Seven Years In Hell: On Body Counts, Dead Zones, and an Empire of Stupidity

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/05/3628/

Published on Wednesday, September 5, 2007 by TomDispatch.com
Seven Years In Hell: On Body Counts, Dead Zones, and an Empire of Stupidity
by Tom Engelhardt

On August 22nd, breaking into his Crawford vacation, the President addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, giving what is already known as his “Vietnam speech.” That day, George W. Bush, who, as early as 2003, had sworn that his war on Iraq would “decidedly not be Vietnam,” took the full-frontal plunge into the still-flowing current of the Big Muddy, fervently embracing Vietnam analogy-land. You could almost feel his relief (and that of his neocon speechwriters).

In that mud-wrestle of a speech, he invoked “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam…. that 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.’” The man who had so carefully sat out the Vietnam War now proclaimed that Americans never should have left that land. As he’s done with so much else, he also linked the Vietnam War by an act of verbal ju-jitsu to al-Qaeda and the attacks of September 11th. 9/11, too, turned out to be part of the “price” we’d paid for succumbing to “the allure of retreat” and withdrawing way back when. (”In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks,” intoned the President, “Osama bin Laden declared that ‘the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.’”)

Whatever brief respite his August embrace of Vietnam may have given him in the polls, it involved a larger concession on the administration’s part. Like its predecessors, the Bush administration and its neocon supporters simply couldn’t kick the “Vietnam Syndrome” — much as they struggled to do so — any more than a moth could avoid the flame. Now, they found themselves locked in a desperate, hopeless attempt to use Vietnam to recapture the hearts and minds of the American people.

Entering the Dead Zone

It’s possible to track this losing struggle with the Vietnam analogy over these last years. Take one issue — the body count — on which we know something about administration Vietnam thinking. For Americans of the Vietnam era, a centuries-old “victory culture” — in which triumph on some distant frontier against evil enemies was considered an American birthright — still held sway. In Vietnam, when it nonetheless became clear that the promised frontier victory was, for the second time in little more than a decade, nowhere in sight, American military and civilian officials tried to compensate.

One problem they faced was that the very definition of victory in war — the taking of terrain, the advance into hostile territory that signaled the crushing of enemy resistance — had ceased to mean anything in Vietnam. In a guerrilla war in which, as American grunts regularly complained, you couldn’t tell friends from enemies, no less hold a hostile countryside, something else had to substitute for the landing at D-Day, the advance on Berlin, the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. And so the “whiz kids” of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon and the military high command developed a substitute numerology of victory.

Everything was to be counted and the copious statistics of success were to flow endlessly up the chain of command and back to Washington, proof positive that “progress” was being made. The numbers looked convincing indeed. In fact, to believe loss possible in Vietnam, when by any measure of success — from dead enemy and captured weapons to cleared roads and pacified villages — Americans had such a decisive advantage, seemed nothing short of madness. Yet, to accept the figures pouring in daily from soldiers, advisors, and bureaucrats was to defy the logic of one’s senses. To make the endlessly unraveling situation in Vietnam madder still, the impending defeat did not seem to be a military one. Those who directed the war (as well as the right-wing in the post-war years) regularly claimed, for instance, that not a single significant battle had been lost to the Vietnamese enemy.

Sometimes it seemed that Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring success. There were, for instance, the eighteen indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the “progress” of “pacification” in South Vietnam’s 2,300 villages and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on “rural security” and “development.” Then there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in slide form, including “strength trends of the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties… enemy base areas neutralized,” and so on. And don’t forget that there were figures by the bushel-load on every form of destruction rained down on the Vietnamese enemy — sorties flown, tonnage dropped, “truck kills,” you name it. The efforts that went into creating numerical equivalents for death were endless.

For visiting congressional delegations, the commander of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland, had his “attrition charts,” multicolored bar graphs illustrating various “trends” in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had their own sophisticated ways to codify “kill ratios”; while, on the ground, where, in dangerous circumstances, the actual counting had to be done, all of this translated, far more crudely, into the MGR, or, as the grunts sometimes said, the “Mere Gook Rule” — “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC .” In other words, when pressure came down for the “body count,” any body would do.

Back in the U.S., much of the frustration that had gathered in the face of mounting years of claimed progress and evident failure would focus on the “body count” of enemy dead, announced in late afternoon U.S. military press briefings in the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. For the element of the fantastic in those briefings (and the figures proffered), they came to be known among reporters as “the Five o’clock Follies.” Continued>>>>>
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/05/3628/

to rescue people off the embassy roof. Instead, they will all die there, slaughtered by the people they tried to enslave.