The Vietnam War killed more than 3 million people, uniformed and civilian. The US lost 58 thousand soldiers in a war that almost tore this country apart. Why did we fight? The idea, the politicians (Democrat and Republican) told us, was to keep the country from falling under Communist rule.
Fast forward to 2010, 37 years after the last US personnel were airlifted off the embassy roof in Saigon. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to cozy up to the (Communist) government in a transparent attempt to buy the friendship of China’s neighbors. The Vietnam government, presumably, have short memories. Napalm? What’s that?
There is a moral here, which is not lost on President Karzai of Afghanistan. Three decades from now, a future Secretary of State may be in Kabul, making nice with the Taliban leadership hoping to lure them away from Iran. If you were Karzai, you would be looking for all the friends you can get – in the Middle East, not in Washington.
The Vietnam tragedy was dramatized stingingly in Miss Saigon, a musical that opened on Broadway in 1991. It is an achingly poignant musical, underappreciated despite its long run (over 4000 performances), perhaps because it lies in the shadow of Les Miserables, created by the same team, Schönberg and Boubill. The essence of the play is stated in the second-act song, Bui-Doi, which is an elegy for the Vietnamese children born during the war and destined to be the dust of life. “They are the living reminder,” the lyric groans, “of all the good we failed to do.”
The parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan are haunting. We are trying to withdraw from Iraq, now a fractious state with sectarian violence still a fact of life. Saddam Hussein’s pistol is mounted as a trophy in the new George W. Bush exhibit in Dallas. Tariq Aziz, a spokesman for the old government, has just been sentenced to hang, despite an appeal for clemency from the Pope. Anbar Province is aboil over control of a natural-gas field. There is still no functioning government in Baghdad.
There will be no musical called Miss Baghdad. Miss Saigon had the advantage of a template (Madam Butterfly) against which Alan Boubill could create a love story about a Saigon bar girl and a GI. There is no template for Miss Baghdad. No one wants to see Abu Ghraib played out on stage.
But rest assured, the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq will be all right in the end. That is the real lesson of the sight of Hillary Clinton clinking cocktails with the politicians and business leaders in Ho Chi Minh City, only blocks from where the last helicopter lifted off, leaving panicked crowds of civilians behind, in 1973.
