There is no parallel between ISIL and Viet Cong: Don DeBar

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Sun Sep 21, 2014 2:2AM GMT

An American political commentator says there is no parallel between the Viet Cong and the ISIL terrorist group, which is a construct of the CIA and is serving Washington’s interests.

Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on the US director of national intelligence’s recent interview in which he drew parallels between the former Vietnamese resistance movement and ISIL.

“There’s a complete failure in the media in the United States – whether Fox or all the way on the left -- to understand the nature, or to describe the nature, of things on the ground in Iraq, mostly recently with relation in relation to the group ISIS,” DeBar said.

“And the parallel that James Clapper attempted to draw between ISIS and the Viet Cong betrays that failure,” said DeBar, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group, which is operating in Syria and Iraq.

“The so-called Viet Cong were Vietnamese people who were engaged in a struggle for a national liberation that pre-dated World War II, and in fact it’s a part of the continual and goes back a thousand years prior to the withdrawal of the US troops in the mid1970s,” he stated.

 “It was the people’s war and the Viet Cong were ‘asked to liberate’ the territory and occupy the South Vietnam. They did not chop off heads because they were welcomed by the people and they were there to liberate the people, not to chop their heads off and not to provide diktat of how they should live going forward,” the activist said.

“A proof of that of course is the fact that the entire country was liberated, rather than becoming a state like North Korea, heavy ideological contented, rather flexible and disintegrated into the capitalistic economy. So it was not an ideological struggle that went on there, but a war of national liberation,” he pointed out.

“To the contrary in Iraq, you have, first of all, the Viet Cong parallel falling on weaponry, rather than first fighting with sticks and then captured weapons, this group enters the stage armed to the teeth, trained in warfare with the US command and control style, warfare tactics and strategy, and also pretty good public relations effort,” DeBar noted.

“They certainly find it easier to get on CNN, for example, than, say the president of Iran. There’s a different relationship between that group and the power elite in the United States than there was between either Ho Chi Minh or General [Võ Nguyên] Giáp. So the ISIS parallel with the Viet Cong fails,” he stated.  “But the real failure in the coverage is the failure to acknowledge even by reference the agency of the Iraqi people in all of this.”

“Iraq was invaded in 1991, and damaged and bombed and sanctioned and starved for better than ten years after that. And then invaded and occupied and devastated. A million or two million people are acknowledged by the West to have died in that period, probably more. The entire infrastructure laid waste, the entire population terrorized and set upon each other,” he said.

“[I]n my opinion, the ISIS is a construct of the CIA. Look how they serve the aims of the United Sates. Every time, they chop off a head they have had another vote in Congress and more money cost over,” the veteran journalist concluded.

The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, control large parts of Syria's northern territory. ISIL sent its fighters into Iraq in June, quickly seizing vast expanse of land straddling the border between the two countries.

According to reports, ISIL is currently in control of seven oil fields in Iraq and large amounts of the country’s wheat supplies.

Iraqi officials said on August 13 that the militants were holding government silos in five of Iraq's most fertile provinces, where the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) says 40 percent of the country’s wheat is grown.

The output capacity of the ISIL-held oil fields amounts to 80,000 barrels a day, said the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a monthly oil market report last month.

The potential oil flow from Iraq’s ISIL-held deposits is commensurate to about $8.4 million a day on international markets.

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