RE: [Marxism] A Vietnamese critique of the Iraqi resistance

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann writes:
Fred Feldman here provides no examples to document his view that the
Vietnamese had a "crisis of leadership" and so it's hard to know to
what he is referring here. If my memory serves, the last time Fred
wrote about this, in the US Socialist Workers Party's International
Socialist Review magazine back in the 1970s, his views were rather
negative. He wrote as an uncompromising opponent of the Vietnamese
Communist Party when expressing the opinions of the SWP, to which we
and others on Marxmail all belonged, at that time. Check that out:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/spainter/FJopening.html


Walter's criticism and his expose of my shady past is simply irrelevant
to what I was discussing.  I am sort  of embarrassed to admit that I
have been insufficiently living in the past of late to even bring the
old articles to mind when I responded to the article submitted -- very
usefully, in my opinion, by Michael K.  s an unfair and rather smugly
self-satisfied critique (assuming that this critique actually represents
the views of any Vietnamese communist, as it may well not.

Having reread the article submitted by Michael K. (and I am glad he
submitted it), I believe that this is basically an attempt by an
anti-insurgency bourgeois journalist to misuse the moral and political
prestige of the Vietnamese revolution against the Iraq insurgency. The
author Aaron Glantz is also the author, as the article notes, of "How
America Lost Iraq." I assume that anyone who finds Iraq is requested to
please return it to its rightful owner.  While from the context he seems
to be a strong critic of US policy, I strongly suspect he is an opponent
of the fight against the occupation and may even be a supporter -- a
disappointed one -- of the occupation itself.

I am not sure this article accurately represents the views of  Tran Dac
Loi, described as "an important figure in the ideological wing of
Vietnam's communist government." But if it does, I exercise my right as
a world citizen to disagree strongly with Tran.  This is why I admit
that I am concerned about the details of the interview: who did the
interviewing (Glantz or someone else, whose notes he is utilizing),
when, and where.  I would like more details about Tran's experience in
the national-revolutionary war.

I'm not talking about sinister psy-op conspiracies, but about the normal
distortions of bourgeois journalism, including the incapacity of many
bourgeois journalists to understand what a revolutionary or someone with
revolutionary experience is talking about.  For instance the article is
titled "Viet Cong [sic!] advice for Iraqi Resistance" but Tran himself
is never quoted as using the word "advice."

Instead, Tran seems to be taking up the issue of whether Iraq is another
Vietnam.  Personally, I have always rejected that comparison because
Vietnam was a prolonged revolt by a long-term colony against the
imperialists -- first the French, then the Japanese, then briefly the
British, the French again, and then the US.  The 1975 victory
definitively ended about a century of colonial rule in Vietnam.  Iraq
had freed itself of direct military and political domination by
imperialism in the 1950s.  The current occupation aimed to take
advantage of economic and military weakness and prolonged political
crisis to at least partially roll back that gain.  And the occupation
has not only met wide resistance.  It has basically failed to take root
in the country as colonial rule did take root in Vietnam.

Secondly Vietnam was not simply a resistance to occupation but, at least
from 1945 on, a deeply popular and massive worker-peasant revolution
against landlordism, imperialism, and ultimately capitalism led by the
Vietnamese Communist Party. The Iraqi struggle is basically a struggle
against occupation, not a struggle against the old society that the
occupation disrupted and attempted to modify and reshape in US
imperialist interests.

Of course, there is a similarity between Iraq and Vietnam in that both
are just national struggles against imperialist powers and both became
"quagmires" for the imperialists.  But neither should be viewed as a
"quagmire" for us, and we should recognize the huge differences -- two
very different kinds and levels of struggle -- and proceed from that
fact.

Walter seems to think that Tran was offering some good "advice" and that
Iraqi fighters should learn from the Vietnamese experience through him.

But here is what Glantz quotes Tran as saying:

Glantz writes: "'This kind of resistance leads nowhere,' he [Tran,
according to Glantz] said. 'Resistance has to
have a clear objective. Ours was independence and socialism; not
reaction but revolution.'"

Does Walter think the Iraqi struggle has accomplished nothing and has
gone nowhere? Does Walter think this is good "advice"?  Does the
Vietnamese CP agree with it? Permit me to doubt it. Does the Cuban CP
agree with it? Not from what I read in Granma and on the CubaNews list.
Is this Hugo Chavez's view? No.  He seems damn well aware of what the
Venezuelan revolution owes to the struggle and sacrifice of the Iraqi
people.

Furthermore, what does Tran allegedly mean mean by the suggestion that
the forces of the resistance representing "reaction, not revolution." Is
this the Vietnamese CP's assessment of the forces of the Iraqi
resistance. I have often pointed out that they do not represent a
progressive social revolution, but rather the resistance of an existing
semicolonial society -- with all its forces, divisions, and hierarchies
-- to an imperialist invasion.  But their fight against the occupation
does not represent "reaction" in any way shape or form relative to the
occupation but defense of the great colonial revolution.

The alleged Tran insists that the struggle "must have a clear
objective." But in the present Iraqi context, why isn't ending the
occupation and restoring independence a "clear objective."  In the
current struggle, it seems to have shown a certain mobilizing and
fighting power in Iraq, across the colonial world, and even for the
antiwar movement in the United States.

In my opinion, the current alignment and leaderships of forces in Iraq
are not capable of resolving the crisis of Iraq in the kind of
definitive way that the Vietnamese CP resolved the crisis of Vietnamese
society, but does that mean -- as Tran seems to imply -- that the people
of Iraq cannot regain independence of sovereignty short of a fight for
socialism?
Iraq without US occupation will not be like Cuba, Vietnam, or Venezuela.
But ending the occupation will be closer on the scale to revolution than
reaction, which is represented in Iraq in its purest form by the US war
against the country's independent existence.

What was I referring to when I mentioned the "crisis of leadership" in
Vietnam and Iraq? Glantz attributes to Tran the following view: "He
compares the Iraqi resistance to the many aborted attempts to end
French colonisation of Vietnam before World War II that were led by
small groups of the educated elite. 'They were all patriots but they
were all suppressed because they could not appeal to the masses.'"

Is this really so relevant to Iraq today?  Iraq has not been
successfully recolonized -- though there are many obstacles to ending
the occupation, Washington has made no headway in decisively reshaping
Iraqi politics, economy, and society so that a stable regime
representing US imperialist interests can be established, as happened in
Vietnam back in the nineteenth century and until World War II. Wasn't
this kind of direct colonial-type reorganization (now called
"nation-building" though it is based on the destruction of independence
and sovereignty) largely ended around the world after World War II under
all kinds of leaderships and struggles of various scopes and
intensities.

More, could the problem of leadership and organization in Vietnam have
been solved without the whole package of struggles -- limited and
unsuccessful in various ways -- that preceded the emergence of the VCP.

Here I would also insist -- I suspect along with my opponent in those
debates, Pierre Rousset (if I understood his French correctly, which I
did not always do, crude-basic-unilingual that I am) -- that the
solution to the problem of leadership and organization in Vietnam was
not resolved forever by the emergence of the VCP.  There were crises:
the electoral defeat by the Trotskyists in the Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh
City] elections in part because the Trotskyists called for independence
while the CP did not in deference to the PRO-IMPERIALIST popular-front
line (an underestimated aspect of the popular front with the democratic
imperialists against the fascist ones). Then there was the decision in
the midst of the great popular revolution of 1945, to welcome the entry
of British troops into Vietnam, the murder of Vietnamese Trotskyists
because they opposed this and because they had a mass base although far
smaller certainly than the VCP, then there were the lessons learned when
they were deprived of South Vietnam by the conmpromises made by the
Soviet Union and China at the 1954 Geneva conference, the failure of an
attempt at forced collectivization in North North Vietnam in the face of
mass resistance (later repeated in southern Vietnam after the 1975
victory, the struggles over whether to join the struggle in the south
directly after 1957, and so on.

Every leadership, of course (like Lenin's, for example), will face such
crises of direction again and again.  But in my opinion the rise of
Stalinism had created a more generalized form of this phenomenon,
disorienting leadership worldwide on an unprecedented scale.

Walter was set off by my use of the term "crisis of leadership." Like
me, he learned it from the SWP, and, unlike me, he seems to react as one
who has been burned to fire.  But I think the term is often useful.  I
think Trotsky was describing a real objective situation when he used the
phrase, although the Trotskyist solution tended to place too much weight
on purely subjective factors to resolve the partly subjective problem,
and to insist on a narrowly programmatic solution (the creation of a
cadre holding a specific set of views).  I see no reason to swear never
again to use a term just because of the threat that my collected works
-- of very varied quality, in my opinion -- may suddenly appear on the
web if I do.

And the creation of the leadership that could win the more than
thirty-year war to consolidate Vietnam's independence and solidarity was
a victory over this situation and not one that was won easily.

The leadership that won the Vietnamese revolution was not created by God
on one of the six days of work but was born out of struggle and prepared
for the role it played by some very difficult and imperfect history.

The Tran presented by Glantz actually has a somewhat ultimatist view of
the Iraqi struggle.  They CANNOT win unless they have a unifying theme
like "independence and socialism."  They cannot win unless they have a
single unifying figure like Ho Chi Minh. They cannot win unless they
have a single party uniting all the ethnic groups and progressive social
forces.

And since he acknowledges that Iraq is nowhere near to having these
advantages, what should the Iraqi people do now? Fight or not? Should
they go home and wait like Tibetan monks waiting for signs that from the
heavens that a new Dalai Lama has been born?  How can the Iraqi people
go forward without today's struggle and today's fight, which -- contrary
to what Glantz's Tran seems to be saying, has already changed the world
in favor of the oppressed and exploited everywhere and has the potential
to win its single unifying though limited goal -- forcing US troops to
go home (most of them won't be sorry, of course) and winning the right
of the Iraqi people to determine their future (which will be no easy
task, I admit) without US occupation and direct domination.
Fred Feldman









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