The Quiet War

I've been reading and learning about what is referred to as 'The Quiet War'. You should do the same. I first learned about it while reading the book in my last post.

[In the United States the conflict in Laos was called the ‘Quiet War’- as opposed to the noisy one in Vietman, whose escalation had turned the Laotian civil war into an international free-for-all, with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China throwing their weight behind the Pathet Lao while the United States continued to back the Royal Lao. But for the Hmong, the war was anything but quiet. More than two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, mostly by American planes attacking communist troops in Hmong areas. There was an average of one bombing sortie every eight minutes for nine years.]

Surprise, surprise, the United States interfering when they shouldn't have. (Read about the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Accords)

King Savang Vatthana of Laos made this statement in 1961.

[Our country is the most peaceful in the world….At no time has there ever arisen in the minds of the Lao people the idea of coveting another’s wealth, of quarreling with their neighbors, much less of fighting them. And yet, during the past twenty years, our country has known neither peace nor security….Enemies of all sorts have tried to cross our frontiers, to destroy our people and to destroy our religion and our nation’s aura of peace and concord. Foreign countries do not care either about our interests or peace; they are concerned only with their own interests.]

Prince Souvanna Phouma, Prime Minister of Laos, addressed Henry Kissinger in 1973 when he was visiting Vientiane.

[The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders. But your shoulders are very broad. We are counting on you to make our neighbors understand that all we want is peace. We are a very small country; we do not represent a danger to anybody. We count on you to make them know that the Lao people are pacific by tradition and by religion. We want only to be sovereign and independent. We ask that they let us live in peace on this little piece of ground that is left to us of our ancient kingdom….Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive.]

The Americans used the Hmong people to inflict their ideals on another country, bombed their communities, disturbed their way of life, and then pulled out before anything they had set out to do was accomplished (taking all USAID with them). Shortly after, a newspaper of the Lao People's Party announced that all Hmong must be exterminated down to the very core of their tribe, because of their support to the Americans. This activated the migration of the Hmong people to Thailand, refugee camps, and eventually to the United States, where they are viewed as lazy, backwards, and primarily as a group who takes advantage of the welfare system.

History repeats itself. Our responsibility is to know and understand our history, not so we can walk around with our heads buried in our chest from guilt, but so we can learn and make better choices in the future. I think about the links between Vietnam and the War in Iraq a lot, and this 'Quiet War' has me thinking about those connections again. When will we pause before assuming our way is best? And what makes us think violence will persuade a country to live peaceably?