The Middle East is NOT "another Vietnam"; it's WORSE!

I have been misunderstood. Apparently some "readers" glance at the headline and just skim the text, often getting the wrong message from the few words that stick in their alleged minds. When, in commenting on the jihadists' attacks on Paris, I wrote [WHO wrote? Ed.] "How about we fight back?!", my suggestion was NOT that the French nor the US nor anyone else step up the air strikes in Syria and "bomb them back to the Stone Age". (copied right, Curtis LeMay).

All I said was that it was suicidal stupidity to be admitting to our countries 1000s upon 1000s of "undocumented aliens" because of the wave of weepy hypocrisy stirred up by the professional handwringers in the human rights industry ("We do well by doing good!") and the lamestream media. See "Paris jihadist attacks result of suicidal stupidity" (WWW 13/11/15)

In previous posts -- for instance "ISIS atrocities worse than ever; Canada ends mission" -- I'd thought I'd made clear my view that what the USA and its allies should do is stop interfering in the Muslim civil war. Get the hell out of the Middle East / get out of the Middle East hell... and let the Sunnis and Shias duke it out until, like the gingham dog and the calico cat, they eat each other up!

In "Why American must (not?) save the world from ISIS", I suggested that American military and political leaders persist in intervening in fights in which the USA has no gingham dog (or calico cat) because of a failure to learn the lessons of history in general and the Vietnam war in particular. What seems to have been misunderstood is that I don't believe that the Bush-Obama war is analogous to the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war, except insofar as America is fighting a losing battle far from home for the wrong reasons.

A better understanding of what the Vietnam war was really about will be gained by reading Two Cities: Hanoi and Saigon (Jonathan Cape, 1992) and A Bright Shining Lie (Random House 1988), both by Neil Sheehan, one of those chiefly responsible for obtaining the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Sheehan views Vietnam as essentially an anti-colonial war, a war fought by the Vietnamese for their independence.

Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, comprised French Indochina, a part of the French empire until it was overrun by the Japanese in World War II. When the Japanese were defeated, the British, who had occupied the region, unaccountably handed it back to the French. Some Vietnamese, mostly in the south, were happy to serve their colonial masters once again. Others, mostly but not only in the north, started a guerilla war against the French.

They -- the Viet Minh -- became Communists almost by accident because the only outside powers that supported them were the USSR and its satellites (not including Marxist China). They weren't concerned with ideology so much as with getting the French to go home. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the Americans supplanted the French, to prevent the spread of Communism, prevent the other countries of southeast Asia from falling like dominoes, and so on -- the wrong reasons.

In Two Cities, Neil Sheehan says that for the first year or two after the Americans installed the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh actually expected that once they counted the cost -- in money and lives -- of propping up the South Vietnamese regime, they would pull out. He was wrong, because for the Americans, unlike the Vietnamese, the battle was ideological, not practical. Johnson and Nixon really believed (one hopes) that they could defeat Communism by winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. They were wrong.

The war being fought in Syria and Iraq (and Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, etc etc) is not ideological. At least, it is not a clash between political ideologies. It's not about democracy versus Communism. There isn't a single democratic government in the entire Middle East. Never has been. There are only autocracies, either secular or religious. A religious autocracy can be described as a theocracy, which describes the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled. A theocracy is what ISIS wants to establish in its "new caliphate". And that's what the war is all about.

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed are fighting each other to decide which are the better Muslims, and which version of Islam shall prevail. It's Sunni Muslims versus Shia Muslims, with non-believers and infidels (that would be us) stuck in the middle. We -- the "Christian" West -- have no business in the Middle East.

There's no way for us, as outsiders, to win what is essentially a religious civil war. If you disagree, please tell me what a victory for "our side" would look like. If we "degrade and ultimately defeat" ISIS, will Basher Assad remain in power in Syria? Is that a win for "us"? Or will there be a power vacuum, as there is already in Iraq, thanks to America's lack of an exit strategy? Or will the entire region continue to be fought over by gangs of barbaous warlords, as is the case in Afghanistan? Could any of those outcomes be described as "victory"? I rest my case... for today...