Well, since it's now almost 3am, and I'm dog tired but have another 6 hours to go, I guess I can more fully explore why I was pondering the Iraq=Quagmire question.
When I was an undergraduate, lo, twenty years ago, I wrote my honors thesis on Dien Bien Phu. I actually had never heard of the place until I noted it mentioned in a footnote in Sideshow, which I was reading for a modern American history class. By the time I finished my thesis, I'd interviewed every senior US officer still alive from Eisenhower's time, as well as locking my keys in my car at Stanley Karnow's home.
I suspect most Americans under the age of 40 have never heard of Dien Bien Phu. Yet if anyone wanted to understand why France was so reluctant to get involved in a hot war in Iraq, the story of the 1954 Indochine battle is required reading. But perhaps more importantly, it was the basis for a defeatist policy which lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese.
The French understood what they were up against after indigenous forces, so desperate to rid their country of an occupying army, dismantled and transported by bicycle the heavy artillery which pounded French troops to smithereens for months. They understood "quagmire". It took their successor over a decade to understand the same hard lessons.
The British have a similar history in the Middle East and Gulf states, which is one reason Tony Blair is in the hotseat. But the US, with is short colonial resume, and post-Vietnam amnesia, is approaching the Iraq situation as if it were handling a kitten, not a rattlesnake. The US leaders, both here and on the ground in Iraq, would do well to read a little modern guerilla/insurgent history, starting with French accounts of Dien Bien Phu.
Posted by MB Williams at July 27, 2003 03:14 AM | TrackBackYes, it is officially a quagmire. And doing the math, there will be at least 450 more US deaths by the elections.
Posted by: Maccabee at July 27, 2003 03:20 AMThanks for pointing out the article. It's nice to get more background on these events, it can be hard to know what to look for.
Would you consider posting at least excerpts of your thesis someday?
Posted by: natasha at July 27, 2003 05:05 AMNatasha, that would mean I'd have to know where it actually is located these days - lol. And I did it on a Mac, which I haven't used...practically since I wrote the thing. But I'll keep the idea in mind if I ever find it ;-).
And what the heck are you doing up? It's 3am on the West Coast!
Posted by: MB at July 27, 2003 06:22 AMDien Bien Phu, maybe,
but I think Algeria might be more relevant to the French. Particularly to Gaullist Jacques Chirac.
Well:
1. About half of the French who got defeated in DienBienPhu were mercenaries:French Legion, mostly Germans and Polish who got into the legion after WWII.
2. After the fall of DienBPHu the survivors moved to Madagascar wher they killed some 1.2 million Malegashi, until M. became independent from France.
3. The remaining moved to Algeria and whoever did not get killed there moved n\back to marseille
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Now them George Doubbleya gringos are starting to send the mercenaries and war profiteers to Iraq. But there will be more than 450 dead before elections. What else is new.
I was suprprised/pleased by France's refusal to join Bush's war until I remembered DBP, Algeria, Ivory Coast, etc. It appears that the people of Europe (as opposed to most of their so-called "leaders") have finally learned that they cannot continue to exploit, oppress and repress the darker two-thirds of the world and get away with it. Americans (including their leaders) have yet to learn this simple lesson, despite VietNam, Korea, and a host of countries and incidents in Latin America and Africa. I think, though, that they may have finally bit off more than even they can chew by re-igniting the age old religious wars of the "Crusades".
Posted by: Herb at April 26, 2004 04:40 PM