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Doubtless the Petraues Report, which is supposed to be issued later this week, will point to some post-surge progress in Iraq: Intervals of up to two whole days without a car bombing! Electricity restored for three straight hours one day in a Baghdad neighborhood! Several warlords switch to our side without obvious bribery! Iraqi parliament returns from summer vacation!
But the main rationale for continuing the American
occupation of Iraq was laid out last month by President
George Walker Bush, speaking to the annual convention of
the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He cited Vietnam, pointing
out that after American forces withdrew and the North
Vietnamese army rolled south, the price of America's
withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose
agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat
people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing
fields.'
In other words, there were many South Vietnamese whose trust in the United States was betrayed when America pulled out.
Such a dismal outcome was apparent even to so fervent a
critic of the Vietnam War as John Kenneth Galbraith, a
prominent economist and one-time U.S. ambassador to India.
He wanted America out of Vietnam, but not completely. In
1967, he wanted the U.S. to maintain some enclaves or
sanctuaries for South Vietnamese loyalists: We cannot
simply write them off; even by majority vote we do not
assign people to the sanguinary attention of their
enemies.
Some will say that Iraq could hardly be worse off without American soldiers, given the level of violence there now, so what's the point of expending more blood and treasure there? Others would argue that American withdrawal is inevitable sooner or later, and even if the country is relatively peaceful at the time, the forces behind the internal conflict will still be present and could re-emerge then. So what's to gain by staying?
Even if such arguments were true, they still don't address the question: Should people trust the assurances of the United States?
Most of us, I suspect, would like to live in a republic that kept its word, and protected those who took its side. But if this ever was such a nation, it was a long time ago.
We can go back to 1819 when the United States signed the
Transcontinental Treaty with Spain to settle various
boundary disputes. In that treaty, Spain sold Florida to
the United States, but the United States promised to
renounce forever
all rights, claims, and
pretentions
to Texas. In this case, forever
was
26 years.
Sometimes the interval was much shorter. On Sept. 28, 1864, a Cheyenne chief named Black Kettle agreed to a peace offer. If he and his people would move to the reservation in southeastern Colorado, they could live in peace. They moved, and Black Kettle flew an American flag and a white flag from his tepee.
Two months later, on Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington attacked anyway, killing 163 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, in what is now known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
In more recent times, we can sympathize with those
Hungarians who rebelled against Soviet control in 1956.
After all, the American secretary of state, John Foster
Dulles, had proclaimed that To all those suffering under
communist slavery, let us say you can count on us.
Just what they could count on us
for remains a
mystery, since hundreds of Soviet tanks rolled into
Budapest and about 30,000 Hungarians died, with 200,000
more fleeing.
On Feb. 15, 1991, American President George H.W. Bush
called for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to
take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein,
the dictator, to step aside.
Thousands of Iraqis took
him seriously and rebelled against the Baathist government,
figuring they would get American support after the first
Gulf War. But when the Iraqi government struck back,
killing thousands of people in horrible ways, the United
States stood by and did nothing. So perhaps the Iraqis, of
all people, should know about the reliability of the United
States.
It's kind of surprising that our current president makes
the argument that our government should be trustworthy. For
the past generation, his party has campaigned on slogans
like Government is the problem, not the solution,
and The nine most terrifying words in the English
language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to
help.'
In other words, they tell us we Americans should not trust our own government, but that the Iraqis should be able to trust our government. I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else coming from Washington these days.
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