Cross-posted from Truth and Progress
Bill Gates, that wandering prophet of High Tech, touched down in Hanoi, North Vietnam yesterday, and he was welcomed as a liberator, not a conqueror.
HANOI, Vietnam - Thousands of cheering Vietnamese students welcomed Microsoft Chairman
Bill Gates on Saturday with a raucous adulation normally reserved for rock stars. The excitement that greeted Gates during his first visit to Vietnam reflects the communist country's eagerness to follow the route of high-tech meccas like India and its belief that he can help pave the way.
After a standing ovation, Gates told his audience that with a world connected through the Internet, "someone's opportunity is not determined so much by geography but by the educational investment you make.
It so happens that I have the fortune to be able to add some perspective to this situation, as I've just come back from a week in Hanoi myself.
In fact, my work is even in the same field, as I was invited to advise the Vietnamese government on its strategy for expanding access to information and communications technologies in rural and remote parts of the country. Somehow, however, Mr. Gates forgot to send his private jet to retrieve me, so I had to fly coach for 28 hours, but that's
another story.
Before I left home, I had a brief conversation with my daughter Alexandra, who is about to turn 17 years old, and has already fully adopted her father's unceasingly sarcastic and ironic sense of humor, to the chagrin of all who know us.
"What's in Vietnam," she asked sarcastically.
I replied ironically, "It's a small country in Southeast Asia of no real significance. The United States almost went to war there in the 1960s, but then the politicians realized how stupid that would be, so they left Vietnam alone, and nobody's heard much about it since then."
Alexandra went on to complain that her high school history classes haven't taught anything about the Vietnam War; they tend to run out of time by the end of the school year, and just gloss over the war while concentrating more on the Civil Rights movement during that period. The same is true of Watergate, which is an almost forgotten term for today's high schoolers. I sympathize with the history teachers, however. I mean, I was in high school during the Vietnam War and Watergate, and our American History classes could barely catch up to the 1950s, and now they've got another 30+ years of new history to cover within the same length semesters. What will the next generation of history teachers do, when they have to include whole new segments on 9/11 and the Iraq War (not to mention the forthcoming Iran War, the global economic and environmental collapse, the assassination of... but I'm getting ahead of myself)? Something tells me that the intricacies of tariff policy under the Polk Administration are soon going to wind up on the editing room floor at the textbook factory.
I had this line of thinking in mind while I was sitting in a small café in downtown Hanoi, with a group of Vietnamese officials ranging in age from about 20 to 45, eating some delicious local food whose name I promised to remember and have already forgotten ("Mim-Chou"? "Mon-Shew"? something like that). Having become quite friendly over just a few days of working together - in spite of a language barrier which only a couple of them could tentatively cross without our interpreter - I ventured to raise the topic of, you know, the, um, War? (I figured they don't call it the "Vietnam War". The "American War," perhaps?) You know what I mean, that time not so long ago when my country was bombing the shit out of your country? When this city was under increasingly heavy attack on a regular basis? When tens of thousands of your brothers, fathers, uncles, even aunts, were getting killed and wounded by gunfire, grenades, missiles, and napalm supplied by the good ole U.S. of A.? It was in all the papers.
(Not only that, but we recently had a guy run for President of our country who was among those who fought over here, and his campaign made a big deal about the time that he heroically, um, killed one of your people...)
I needn't have hesitated or worried much about striking a delicate nerve. My Vietnamese colleagues politely explained that, in essence, nobody gives a shit about the War any more. As I said, their English was limited, so they weren't actually articulate enough to use the phrase "nobody gives a shit", but that was what they meant. People don't talk about the War, they don't dwell on it. (Actually, I don't think they even capitalize it, either.) Students in particular don't even learn about it in school; Alexandra's experience is replicated half-way around the world. One of my colleagues claimed to remember hearing the explosions back when the bombs were dropping, and another had an uncle who was in the army, but it was a long time ago, doesn't really have any relevance nowadays, don't you know.
And to look around Hanoi, North Vietnam, in 2006, there's no denying it. It's hard to imagine that this was the capital of America's mortal foe just a couple of generations ago. All those war-era images of dangerous, evil Communist minions, of lock-step soldiers barely 18 years old prepared to throw their lives into destroying the American enemy, of an alien, hostile, desperate populace seething with anti-Yankee hatred... you couldn't find a whiff of that "Apocalypse Now"/ "Deer Hunter"/ "Platoon" stereotype of Vietnam in today's Hanoi.
And I must say, as a proud American, that they should be damned thankful that we won that War. Look at what they've got now: designer stores, 5-star hotels, cell phones in every pocket, cable TV, digital cameras, Burger King and KFC, and everyone wearing Western clothing, none of those drab workers-of-the-world-unite pajamas any more. Why, if the Commies had actually won the Vietnam War, if America had "cut and run" and abandoned that noble cause then, well, uh... excuse me?
Seriously, it was really almost too much to wrap my mind around, and yet in the end not surprising at all. This place where we "took a stand" to stop the spread of Godless Communism, where the toll of death and destruction and hypocrisy finally tore the veil from the American public's eyes and we found the democratic will to compel a long-overdue political end to the insanity, now looks no different than any of its neighbors - Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, or any other emerging economy - that didn't endure the privilege of U.S. military bombardment. (South Korea, by the way, is even more thoroughly "Westernized", but that bit up North hasn't quite got with the program yet.)
Is this the way it is, then? We fight, we kill, we get over it, we move on? It sure happened with our good buddies Germany and Japan, didn't it? I know quite a few Jewish Americans who had relatives murdered in the Holocaust who weren't quite ready to forgive and forget when German reunification came about, but check out all the Volkswagens and BMWs on the streets: we've gotten over that little misunderstanding. Likewise, my wife grew up in the Philippines, where memories of rape, abuse, and murder by the Japanese invaders permeate nearly every family, and she too still has trouble letting go when that country is the topic of discussion; but we're awash in Sony's and Toshiba's and Honda's, and Alexandra and her friends are faithful devotees of scores of Manga comics and Anime TV series. Japan is not only our friend, they're the coolest country around these days.
But at least everyone pretty much agrees that World War II was a necessary evil, and the sacrifices and heroism of the Greatest Generation can be credited with saving the world from a tyrannical fate. Can anyone with a reasonably functioning cranium honestly explain what the hell we accomplished through ten years of bloodshed in Vietnam? In what way would that country, or the world, be any different, any better, if that War had never happened, or if we had "pulled out" in 1972, or 1969, or 1966? (To any revisionist neocons who may happen to read this, I'm not actually interested in your fanciful, fabricated answers; the correct response is, "It wouldn't.")
I'm sure anyone who knows me can guess approximately where this is going from here: straight to Baghdad. No, I actually haven't been to Iraq on my journeys, not yet anyway, but I've spent a lot of time in the Arab world, and I've even participated in two workshops with Iraqis in the post-Saddam era in neutral locations, so I am certainly just as unqualified as anyone else to comment on the situation in that country. I do see the present Iraq conflict as largely a repetition of the Vietnam bog-bayou-everglade-swampland (these are the synonyms for "quagmire" that MS Word suggests): the lack of any valid justification for the invasion, the stubborn refusal of our government to admit the uselessness of the situation, the screams of "retreat" and "cut and run" and "credibility" in response to calls for our withdrawal, the overall pointlessness and absurdity of the whole mess.
But I also wonder about where it's all leading, eventually: not in the next few years or the next Administration, but down the road, a generation or so from now. Will our children or grandchildren grow up to think of Iraq, and maybe Iran and Syria and Libya, even Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, perhaps, as our good friends and allies? As vacation hotspots and cultural treasures they can't wait to visit? As the source of that great Arabic/Islamic food and artwork and music, and the makers of really cool furniture or video games or robots or something? I realize that, in many respects, this is actually the vision of the neocons themselves, who believe that in "transforming" Iraq and the Middle East through the force of our military arms as well as our democratic ideals, we can usher in an era of mutual respect and cooperation, bla bla bla. In fact, I've never rejected that goal, that dream, as an end itself, at least in general terms; what I abhor is the means, as well as the overall philosophy, which clings to a belief that military might not only makes right, but makes friends. I believe that the aspirations of the vast bulk of the Arab and Islamic world are, if not identically aligned with those of average Americans, Europeans, and Vietnamese for that matter, are very much compatible with and complementary to the hopes and dreams of the rest of the world: have enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, watch your children grow up in peace and happiness, have a little fun along the way, feel like it's all worthwhile in the end.
So the point is (you'll find that I do eventually get to it, most of the time), that Americans' knee-jerk impulse to smack down the Commies in Vietnam forty years ago in the throes of the Cold War mindset only led to pain and sorrow, and our knee-jerk invasion of Iraq in the throes of the post-9/11 War on Terror mindset appear to be leading to the same type of military oblivion. The difference, for the moment, is that we have yet to escalate the Iraq War to the scale of Vietnam, so that only a few thousand young American lives have been lost, to accompany the tens of thousands of Iraqi's killed and the comparable numbers of wounded on both sides, but there is still time to catch up: we've only been over there for three years now; that puts us at about 1967 in Vietnam-parallel terms, and wasn't that a fun year for the hawks? Instead of spiraling further down that hell-hole, what if we were to just get the hell out now? Would the Iraq and the rest of the Middle East of 2025 really end up that much different, that much happier and safer and more "democratic" if we stay indefinitely in that marshland-fen-peat bog, than it would if we simply cut and run? Would the history textbooks and teachers and students of the future really give a shit?