The History They Didn't Teach You in School: Richard Nixon's "Merry Christmas Vietnam," 1972

In December 1972, Richard Nixon unleashed the most intense bombing campaign of the Vietnam War in the so-called Christmas Bombings.

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Throughout the fall of 1972, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and northern Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho had been negotiating to end the Vietnam War and seemed poised for a breakthrough. On 8 October, Le Duc Tho offered Kissinger a nine-point proposal to end the war. In it, he rescinded calls for Thieu’s removal and the establishment of a coalition government; was willing to accept a cease-fire prior to a political settlement; called for the removal of all "foreign" troops; and wanted to limit all military aid to the replacement of used supplies. Politically, Tho was willing to recognize two "administrative entities" in the south--the Thieu government and the PRG. Kissinger, eager for an agreement before the 7 November presidential elections, assented to the proposal, declaring to the world that "peace is at hand." If only Nixon and Thieu had agreed!

The southern Vietnamese had been left out of the negotiations between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, so Thieu immediately began to monkeywrench the process. In late October, the RVN leader listed 69 objections to the nine-point program. Thieu was enraged that northern troops would remain in the south and that the PRG was recognized as an institutional entity. He also issued "Four Nos" regarding any agreement: no recognition of the enemy; no neutralization in the south; no coalition government; and no surrender of territory. Kissinger was furious at Theiu and wanted Nixon to threaten to cut off all aid to the RVN unless its president fell in line with the deal. By that time, however, Nixon was quite sure that he would easily be re-elected, with or without a settlement in Vietnam, so he simply dismissed the agreement between Kissinger and Hanoi. In turn, Kissinger issued a new round of threats to the DRVN, promising more air strikes and breaking off talks, while also demanding to reopen the question of northern troops remaining in the south. In short order, Kissinger had double-crossed Thieu; Thieu had done the same to Nixon; Nixon then did it to Kissinger; and Kissinger to Le Duc Tho. Years earlier Bob Dylan had written that "to live outside the law you must be honest." Apparently, Nixon and Kissinger had not been listening to Blonde on Blonde.

In both Saigon and Washington, there were immediate and catastrophic repercussions to the breakdown. In the RVN, Thieu began a series of large-scale arrests of so-called dissidents, detaining many without trial, and he began reclassifying political prisoners as "criminals" in order to exclude them from any Prisoner of War exchange or amnesty. In the United States, Nixon won a landslide reelection victory against George McGovern, though he still had not unveiled his "secret plan" to end the war from 1968. Kissinger, citing "nuances" and "technicalities," was still blaming the DRVN for the failure of the October talks, and he described Hanoi’s representatives as "just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits." And the U.S. media just went along for the ride, creating the impression that the Vietnamese had disrupted the peace process.

Nixon, thus politically protected and emboldened, played "madman" once again and commenced Linebacker II, better known as the "Christmas Bombings." Beginning on 18 December and lasting eleven days, the saturation bombing campaign "was a final and devastating evidence of Nixon’s willingness to unleash U.S. power." Fighter jets such as F-105s, F-4s, and F-111s and over 200 B-52 bombers flew round-the-clock missions for a week and a half against the DRVN in what Kissinger’s aide Roger Morris called "calculated barbarism." Air Force tactical aircraft flew over 1000 sorties and B-52s another 750, and they dropped a combined total of over 40,000 tons of bombs, hitting not only military and communications facilities but also docks, shipyards, workplaces, residential areas, and the DRVN’s biggest hospital. In some places, the B-52s left craters with diameters of 50 feet. The northern Vietnamese had prepared for the raids in underground shelters and tunnels, and still lost 1600 civilians, which was not a significant number compared to other civilian deaths during the U.S. air war.

Linebacker II caused serious destruction in the DRVN, but at a great cost. North Vietnam, utilizing its own considerable antiaircraft capabilities--with over 1000 surface-to-air missiles--downed well over 20 tactical aircraft and 15 B-52s (though Hanoi claimed to have downed 34 and the U.S. Pentagon privately admitted to higher numbers), and also shot down 44 American pilots. Politically, Nixon’s air attacks were condemned across the globe, with the Vatican and European leaders speaking out against the bombings--Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme compared them to Nazi atrocities--and both the Soviet Union and China threatening to reconsider detente. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev publicly blasted the "longest and dirtiest" war in U.S. history while Zhou Enlai and Mao’s wife attended a mass rally in Beijing in support of the PRG and its foreign minister, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh.

At home, about two-thirds of U.S. senators polled opposed the Linebacker bombings and were threatening to jpull funding for the war, while the president’s approval rating, barely a month after his overwhelming reelection victory, fell to just 39 percent. Nixon would claim, in 1973 and repeatedly thereafter, that the Christmas bombings had forced Hanoi to accept the treaty that ended the war; in truth, the United States bombed itself into a final settlement. Linebacker II amounted to a terror bombing campaign, had little, if any, military purpose, and backfired politically. By January 1973, even Richard M. Nixon could see that the war in Vietnam had to end.

Ignoring the Past in the Middle East

I wrote this several months ago but never tried to get it published as an op-ed. Sadly, and in light of yesterday's attack in Mosul, it's still relevant . . . BB
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“Ignoring America’s Past in the Middle East”

“Anti-Americanism is resurging in the Arab world,” the secretary of state reported to U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East. “Recent bombings . . . vitriolic public statements by . . . high officials . . . diatribes and fantastic rumors,” he explained, “all testify to the reenkindling of Arab animosity against the United States.” Whether prompted by Moslem extremists or “whether attributable to a sincere objection to America’s part in Palestine developments,” such ill will “bodes no good for the interests of the United States . . . .”

Clearly, such an analysis would accurately describe conditions in the Middle East today but it was not producted by Colin Powell in 2004. It was written by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in May, 1950. Today, two conclusions stand out: anti-American sentiment in the Arab world remains just as strong after 54 years, and U.S. leaders have shown little sensitivity, or even interest, in trying to understand the historical roots of such feelings in the ensuing half-century.

Since becoming more intimately involved in Middle Eastern affairs in the aftermath of World War II, the United States has had an overweening presence in the region. On one hand it has been able to develop strong relations with pro-American, of internally repressive, Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or, before 1990, Iraq, to protect its oil interests in there. On the other hand, by intervening with American forces, fomenting coups d’etat, and, most importantly, funding and providing political cover for Israeli policies against Palestine, U.S. leaders have provoked an often-violent response to their presence, as the world saw on September 11, 2001.

However, instead of asking “why do they hate us,” American leaders could have been examining the very clear historical legacy that they had created in that region. In 1952, for instance, the state department cited the widespread “suspicion of foreigners” and “feeling against [the] US because of Israel” as barriers to having open and frank discussions with Arab leaders.

In 1954, just a year after the CIA-sponsored ouster of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian leader who tried to nationalize that country’s oil resources, the national security council recognized that conditions and trends in the Middle East “are inimical to Western interests.” Nations in the region were “suspicious of outside interest in their affairs” and “the Arab nations are incensed by what they believe to be our pro-Israel policy.” Just two years later, after the Americans reneged on loan guarantees to Egypt to help fund the Aswan Dam project, Gamel Abdel Nasser wished that the Americans would “choke on your fury” and nationalized the Suez Canal in response.

Even though the Americans opposed the combined Israeli-British-French military intervention, Washington maintained an economic boycott of Egypt and stopped several aid programs to Cairo. A year later, the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine asserted an American right to intervene in Middle Eastern states threatened by Communism. The result, as in the aftermath of the Mossadegh coup, was a new round of anti-Americanism in the Arab world and renewed prestige and influence for nationalist leaders like Nasser and, ironically, even closer relations between Arab leaders and the Soviet Union.

America’s image in the Middle East continued to deteriorate over the ensuing decades, as conceded by U.S. leaders. In the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and Arab states, in which massive U.S. arms shipments made Israeli success possible, Middle East leaders and, more importantly, the “Arab Street” turned more virulently against the U.S. presence in the region. In the late 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization became a world-recognized political entity and its leader, Yassir Arafat, something of a Third-World icon. Meanwhile, U.S. aid to Israel grew dramatically because, as President Richard Nixon explained, weapons shipments and foreign aid to Israel were the cheapest and most efficient way to ensure American strategic objectives in the region without having to actually intervene or becoming more involved with American troops themselves.

Not long after that, the Americans would truly reap the whirlwind of their history in the Middle East. The 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a belated response to the 1953 coup in Tehran and it unleashed waves of anti-Americanism, just as in 1950, throughout the region. By the 1980s many of the guerrillas who had been receiving massive amounts of American aid and equipment to subvert the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan were forming terrorist cells and targeting American institutions.

America’s military presence in the region, wars and destructive sanctions against Iraq, sponsorship of repressive Arab governments that, and, most critically, overwhelming support of continued Israeli attacks, and human-rights violations against the people of Palestine, have created a situation which, to put it mildly, is “inimical” to American interests. The current war against Iraq, now exacerbated by American attacks on cities and mosques, and, more damaging, the growing scandals concerning American torture of Iraqi prisoners, will make it virtually impossible for the United States to be accepted positively in the Arab world.

So, in 2004, U.S. leaders face conditions almost identical to those pointed out by Dean Acheson in 1950, by the National Security Council fifty years ago, and by subsequent generations since then. Contemporary developments in Iraq and Israel, where the United States is either committing or sponsoring wars against people who seek political sovereignty, will only lead to greater animosity and violence and that, as the Americans realized a long time ago, “bodes no good for the interests of the United States . . . .” Nor, for that matter, for the interests of the Arab states or of the world. America’s refusal to confront its history will only lead to an intensifying downward spiral with all of us potential victims of the violence that will ensue. The current American leadership, ignorant of its own history in the Middle East and drunk on hegemony, seems condemned to repeat it, time and again.