Comrade nathan
Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2004
- Messages
- 1,170
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- HSC
- 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/06/INGH7B39Q41.DTL
The voters came to the polls in huge crowds, ignoring insurgent attacks and casting their votes under the protection of U.S. troops. International observers praised the process, calling it a triumph of democracy and a defeat for tyranny.
Iraq 2005?
No. South Vietnam in September 1967.
As we now know, South Vietnam's experiment in democracy didn't work out well. Communist forces launched the Tet Offensive four months later, forcing the U.S.-backed government almost to its knees, and finally conquered the nation seven years afterward.
After last week's election in Iraq, many critics are finding eerie parallels with the Vietnam vote. Will Iraq turn out the same? Were the elections a sham, a foreshadowing of increased conflict, as claimed this week by Sunni clerics in Iraq who are close to the insurgents?
Even these questions are highly controversial, a sign of the intense public emotions about the Vietnam War, then and now. While there are similarities between the two wartime elections, there are also clear differences.
In 1967, most American politicians and pundits considered the South Vietnam elections a great victory, as they did last week's vote in Iraq. Fully 83 percent of South Vietnam's 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots, defying calls by the Viet Cong guerrillas to boycott the vote.
Military strongman Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president with 35 percent of the votes cast; the rest were divided among 10 other candidates. The 22 observers from the United States and 120 from 24 other nations hailed the election as a triumph.
"I have no reservations about calling this a free and fair election," said one of the observers, Sen. George Murphy, a California Republican. "I'll have little patience with anyone who starts telling us it's rigged. Half of the people who were wounded dressed their wounds, and by God, these people got up and voted. Anyplace where you find enthusiasm like that should get the best we can give them."
For many analysts, similarities between that election and last Sunday's are tantalizing yet deceiving.
"It's very tempting to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, but it's a big stretch," said Timothy Lomperis, chair of the political science department at Saint Louis University and a former military officer who served in Vietnam and wrote three books on the war.
In both countries, he agreed, the insurgency drew its strength from nationalistic feelings against the presence of foreign troops. And in both countries, the United States tried to promote religious moderates as a modernizing force -- so-called neutral Buddhists in Vietnam, and secular Muslims in Iraq.
On the other hand, Lomperis said, there are differences: The Viet Cong received overwhelming military support from the North Vietnamese Army -- and after heavy losses sustained in the Tet Offensive, the guerrillas were largely replaced by regular northern troops -- while the alleged Syrian or Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents much less significant.
Perhaps most important, the Viet Cong was viewed as the standard-bearer of nationalism by large sectors of the Vietnamese population, while the Sunni- dominated insurgents in Iraq draw their support almost exclusively from among the 20 percent of Iraqis who are Sunni Arabs.
"I don't think the democratic process of elections in South Vietnam contains a message of parallel defeat for Iraq," Lomperis said. "There are many things that the United States did in Vietnam that worked well, just like in Iraq, and elections are among them."
Yet even if Vietnam is a flawed yardstick against which to predict Iraq's future, other nations may offer useful lessons.
The list of elections held during a bloody internal war is long -- El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1980s, Colombia from the 1960s through the present, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. In each of these cases, the voting failed to quell bloody insurgencies.
In each case, the insurgents called the voting fraudulent, ignored international observers' praise for the balloting and succeeded in prolonging the conflict.
"What we have learned (from other wartime elections) is that it's important this new Iraqi government realizes its ability to form a government and develop a constitution depends on whether it is accepted by a vast majority of the population," said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group in Washington and a former State Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration. "Which means it will have to find ways to reach out to the Sunnis, who have not been adequately represented."
In El Salvador, for example, presidential elections in 1984 and 1989 were viewed by President Ronald Reagan's administration as a test of strength between the rightist, U.S.-backed government and the leftist FMLN guerrillas.
Despite the rebels' calls for a boycott, the majority of registered voters cast ballots. But the entrenched opposition minority saw the vote as illegitimate because government death squads had killed thousands of opposition political activists.
It was only a 1992 negotiated peace pact between the government and the FMLN that pacified the country and allowed subsequent elections to gain full legitimacy.
Schneider says the new Iraqi government should learn the lesson of El Salvador if it wants to avoid the lesson of Vietnam: compromise and negotiate rather than fight and lose.
"There isn't one single mechanism," he said. "But you need to get to the point where all the major players conclude it's in their interest to be part of the (elections) transition. Elections are the means, not the end."
The voters came to the polls in huge crowds, ignoring insurgent attacks and casting their votes under the protection of U.S. troops. International observers praised the process, calling it a triumph of democracy and a defeat for tyranny.
Iraq 2005?
No. South Vietnam in September 1967.
As we now know, South Vietnam's experiment in democracy didn't work out well. Communist forces launched the Tet Offensive four months later, forcing the U.S.-backed government almost to its knees, and finally conquered the nation seven years afterward.
After last week's election in Iraq, many critics are finding eerie parallels with the Vietnam vote. Will Iraq turn out the same? Were the elections a sham, a foreshadowing of increased conflict, as claimed this week by Sunni clerics in Iraq who are close to the insurgents?
Even these questions are highly controversial, a sign of the intense public emotions about the Vietnam War, then and now. While there are similarities between the two wartime elections, there are also clear differences.
In 1967, most American politicians and pundits considered the South Vietnam elections a great victory, as they did last week's vote in Iraq. Fully 83 percent of South Vietnam's 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots, defying calls by the Viet Cong guerrillas to boycott the vote.
Military strongman Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president with 35 percent of the votes cast; the rest were divided among 10 other candidates. The 22 observers from the United States and 120 from 24 other nations hailed the election as a triumph.
"I have no reservations about calling this a free and fair election," said one of the observers, Sen. George Murphy, a California Republican. "I'll have little patience with anyone who starts telling us it's rigged. Half of the people who were wounded dressed their wounds, and by God, these people got up and voted. Anyplace where you find enthusiasm like that should get the best we can give them."
For many analysts, similarities between that election and last Sunday's are tantalizing yet deceiving.
"It's very tempting to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, but it's a big stretch," said Timothy Lomperis, chair of the political science department at Saint Louis University and a former military officer who served in Vietnam and wrote three books on the war.
In both countries, he agreed, the insurgency drew its strength from nationalistic feelings against the presence of foreign troops. And in both countries, the United States tried to promote religious moderates as a modernizing force -- so-called neutral Buddhists in Vietnam, and secular Muslims in Iraq.
On the other hand, Lomperis said, there are differences: The Viet Cong received overwhelming military support from the North Vietnamese Army -- and after heavy losses sustained in the Tet Offensive, the guerrillas were largely replaced by regular northern troops -- while the alleged Syrian or Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents much less significant.
Perhaps most important, the Viet Cong was viewed as the standard-bearer of nationalism by large sectors of the Vietnamese population, while the Sunni- dominated insurgents in Iraq draw their support almost exclusively from among the 20 percent of Iraqis who are Sunni Arabs.
"I don't think the democratic process of elections in South Vietnam contains a message of parallel defeat for Iraq," Lomperis said. "There are many things that the United States did in Vietnam that worked well, just like in Iraq, and elections are among them."
Yet even if Vietnam is a flawed yardstick against which to predict Iraq's future, other nations may offer useful lessons.
The list of elections held during a bloody internal war is long -- El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1980s, Colombia from the 1960s through the present, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. In each of these cases, the voting failed to quell bloody insurgencies.
In each case, the insurgents called the voting fraudulent, ignored international observers' praise for the balloting and succeeded in prolonging the conflict.
"What we have learned (from other wartime elections) is that it's important this new Iraqi government realizes its ability to form a government and develop a constitution depends on whether it is accepted by a vast majority of the population," said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group in Washington and a former State Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration. "Which means it will have to find ways to reach out to the Sunnis, who have not been adequately represented."
In El Salvador, for example, presidential elections in 1984 and 1989 were viewed by President Ronald Reagan's administration as a test of strength between the rightist, U.S.-backed government and the leftist FMLN guerrillas.
Despite the rebels' calls for a boycott, the majority of registered voters cast ballots. But the entrenched opposition minority saw the vote as illegitimate because government death squads had killed thousands of opposition political activists.
It was only a 1992 negotiated peace pact between the government and the FMLN that pacified the country and allowed subsequent elections to gain full legitimacy.
Schneider says the new Iraqi government should learn the lesson of El Salvador if it wants to avoid the lesson of Vietnam: compromise and negotiate rather than fight and lose.
"There isn't one single mechanism," he said. "But you need to get to the point where all the major players conclude it's in their interest to be part of the (elections) transition. Elections are the means, not the end."