Mr. Bush is right, though not in the way he intended. The United States must withdraw, that has become evident, but cannot leave the way we left Vietnam, in a paroxysm of self-absorption, political manipulation, escapism and shame, in which the fates of the Vietnamese became simply collateral damage in our struggle with ourselves. The planning for withdrawal must include provisions for the security of Iraqis who put their faith in us, and that means resettling many of them in the United States. We must not make the same mistake again.
That is the final paragraph of Looking Back at the Shame of the Vietnamese Left Behind in today's NY Times. The author is Serge Schmemann, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his coverage of the unification of Germany. It puts together several important items - that we will leave Iraq, that we have a responsibility to Iraqis who helped us, that we need to do things differently than we did in Vietnam. Schmemann knows, because he was at an Army base in Vietnam when US troops began to withdraw. He also reminds us how we tended view Vietman through an incomplete lens. I urge people to read this piece.
I have never met Serge Schmemann, but his father, the late Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, was a major figure in my life, serving as a mentor to me when I first approached the Orthodox Church in America more than 3 decades ago, and remaining a friend until his death in the 1980s. He was world famous as the long-term dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary in Crestwood, NY, just north of NYC. He broadcast into Russia for Radio Liberty, and he was an internationally respected writer whose many books are still worth reading. As a result of that connection I would read with interest the many pieces Serge posted in the NY Times over the years.
Thus when I saw this piece in my morning NY Times email, I knew I would give it attention. And when I saw the topic, I knew I wanted more people to read it. I have previously written on a related topic, the fact that the US has not lived up to its commitment to relocate Iraqis who have worked for us, in the embassy. That diary at the end of August was entitled Abandoned at the Border - violating our fundamental values and was inspired by an op ed by former General Joe Hoar.
Above the fold I used the image of an incomplete lens - that Schmemann points out the lack of completeness of our view of Vietnam. He sets up his exploration of the topic by noting the shame many who had been in country felt at seeing the images of Vietnamese who had supported the Americans desperately trying to get out in 1975, besieging the embassy and clinging to helicopters. Obviously Bush has tried to invoke those feelings as a justification for remaining in Iraq, things like the boat people, the re-education camps, and the killing fields. Schmemann has told us in the piece that his shame was in part because of the Vietnamese he had known, the "hooch girls" who washed the GIs' laundry, and how little he and other soldiers had known of their country and their lives.
And yet, even for those who had served overseas, their vision was incomplete, and the post-war reaction towards isolationism and withdrawal was perhaps not properly framed.
Schmemann draws a different set of lessons than those Bush wished to impose upon our current debate:
Those comments by Mr. Bush have generated considerable debate over the validity of comparisons to Vietnam and the right of a president who eluded Vietnam service to make them. There is certainly a dollop of irony in the invocation of the "legacy of Vietnam" by an administration that campaigned furiously against a more tangible legacy, the sharp turn toward isolation that followed the war, when it set its mind on another foreign military adventure. Now that the pressure is mounting to end this adventure too, avoiding another round of that isolationism is as important as avoiding a chaotic flight. To do that, I believe we should recognize another "legacy of Vietnam," one inherent in the phrase itself.Many Americans who returned from Vietnam were stunned that "Vietnam" meant something completely different back home. It had ceased referring to the country we had tried, for better or for worse, to help, and had become shorthand for a monumental domestic crisis of identity. I don't mean to suggest that Americans caught up in that wrenching clash were callous or cynical, but for most of them the war in Vietnam became lost in the ensuing domestic conflict over the morality of warfare, the exercise of power, the draft. That, for them, became "Vietnam."
There is no doubt that there will be a draw-down of troops. We cannot sustain the current level, and the results of any drawdown to pre-surge levels or less will demonstrate soon enough that our efforts in Iraq have on the whole been a failure. I think Schmemann's piece should help us keep in mind several things:
1) we have a moral obligation to those Iraqis who sought to help us and who thus are at risk. We cannot abandon them.
2) that this administration has made a mess of its foreign relations, something of which our Iraqi debacle is but the most visible and immediately expensive example, just not justify our withdrawing from the world, or even from the Middle East. We cannot - we are too essential, despite the hatred towards American intervention that will be a legacy of the 8 years of Bush and Cheney. We must find ways to work diplomatically and economically to ensure stability in the region holding most of the world's petroleum reserves, or else there will be further wars, whether or not we are directly involved. And by the actions we have taken that have destabilized the region, we will bear the major responsibility for what happens.
We will leave Iraq. That is, we will withdraw most of our troops outside the borders of what is currently called Iraq, whether or not it remains together as one nation. How fast, what we leave behind, how we work with other nations, all of these are issues of HOW we leave, not when we leave. So is our moral responsibility to those we have placed at risk because they cooperated with us in an occupation that most Iraqis now hate.
Sergte Schmemann's editorial observer piece got me thinking. Hence this diary. I hope the diary is of value to those who have read it. I know Schmemann's piece will be, so if you have not yet read it, please do so.
Peace.
Peace.