Bush is wrong: Iraq is not Vietnam ; Hungary 50th Anniversary ; Labour's plans for faith school --Telegraph.co.uk

Thursday, October 19, 2006


Has Iraq become the new Vietnam?


Posted at: 11:01


President George W Bush has conceded for the first time that there are parallels between the fighting in Iraq and the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.

Amid a steep spike in US deaths in Iraq, Mr Bush recognised comparisons between the current bloodshed and the 1968 Tet Offensive, considered a key turning point in the US war in Vietnam.

Do you agree that Iraq has become a second Vietnam – an unwinnable, costly and politically damaging conflict? If so, do you agree that the current situation is equivalent to the Tet Offensive, or does it echo an earlier or later stage of the Vietnam War?

Why do you think Mr Bush has chosen this moment to acknowledge the comparison for the first time?



What are the implications of his comments?





*** John Keegan: Bush is wrong - Iraq is not Vietnam ***





Bush is wrong: Iraq is not Vietnam

By John Keegan

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/10/2006




Your view: Has Iraq become the new Vietnam?

President Bush has for the first time conceded a similarity between events in Iraq and those in Vietnam 40 years ago. Asked in a television interview on Wednesday if he now saw a similarity between the recent escalation of American losses in Iraq and those suffered in the Tet offensive of 1968, he admitted that the rise of casualties in the past weeks had given ground for making a comparison. The President's admission will probably trigger a feeding frenzy in the American media, which has been seeking to equate Iraq with Vietnam ever since the insurgency started to inflict significant casualties.

It has to be said, however, that the President's admission will come as a surprise to those with long historical memories. Indeed, it is a surprise that the President allowed himself to be drawn. I recently had the opportunity to discuss Iraq with the President in the Oval Office at an intimate meeting with a small group of historians.

Mr Bush then — early September — did not want to discuss Iraq, but larger issues of the culture clash between radical Islam and the Christian West. Indeed, he has been ill-advised to rise to the bait. Many of those who took sides over Vietnam are still alive and active, still animated by the passions that transfixed the American people in the 1960s. His admission can do nothing but harm, certainly to him and to his administration, but also to the US forces in general and to the servicemen in Iraq in particular.

A large part of the reason for that is the lack of comparability between Iraq and Vietnam. Anyone familiar with both situations will be struck by the dissimilarities, particularly of scale and in the nature of the enemy.

By January 1968, total American casualties in Vietnam — killed, wounded and missing — had reached 80,000 and climbing. Eventually deaths in combat and from other causes would exceed 50,000, of which 36,000 were killed in action. Casualties in Iraq are nowhere near those figures. In a bad week in Vietnam, the US could suffer 2,000 casualties. Since 2003, American forces in Iraq have never suffered as many as 500 casualties a month. The number of casualties inflicted in Iraq are not established, but are under 50,000. In any year of the Vietnam war, the communist party of North Vietnam sent 200,000 young men to the battlefields in the south, most of whom did not return. Vietnam was one of the largest and costliest wars in history. The insurgency in Iraq resembles one of the colonial disturbances of imperial history.

There is a good reason for the difference. The Vietnamese communists had organised and operated a countryside politico-military organisation with branches in almost every village. The North Vietnamese People's Army resembled that of an organised Western state. It conscripted recruits throughout the country, trained, organised and equipped them.

The Iraqi insurgency, by contrast, is an informal undertaking by a coalition of religious and ex-Ba'athist groups. It has no high command or bureaucracy resembling the disciplined Marxist structures of North Vietnam. It has some support from like-minded groups in neighbouring countries, but nothing to compare with the North Vietnamese international network, which was supported by China and the Soviet Union and imported arms and munitions from both those countries on a large scale.

North Vietnam was, moreover, a sovereign state, supported explicitly by all other communist countries and by many sympathetic regimes in the Third World. The Iraqi insurgency has sympathisers, but they enjoy no organised system of support and are actively opposed by many of their neighbours and Muslim co-religionists.

The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People's Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.

Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. It has become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was. Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from the start, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its own Vietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with the French and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win where they had failed.

It was, however, the American rather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The American media had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however, without any end in sight and with the promised military victory constantly postponed, American newspapers and — critically — the evening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story.

The media were extremely influential, particularly at such places as university campuses and the firesides of American families whose sons had been conscripted for service. When casualties of 150 a week began to be reported, the war began to be increasingly unpopular. President Johnson, who was temperamentally oversensitive to criticism, believed that one particular broadcast by Walter Cronkite in February 1968, just after Tet, lost him Middle America. "If I've lost Kronkite," he said to his staff, "I have lost the war."

President Bush must now expect that America's television anchormen will be looking for a similar opportunity to damage him. If they find it, the blame will be the President's alone.

The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, but in the American media's treatment of news from the front line.




© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.



* * *




Children of the 1956 revolution still haunted by invasion

By Kate Connolly, in Budapest

Last Updated: 2:51am BST 24/10/2006



In pictures: Budapest marks the 1956 uprising



Sandor Racz clutches a jagged piece of iron in his fist and stabs it in the air. The 73-year old calls it a symbol of a revolution that as far as he is concerned has never been completed.

"It was an incredible moment when they brought Stalin's statue down," he said, recalling the pivotal day of the Hungarian Uprising against communism 50 years ago, an event that still haunts the nation.

"All eight metres of it came crashing down on Heroes Square, and I and everyone around me took to it with hammers, saw, any tools we could find," he said. "It felt like a whole nation was venting its anger on that one mighty monument."

Racz, a retired toolmaker, was one of the leaders of the brutally suppressed revolt and was subsequently imprisoned like tens of thousands of others for his actions.

Today Mr Racz still carries his piece of the Stalin statue with him, wrapped in tissue, as a souvenir of those heady days. As this young democracy marks the anniversary today of its heroic but failed attempt to escape the Soviet Union's iron grip, the capital, Budapest, is awash with pride and nostalgia.

Tanks, machine guns, fire engines and ambulances have been parked in "open museums" around the city for children and toddlers to clamber on.

Young people dressed as freedom fighters ride the city's trams handing out copies of the "liberation" newspapers of the day. The city's theatres and cinemas are full of plays and films dramatising the events and the brutal interrogations and executions which followed and memories of the bloody days in which thousands of civilians died fighting Soviet forces.

Hungary's national goalkeeper at the time, Gyula Grosics, remembers returning from a match abroad on October 25, to find thousands had taken to the streets, led by students, demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Children as young as 12 were throwing Molotov cocktails in the paths of tanks. "When we arrived the city streets were blocked by Soviet tanks," the 80 year-old who was part of the legendary "Magic Magyar" team which dealt England its first home defeat of 6-3 in 1953, told The Daily Telegraph.

"We were transported to the outskirts by a special train and the revolution was in full flow," he said. "The entire team had to cross the bridge from Buda to Pest by crawling on our hands and knees to avoid the crossfire."

When he heard of the freedom fighters' search for a place to store their weapons, he offered them the basement of his home. "Only much later did I discover just how serious it was and that I could have been sentenced to death," he said. His actions led to constant surveillance by the secret police, who spied on him and his family and held a case file which was only closed in 1996.

At a Wall of Heroes outside Budapest's House of Terror, which recalls the horrors of Communist rule, Ella and Ferenc Lovasz stood hand in hand quietly contemplating the ceramic plaques commemorating some of those men and women who died.

"Many of my fellow students at university disappeared around this time," recalled Ferenc, 78, a retired engineer. He and his wife were caught up in the revolt when they attended a peaceful demonstration in front of parliament and troops unexpectedly opened fire.

"Out of the blue they started shooting," a tearful Ella, 75, a retired chemist recalled. "We ran – it was a bright autumn day like today – we saw people collapsing around us as we fled back to the safety of our home. We can never forget those who died for us." But as world leaders gather in Budapest to join the ceremonies, rather than find a country celebrating more than a decade of democracy since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, they will find a bitter and divided Hungary.

Mr Racz said his souvenir chunk of the toppled Stalin statue reminded him of "our fight for a free, independent and democratic Hungary." But, he said, "it's a Hungary we're still fighting to achieve in 2006". Longstanding political rifts in society have only been intensified by recent remarks by Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Socialist prime minister, that he lied to Hungarians about the state of the economy, leading to the worst political violence since 1956.

As a result, the many different interest groups, including students, political parties, and veteran fighters will mark the event in separate ways.

Most prominent is the motley crew of protesters who have been camped outside the parliament for the past month, whose demands range from the toppling of Gyurcsany to the break-up of democracy. They see themselves as the inheritors of the 1956 revolution and are offended that a government they see as direct successors to the communists are leading today's events.

"Over the past 16 years every political party has tried to hijack 1956 for their own purposes," said Laszlo Garaczi, an author and historian who was four months old when the revolution started.

"While the revolution itself was very complex, over the 10 to 12 days in which it was fought the nation pulled together like never before or since."





"Children clamber over a tank placed in Budapest for the anniversary celebrations"




© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.






* * *





Labour's plans for faith schools will only make divisions deeper

By Vincent Nichols

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/10/2006



The exact government amendment concerning admissions to all new schools of a religious or faith character has not yet been seen. But its intention is well known: to make available a quarter of places in such a school to pupils of other faiths or none.

Hints that this will be extended to existing faith schools have already been made.

The amendment is ill-thought-out, unworkable, contradictory of empirical evidence and deeply insulting of the reality and achievements of Catholic schools. Yet, in many ways it could well mark a watershed in government thinking and action.


The intended amendment is based on the assumption that Catholic schools, as they stand, are socially divisive. The evidence is the opposite, and in a letter to me on October 2, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, fully acknowledged the qualities of Catholic schools and the way they serve social cohesion. Yet now he is acting on the opposite assumption, without further consultation or discussion.

Ofsted statistics confirm that the pupils in a Catholic school closely reflect the national school population in terms of levels of disadvantage and special educational needs. Catholic schools have a higher proportion of pupils from minority ethnic groups than other schools.

Catholic schools, on average, already welcome 30 per cent of their pupils from other Churches, faiths or none. Pupils in Catholic schools achieve above-average academic standards and are less likely to encounter bullying, racism and harassment than in other schools.

Catholic secondary schools are also twice as effective as other schools at developing respect for others. When it comes to social integration, Catholic schools are part of the solution.

This is increasingly so with the arrival in this country of people from many lands. Through their participation in a stable and unified Catholic school, especially where the faith is shared, newly arrived families and children find an excellent point of entry into British society.

One priest told me that in his First Holy Communion group from the parish school, there are 14 different nationalities among the 19 candidates. That is not in central Birmingham but in Henley-on-Thames.

These are the foundations on which we want to build, but the coercive measures being proposed by the Government will not win co-operation.

In this I stand with Tahir Alam of the Muslim Council of Britain and with Henry Grunwald of the Jewish Board of Deputies. Confrontation will not build social cohesion.

Nor do Catholic schools act in isolation. Many examples could be given of Catholic schools working within their neighbourhood.

In Leicester, one set of neighbouring schools, including a community school of which Muslim children made up 80 per cent of the roll, share lunchtime groups, educational and creative projects, parental activities and a common vision for the future.

I support suggestions that all schools — and not just religious schools — be inspected for the ways in which they build up networks with other schools and contribute to mutual understanding.

The amendment that Mr Johnson is bringing forward seems to enshrine as government policy the view that, left to themselves, Catholic schools would be divisive.

In other words, the vision that inspires Catholic education is no longer trusted as capable of delivering the qualities and virtues needed in our complex society. Since the evidence suggests the opposite, I can only assume that this view rises from muddled thinking or prejudice.

Muddled thinking often does damage. The requirement that a quarter of places in a new Catholic school are open to all contains within it the prospect that those seeking such places will have scant regard for the Catholic nature of the school and want only its "success".

Those who understand Catholic education know very well that it is an integrated endeavour, centred on the person of Christ, whose Spirit informs the school and whose teaching is embraced and explored in every aspect of its life.

It is not a "secular" education with RE and prayer bolted on. A willingness to be at least a passive partner in this endeavour is a minimum expectation of participation in the life of these schools.

The introduction of "admissions requirements" is a Trojan horse, bringing into Catholic schools those who may not only reject its central vision but soon seek to oppose it.

But there is another consequence of muddled thinking. Is it really sensible to assume that a new Catholic school could be planned on the projected needs of the Catholic community — for that is what happens — only for a quarter of those places to be taken away from that group of parents?

There is a deep pride within the Catholic community over its schools. It is rooted in part in the efforts of many generations to finance and sustain those schools. It is expressed in the £20 million found every year by the Catholic community for its schools, in addition to the taxes that all pay.

Any Government wanting to remove a quarter of the school places actually needed by that community, and to do so on false grounds, cannot expect co-operation or respect.

Clearly pressure has produced this muddle. Over the past few weeks, there has been an intense scrutiny of the role of religious faith in our society.

So far we have not got much beyond knee-jerk reactions. I am quite clear that the work of building a coherent and harmonious society in Britain requires all possible partnerships, including partnerships with the major faiths and religious bodies.

A precondition of this co-operation is that partners must be treated with respect for what they are and what they can contribute.

It is now clear that multi-culturalism is never going to work within a secular model. A secular model excludes recognition of the spiritual and religious roots of many cultures. The diversity of cultures has been encouraged, but without genuine engagement with their moral values or beliefs.

This has left us with a spiritual vacuum at the heart of life, illustrated in the poverty of so much religious education in state schools.

In the face of this ignorance, tolerance does not last long. Equally important is the ability to think ethically about what constitutes a good life. Neither opinion polls nor focus groups are a sound foundation for shared moral thinking.

The challenges of learning about other faiths, of which Mr Johnson speaks, and of educating youngsters in moral literacy, confront not so much faith schools, which have a clear contribution to make, as every other school in the land.

The alternative to secular multi-culturalism is not an enforced integration, such as we see in France. What is required is a proper and mutually respectful co-operation between religious faith and public authorities.

That has been our way in the past and it has given rise to good schools and a rich tradition of voluntary work, much inspired by religious belief. That is the road on which we must continue. But this amendment seems to signal an alternative and deeply divisive step. It has to be resisted.



Dr Nichols is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham and chairman of the Catholic Education Service.




© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.