Not Refighting is
Different from Remembering – How Obama stumbled into Syria
Barack
Obama is famous for saying that we’re not going to refight old wars. Unfortunately, that adage was taken to heart by
his new generation of foreign policy advisors who ridicule the Vietnam
generation as old fogies unable to forget the past and move on.
However,
if those hurrying to forget Vietnam because it’s over and we lost it, had
bothered to study it, they would have discovered, to their chagrin, that Ho Chi
Minh wrote in a 1924 pamphlet entitled The
Case Against French Colonialism a section called “The
Militarism Continues” in which he documents the objections of the Vietnamese
soldiers to being sent as occupiers to Syria.
Let me repeat: Syria.
Ho
Chi Minh wrote:
“Here (in
Haiphong), there are also seamen’s strikes.
Thus Thursday (August15) two ships had to leave taking a large number of
Annamite infantrymen to Syria. [Italics in the original.]
“The sailors refused to leave, claiming
that their wages were not being paid in piasters. In fact, the piaster’s market value was 10
francs instead of the official rate of 2.5. The companies established an
unheard of abuse, the sailors’ deductions in francs while the officials are
paid in piasters.
“Everyone was then disembarked and
the men of the crew were immediately arrested.
“As
you can see, sailors in the Yellow Sea have nothing to envy of the Black Sea
sailors.[1]
“We protest with all our
strength against sending Annamite troops to
Syria. Is it believed, in high places,
that not enough of our unfortunate yellow brothers were massacred on the
battlefields between 1914 and 1918, during the ‘war for civilization and
justice?’”
[1] On April 19, 1919, French crews of the
battleships Jean Bart and France, sent to the Black Sea in
support of intervention in the Russian civil war, mutinied.
.
Vietnam
and Syria are linked by more than French imperialism from the 1920’s. Israel
seized Sinai, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights in June 1967 when the United
States was distracted and Vietnam War was going badly. In the binary Cold War competition with the
Soviet Union, the US and its allies needed a win, and the Middle East was the
place. While LBJ was pretending to
defuse the conflict, he secretly supplied Israel with 200 tanks in the weeks
before the war to ensure Israel’s fastest possible victory. [See The Foreign Policy of LBJ by Jonathan
Coleman.]
As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Obama has succumbed to what Andrew O’Hehir in his brilliant “Dick Cheney, Iraq and the ghosts
of Vietnam” Salon article on June 21, 2014 refers to as post-Vietnam stress
disorder. According to O’Hehir, all American military ventures in the past four
decades have been inter alia in
pursuit of a clean military “victory” that will exorcise the ghosts of failure
in Vietnam. Unfortunately for America
and Obama, each successive military endeavor in the Middle East looks more and
more like Vietnam because we’re on the wrong side.
Israel is really a
western implant in the Middle East.
According to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister,
Israel’s legitimacy rests, not on UN resolutions, but on the Bible. That is why,
with the support of Christian fundamentalists in the west, Jewish fundamentalists
claim vast stretches of the Middle East from the Sinai to the Euphrates. When Israel demands “recognition” of its
right to exist, it refuses to divulge its borders. It is asking the Palestinians to recognize an
unknown. Naturally, the indigenous Arabs
find it offensive to be dispossessed of their lives, lands and property based
on an alien religious text. Israel
pretends it is willing to make peace with the Palestinians, but first it needs
help fighting: the Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the 1950’s ‘60’s, and ‘70’s, Iraq
and Iran in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, now Hezbollah and Hamas in the 21st
century. And the United States always falls for the bait, it fights Israel’s
wars and then the Israelis reneg and still don’t make
peace.
The United States is becoming a colony of Israel, turning into a
religious state by abandoning its own history to embrace Israel’s version of religious
statehood. The US now engages in
targeted killings, just like Israel. The
Supreme Court gives religious rights to employers to determine the health care coverage
of its employees, it gives corporations and individuals the right to spend
unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns based on “free speech”, but
individual people have “no right to vote under the constitution.” Well, if you believe that a document that had
to be ratified by voters to come into effect denied its ratifiers
the right to vote, they you’ll agree that the Supreme Court is an honest group
of great legal scholars instead of a bunch of partisan political hacks who are
jeopardizing the survival of the United States (not to mention the human race.)
People are
not flying airplanes into our buildings and committing suicide because the
United States is this great good country dedicated to freedom, democracy and
rule of law. The United States and its
western allies have become a shill for the religious
state of Israel and are fighting an aggressive global war against democracy in
the Moslem world to protect the privileged status of Israel. Any truly
democratic regime in the Middle East will gird for war against Israel. For a hundred years, the experience of the
Middle East with respect to the west has been one of continual attacks by
western arms. The reason the Arabs hate
us is that they are tired of being bombed and killed by western arms while
their treasure, oil, is taken to support the west’s opulent and wasteful life
style. Now, they are fighting back. The implantation of Israel in the Middle East
is the cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements. Isis and the rest of the so-called Islamic terrorist
movements can not be defeated until Israel decides to make peace with the
Palestinians. Peace with the
Palestinians is Israel’s best and only survival strategy. If the Israelis are so smart, why can’t they
figure out how to make friends with their neighbors after sixty-six years?
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[1] On April 19, 1919, French crews of the
battleships Jean Bart and France, sent to the Black Sea in
support of intervention in the Russian civil war, mutinied.