Dear all,

This week, hundreds of Vietnam veterans will make their way to the small town of Dien Bien Phu to remember their fallen comrades.

Dien Bien Phu was the site of a seminal battle, a battle that was to signal the end of the French empire the world over.

It was fought between the Viet Minh and the French, and recieves little attention despite its enormous significance.

The Viet Minh were lead by Ho Chi Minh, who was later to inflict such terrible damage on the American occupiers.

But at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, it was the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap that was the hero of the hour.

This week, the 92 year old General will take the salutes from those veterans that surive, and in turn salute those that fell on that day fifty years ago.

The Viet Minh had been harrying the French for months, sapping morale with their drip by drip stealth attacks and ambushes

They were a rag-bag peasant army trying to stand up to the might of a colonial power - an impossible task.

Dien Bien Phu lies some 420km North of Hanoi, and lies in a valley surrounded by imposing, misty mountains.

The Viet Minh would attack and then melt away into the night, leaving the French frustrated and helpless, like a giant trying to swat a fly.

The French motto, 'three colours, one flag, one empire' was emblazoned across maps of Indochina.

The French government insisted that the French war in Vietnam was a noble one, aimed at protecting the majority of the Vietnamese people from Ho Chi Minhs communists. This was about the right of the Vietnamese people to live freely and without fear.

There was talk of 'turning points', 'light at the end of the tunnel' and one political commentator, Andre Mercier wrote,

'The Viet Minh will will not be able to face us, our potential armament being greater than theirs. Their fight is without hope of victory'.

The French government said that they would never abandon Vietnam and its people, that they would do their duty and see this war through to the end.

And the French had a plan.

They realised that they could never win against these 'terrorists' that were being aided and abetted by outside agencies, namely Laos and China, while the war was being fought on their terms.

These insurgents, though the Viet Minh called themselves freedom fighters, could only be beaten if they were bought into the open and crushed in conventional battle.

So the French assembled a huge force, ready to take on the 'few diehards' that were causing them such disproportionate collateral damage.

They built themselves a heavily fortified garrison in the valley around Dien Bien Phu.

General Giap realised that the French had walked into a trap of their own making.

In a feat of logistical miracle, he ordererd the dissassembling and transportation of heavy artillery pieces across the mountainous region, and rebuilt them above the French firebases and garrison.

Then began a 56 day siege that was to choke both the French army and eventually the empire.

They surrendered on May 7th 1954.

At least 2,200 French troops died in Dien Bien Phu, contributing to the total of some 58,000 that the French were to lose overall in Indochina.

The Vietnamese lost four times that number in the siege.

Colonel Pierre Langlais, who was there at the surrender, was later to observe in his memoirs,

'The Viet Minh fought to throw us out of their place, where we had no business being.'

and,

(the French people)  had learned a simple lesson: A modern power can't force its will on distant populations determined to run their own affairs'

Patrice Lorenzi, a defense ministry official noted several years ago,

'That place (Vietnam) shows clearly enough that you can't make a people do what they don't wan't, unless maybe you're prepared to burn their country to the ground and start all over from scratch again'

The French were to suffer a similar defeat seven years later, when they were forced to withdraw from Algiers suffering similar, sapping, guerilla insurgencies in the North African country.

'Even if you have ten times the military force you can't win'

remarked Jea-Guy Marenco, an Algerian veteran.

In Paris, General jacques Bourry, President of the French Veterans Union, noted that

'We could not stay any longer. There were too many deaths, and we just didn't have the means or the political will...'

Fifty years later there are obvious comparisons here to the situation in Iraq.

History has a nasty habit of repeating itself, especially when its lessons are ignored.

Today one year after George Bush's cheap, self serving publicity stunt of flying onto USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit and posing under the banner 'Mission accomplished', what of Iraq?

The recent photographic evidence showing US and British troops torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners may yet prove to be the straw that broke the camels back, the 'Omega' point.

'A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an army in disgrace, a policy in tatters and the real prospect of defeat. Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis,the battle for hearts and minds has been comprehensively lost' (Patrick Cockburn, The British Independent)

The photographs of torture and humiliation that have caused such opprobrium in the West come as no suprise to most Iraqis. What also comes as no suprise is that Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has not read the Army report on prisoner mistreatment. He said it was working its way up the chain of command. The report was finished in February

Pictures shown on al-Jazeera that CNN chooses, or is not allowed, to air show on an almost daily basis the full brutality of the occupying army.

Many Iraqis now see little difference between the jackboot of Saddam and the jackboot of Uncle Sam.

There have been a high number of unnecessary shootings of people at checkpoints, on patrols, following ambushes. None of the killings are recorded. None of the killings are investigated.

Iraqi people understand all too well that their lives are worth less that those of Americans who regard them as an inferior people whose lives are not even worth noting when they are shot.

'Another simple reason for disillusionment with the US is simply the Americans' failure to restore normal life. Iraqis in Baghdad continually say that Iraq recovered more quickly from the damage inflicted by the first Gulf War under Saddam in 1991 than it did after the second war in 2003...it is still more dangerous than it was under the old regime' (The Independent).

The failure of the US army to wrest Fallujah away from the militias, has shown a dangerous weakness, one that will have been noted with interest all over Iraq.

The feeling now is that the 'brutal occupiers' that torture, humiliate and murder innocent Iraqi people are on the run.

The US has next to no political support outside Kurdistan, the paramilitaries are growing in number and champing at the bit, Fallujah is the start, the Omega point.

As with France in Indochina, there is now a palpable expectation in Iraq , a clear understanding that the Omega point has been reached:

The US can no longer win.

It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in both modern and military history.

yechydda,