Iraq woes haunt Bush in Vietnam

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By Brian Barron BBC News

President Bush attends the APEC summit with Nguyen Tan Dung When President Bush agreed months ago to attend the Apec summit in Vietnam, he may have pictured headlines about extending the hand of friendship to an old enemy. But instead, at the end of another week of distressing news from Iraq, many commentators are drawing uncomfortable parallels with Iraq.

Occasionally during periods of war and public stress you come across a concrete statement of intent literally built to underscore national resolve.

Nothing symbolised America's lost crusade in Indochina more than the enormous concrete embassy erected in Saigon in 1967, seemingly to last for ever, up the road from South Vietnam's presidential palace.

Note that I used the past tense. Because this became an albatross as Washington's Vietnam adventure foundered just over 30 years ago.

Mobs of Vietnamese people scale the wall of the US Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1975And as I ran about the streets then, with a BBC cameraman filming South Vietnam's death throes, the looting, the mayhem, the futile casualties for a cause long lost to corruption, cowardice and wishful thinking, the very last American marine guards were hiding on the roof of the embassy above us praying for a helicopter from their evacuation fleet in the South China Sea.

It did come and flew them out, as the conquering North Vietnamese tanks rolled past us and smashed through the presidential palace gates. So much history compressed into a few short hours.

"Never Again!" vowed the US military establishment, ushering in pragmatic policies, including an end to conscription.

Iraq war

So it was that February 1991 I found myself flying at dawn in an American Chinook helicopter across the Kuwait desert wreathed in smoke and flames from scores of oil wells set ablaze by Saddam's retreating troops.

We landed at an airbase in southern Iraq captured a few hours earlier by US forces, now a professional full-time army. I watched as half a dozen Iraqi generals, with Saddam look-alike moustaches and berets, were marched to a tent to sign a ceasefire with the American commander.

It was surrender. That campaign by the first President Bush, to drive the Iraqis from Kuwait, was a text-book example of painstaking diplomacy sustaining an alliance of Western and Muslim forces, coupled with brilliant battlefield tactics, and recognition it would be unwise to seize Iraq itself.

It was a difficult job, well done with an absence of what I would call missionary zeal - unlike the second President Bush's Iraq adventure.

Second Iraq war

In both conflicts, America's justifications for war were eventually discredited. Three years ago I watched it begin on board the US guided missile cruiser Mobile Bay, as the American fleet in the Gulf bombarded Baghdad far over the horizon.

The high tech military superiority was overwhelming - just like US forces in Vietnam. These days the parallels seem to be multiplying.

In Iraq, there has been a similar, disastrous lack of intelligence about the country and people - reminiscent of American mistakes in Indochina.

Protests against the Iraq war have been more restrained than VietnamIn both conflicts, America's justifications for war were eventually discredited. Just as disturbing, was Washington's failure - initially at least - to learn from well-documented colonial blunders by the French in Vietnam and British in the 1920s in Iraq.

As for pressure to hand over to Iraqi forces, that resembles Vietnamisation, training South Vietnamese forces to replace departing Americans.

But by the end, 58,000 Americans were dead and more than one million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

One big difference is that Vietnam poisoned the political mood of America, with tragic consequences.

Whereas the USA today is not shaken by anti-war protests - instead a majority just voted with calm common sense for bringing an end to what now seems an even bigger foreign policy blunder than Vietnam - in a region of far greater strategic importance.

In the wake of the recent elections here, the supposedly open-ended military commitment to Iraq suddenly looks, well, almost rubbery.

Now, on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad, a huge new American embassy is rising.

I cannot help remembering its now-demolished monumental forerunner in Saigon, packed with the best and brightest CIA and military types, under Washington's proconsul.

They proved powerless as the country around them disintegrated. To be fair about that final meltdown, the American expeditionary force had completed its withdrawal three years earlier. From half-a-million troops to zero.

But it is the images of South Vietnam's death throes that endure - overladen helicopters abandoning a panic-stricken American ally.

It was an exit strategy that failed ingloriously. For Mr Bush, the self-styled war president seeking a way out of the Iraq quagmire, his visit to what was Saigon, offers no comfort at all.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 18 November, 2006 at 11.30 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.