Bin Laden, the Victor?

There are images that will remain forever etched into the world’s collective memory, and none is more symbolic of Goliath’s bitter defeat at the hands of David than the striking photo of men and women scrambling to catch the last helicopter that was about to take off from the American Embassy in Saigon. Meanwhile, the Communist Viet Cong troops rushed into the streets of the capital of South Vietnam in a celebration of victory on April 30, 1975…

Despite being a military and economic superpower, the United States was forced to accept defeat after withdrawing from a vicious war that left America demoralized, ashamed, humiliated, and essentially on the brink of ruin…

However, today we are forced to reexamine the past: the Communist movement is no longer viewed as a threat, and Vietnam is a bustling anthill of free enterprise, capitalist to the bone.

So in the Vietnam War, who was really the victor and who was vanquished?

It is important to remember on the five-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq- this was a war born out of lies and propaganda, one that has also left Americans demoralized, perplexed, ruined, divided, and increasingly less popular around the world.

The American Giant saw red the day after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For the first time, the United States had suffered an attack on its own soil by an elusive force-Al Qaeda had neither flag, nor territory, nor government.

Propaganda Machine

But those details would not hold up in the face of the formidable propaganda machine of the Bush Administration, which needed a clearly identifiable enemy. Weapons of mass destruction were invented, and they were said to be hidden in Saddam Hussein’s desert. Another fabrication was the supposed cooperation between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The United States bullied the Europeans who were hesitant of becoming involved in a situation that they considered to be a powder keg waiting to explode. And 18 months after the September 11 attacks, we witnessed everything live and direct, including the frighteningly clean explosions deemed “surgical strikes”-–yet another falsehood—that effectively leveled the center of Baghdad.

Five years later, 160,000 American soldiers are trying to enforce a “peace” that is far from being a reality. The situation on the ground is punctuated with suicide bombings and ethnic clashes. Four thousand Americans have lost their lives, and the $500 billion price tag for the war has put a strain on the U.S. budget, bled the dollar and propelled the national debt to 9 trillion dollars.

The official moral justification of the White House was as follows: We will liberate Iraq from Saddam, we will establish democracy there, and after that we will withdraw. The problem, however, is that the new Iraqi parliament has been paralyzed by the same inter-ethnic tensions that have ravaged the rest of the country. It has neither the credibility nor the strength to govern a country in such a state of disarray.

Five years ago, 73 per cent of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq; today 61 per cent think that it’s no longer worth the effort. In Europe, they count down the weeks that President Bush has left in office, hoping that he won’t do too much more damage before the end of his term in November. What else is there to do? The world has been content to let the Americans take responsibility for this catastrophe, knowing that if they decided to withdraw from Iraq too quickly, there would be an increased risk of the conflict spreading throughout the entire region.

So it seems that Bin Laden may have won this game of chess: the U.S. is on its knees and he did not even have to go to war. But who knows what the future holds? Perhaps one day the trappings of democracy will no longer appeal to the ‘tough guys’. Who would have thought that after thirty years, Vietnam would become a bastion of free enterprise?