Democracy for Vancouver

Here it is. The inevitable outcome is upon us. The only “failure” we must endure is the Bush administration. Success will come once we rid ourselves of those that say “failure is not an option”.

Falling Dominos and Failing Presidencies

by Dave Lindorff

There was a word missing from President Bush’s pathetic State of the Union Address. That word was “domino.”

With all his arguments for continued war in Iraq now exposed as lies and shams, our “war president” and would-be generalissimo has fallen back on the same last straw that Tricky Dick Nixon clutched to the end of his sorry presidency: the domino theory.

As Bush the Lesser put it last night, to a skeptical Congress and an even more disbelieving American public: “If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists backed by Al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country, and in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict.”

Sound familiar?

It should. Back in the Vietnam War days, we were told that if Vietnam “fell,” then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia would “fall,” and who knows what other countries after that, like a chain of dominos–leading, the hoary argument went, right back to America.

Of course, it didn’t quite happen that way. Vietnam won its war against the U.S. The indigenous revolutionaries of Laos, the Pathet Lao, defeated the CIA-backed royal government in Laos, too, but in Cambodia, it was the U.S., not Vietnam, which spread the war to that neutral kingdom, by overthrowing the existing government and setting up a vicious right-wing dictatorship under Lon Nol, which was later ousted by a Maoist movement, the Khmer Rouge. But that nominally communist government was no ally of the Vietnamese. It was indeed the Vietnamese who rescued the Cambodian people from the genocidal Khmer Rouge, who ended up, incredibly, being backed by the U.S.

Thailand and Malaysia, of course, were never at risk of “falling.”

The domino theory made no sense in Southeast Asia in 1970, and it is equally ridiculous in the Middle East today. It is simply the last desperate ploy of an administration that is terrified about having to face the reality that the U.S. has lost its war in Iraq.