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POLITICS: Viet Cong Advice for Iraqi Resistance
By Aaron Glantz*
HANOI, Nov 10 , 2005 (IPS) - Is Iraq another Vietnam? Tran Dac Loi should know. The Secretary-General of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation grew up in Hanoi dodging bombs dropped by the United States Air Force, while his father fought in the successful guerilla war in the country's central highlands.
Three decades later, Tran, now an important figure in the ideological wing of Vietnam’s communist government, has some basic advice for the Iraqi resistance.
''Our struggle was well organised. We had an address and official contacts, but with Iraq you never know who the resistance is and what their objectives are,'' Tran said in an IPS interview.
''Sure, the fighters all want the Americans out, but there’s no unifying political programme,'' Tran said, pointing to what he sees as a serious flaw with the Iraqi resistance.
In Iraq, the insurgency’s appeal flows primarily from the pain of the occupation. Much of its support comes from regular Iraqis who have relatives who have been killed or imprisoned by U.S. forces and they want to get even.
''This kind of resistance leads nowhere,'' he said. ''Resistance has to have a clear objective. Ours was independence and socialism; not reaction but revolution.''
Some of the occupation’s opponents in Iraq do have developed organisations, complete with spokespersons and ideological programmes. But, Tran says, because all of them are built on ethnic or religious lines, they’ll never succeed in their objectives.
The movement of Muqtada Sadr, for example, appeals primarily to poor people in the country’s numerous Shi’ite slums. It provides services in poor Shi’ite neighbourhoods, while advocating an Islamic state.
Such a plan of action has helped Sadr amass millions of supporters, but has also caused him to be unable to attract a following outside his core base.
According to Tran, the same can be said of Sunni fundamentalists. The hardline Association of Muslim Scholars may have spokespersons who appear regularly on the Arab satellite channels, but their appeal is limited even within the country.
Tran thinks that the lack of a pan-ethnic political programme can cause minority groups to ally with the occupier in order to ensure that their cultural rights are protected. In Iraq, this has caused the Kurds, and their more than 100,000 'peshmerga' guerillas, to side with the U.S.
''The absence of a clear political programme is in the interest of the U.S.,'' Tran said. ''Then, they can go above you and pretend like they’re solving the problems between you, when really they’re lording over you.''
While the occupying forces took care to ban the secularist Ba’ath Party-which continues to function through independent cells within Iraq and through exiles in Syria and Jordan-it has not been able to earn the trust of minority groups.
It is a classic case of divide and rule. Indeed, from the start of the occupation, the U.S. government actively encouraged the Iraqi people to organise themselves along sectarian lines.
The U.S. administration even hired a company, Research Triangle Institute (RTI), and charged it with selecting local governments, based solely on the ethnic make-up in each of Iraq’s regions.
In March 2003, RTI was awarded a contract worth 466 million US dollars to create 180 local and provincial governments in Iraq and obtain wide public participation in a new political process but irregularities were pointed out by government auditors.
As a communist, Tran suggests a programme in Iraq similar to Vietnam’s revolution which was based on a single political party, aimed at throwing out the aggressor, defending the unity of the country and the country’s economic and political sovereignty.
The particular ideology, he said, is not the key. More important is something everyone can believe in, regardless of religion or ethnic background, said Tran, who, among other things, coordinates the country’s delegations to the annual World Social Forum, usually held at Porto Alegre in Brazil.
Iraq, he said, needs a unifying political figure like Ho Chi Minh. ''You need a political figure who can introduce a long-term objective that’s in the basic interest of the majority of the people.''
Tran doesn’t think any of Iraq’s current crop of political leaders fits this mould. Moreover, he says the fighters’ regular killings of innocent civilians are sickening and counterproductive.
''They behave more like random rebelling groups," he says. "When we fought, we only fought against the ones who fought us. Civilians were never our targets.''
Given the Iraqi resistance’s bloody tactics and lack of a unified political programme, Tran doubts it will be successful in forcing the Americans out-at least in the short term.
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.''
*IPS reporter Aaron Glantz is author of the book, ''How America Lost Iraq''(Tarcher/Penguin). Ngoc Nguyen also contributed to this report.
(END)
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