A couple of months ago, I wrote about President Bush's discovery of significant parallels between the situation in Iraq and that in Korea. Apparently, this was not good enough, because last week he discovered other significant parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Apparently, if we were to abandon Iraq, it would fall into the same morass that Vietnam fell into after we were driven out of Saigon — the morass, as President Bush would have it, from which the terms "boat people", "re-education camps" and "killing fields" derived.
Of course, the first "boat people" were not Vietnamese, even though we coined the term for them. We can go back more than two centuries and find a whole different generation of "boat people" — Tory loyalists who fled a newly independent United States to avoid tar, feathers, the rail ... and the noose. That there were many Vietnamese, particularly in the South, who felt that they had to flee an imagined — and, one supposes, in many cases an actual — threat of sanctions by the victorious Communists is hardly surprising; history showed many examples of such situations long before Ho Chi Minh came along.
"Re-education camps"? The Vietnamese didn't invent those, either. I know someone who spent a year in such a camp in China a decade before the South fell; and, again, we can find other examples throughout history.
"Killing fields"? But those had nothing to do with Vietnam; they were a product of the Pol Pot government in neighboring Cambodia. In fact, about half the deaths in the "killing fields" were suffered in 1978 by sympathizers with Vietnam; and, ultimately, it was the Vietnamese who put an end to the "killing fields" by marching into Cambodia, ousting the Khmer Rouge, and installing the Heng Samrin government — an installation that the United States refused to recognize, insisting under the Reagan administration out of its distaste for Vietnam for years after the fact that the murderous Pol Pot régime was the only legitimate government of Cambodia. No, no United States administration — and particularly a Republic one — has any business associating the "killing fields" with Vietnam.
And what do we see in Vietnam today? A quiet, calm, relatively prosperous country with fairly good relations with the United States — a revelation, after the four decades of war that killed millions before the U.S. was driven from Saigon. And is this what we can expect in Iraq after we withdraw from that country? "Boat people", "re-education camps", "killing fields" — or, just maybe, a couple of years of upheaval followed by a settling-down into quiet and prosperity? Is that the lesson to be learned from Vietnam?
In order to vote in a country one should need to have spent at least 5 years in the country, to mingle with the rest of it's inhabitants, learn to communicate in that national language and give up the original citizenship of their country of origin. In public only the national language should be used: except newcomers who had no opportunuty to study the national language and of course elderly, retired relatives of new citizens. Esperanto should be permitted to speak in public at all times by any-one. All countries should accept Esperanto as a second official language and teach it in all schools.
Posted by: Jurgen P. Kuhl at September 25, 2007 12:13 PM