One thing you can say for the right-wing mind … it’s consistant in it’s reliance upon hoary old myths:
Flee Iraq, relive shame of Vietnam
The folks who believe the Iraq war looks increasingly like the Vietnam War are right.
At least the part where the United States pulls out and leaves millions of people hanging out to dry. That part where the war comes to a dishonorable, murderous end. Like on the day, April 30, 1975, that America broke its promises to millions of South Vietnamese and jumped ship. The day on which hysterical Vietnamese civilians and officials were crowding a ladder to the top of the U.S. Embassy, pleading for a seat on the last American helicopter out. The day that crowds of Vietnamese swarmed the embassy gate, crying for escape or protection, as North Vietnamese tanks approached. The day that uncounted thousands turned into freedom-seeking boat people.
Yes, yes, that terrible shame of a war-mongering imperialist power forced to retreat by dirty hippies, commie reporters and spitting college girls. That noble freedom that was advanced by the propping up of one corrupt puppet government after another, a war launched by lies, broadened by lies, prosecuted with lies.
We abandoned millions of people to be stripped of their freedoms, imprisoned for their beliefs or slaughtered by a monstrous, tyrannical regime. It was one of the most shameful days in American history. It was our own day of infamy.
Blame public opinion for bringing shame on ourselves. Public opinion demanded a Congress that simply decided to choke the life out of the South Vietnamese. Yes, the Iraq war is beginning to look a whole lot like the Vietnam War.
Wingers have strange ideas about what constitutes shame. Lying about the nature of our imperialism isn’t shameful. Slaughtering untold thousands of innocent people isn’t a shame:
This is not to minimize the sacrifice of those who have fought or died in Iraq, but in World War II, almost 300,000 American military personnel died in combat, as compared to nearly 3,000 in the Iraq war. (More than 47,000 died in Vietnam and nearly 34,000 in the Korean War.) Civilian deaths in World War II amounted to at least 38 million, compared with the 30,000 to 60,000 by UN and other reliable estimates in Iraq. (The recent, ridiculous 600,000 estimate by researchers from John Hopkins is not included among the reliable.)
[note: experts beg to differ with this moron on the question of “reliable”]
This is not to diminish the importance of any life; its value is not set by the number of people who die with you.
But it is to make the point that the cost of defending the freedom of millions in the Middle East has been somewhat less than Pelosi and crew would have it.
Turning young men and women into corpses or broken and battered survivors isn’t a shame. Turning some of them into monsters isn’t a shame, or unleashing those who already showed signs of being monsters. Nope, the shame is “losing” or “retreating”, no matter how hopeless the cause, no matter how much more meat will be fed into a grinder that shouldn’t have been activated in the first place. The shame is in failing to escalate into full-out genocide if that is what is necessary to accomplish “winning” and “freedom” … after all, it worked in the American West, didn’t it? Manifest Destiny marches on, after all, and we exceptional Americans have no choice to wade into our designated enemies (and any innocents in the way) like Gabriel swinging his bloody angel’s sword. Carnage is God’s work, and we’ll be damned (literally) if human decency or the basic good sense to see it’s hopeless will allow us to be stayed from our righteous course.
The right has bled this country dry for decades with this myth, this myth of “winning” bloody occupations. People of principle and decency failed to make the case against this behavior after the pile of war crimes that was the Vietnam “conflict”, and they’ve failed so far leading into this debacle. J. S. Paine makes the point that it’s past time to make the case THIS time, so that in another generation we’re not being bullied into another war with tales of how terrible Cindy Sheehan and Nancy Pelosi were when we “lost” an Iraqi war that was actually lost at the very moment Bush started it:
Indeed, where is the root blowing charge we need to place at the stump of each one of these brutal gun play interventions? We need right here and now to stop the insanity from happening again. But we haven’t even begun to set the charges — in fact I suspect most of us dare not set any charges — because, as Max writes, “Criticism of imperialism can still be painted as ‘anti-American.'” He’s dead right. He continues, “The only safe way to do it [i.e. attack the American empire project] is as a conservative or libertarian.”
But doesn’t the horrendous debacle that the Iraq escapade has become give us progs the means to beat the empire’s battle apes senseless in the public square, right now, even as they still grapple like ruthless futile imbeciles with their sand hydra? To free ourselves and our future from these horrors repeating twice every generation, we must wave the bloody shirt of this present monstrous carnage like raft-bound castaways trying to flag down a passing ship.
Flashback to the low 70’s: the “anti-imperialists” lost the Nambo post-mortem, didn’t they? The GI’s were near rebellion in 1970, but by 1980, these same vets had joined the white-trash roar for Reagan. The Nixon white house did it up brown. Man, were they good, what with the brilliant MIA cult, and the fabricated Jane College anti-vet spitskrieg. In spite of Dick’s personal and temporary disgrace and fall, his pattern of goverence and his notion of national entitlement passed through the gauntlet without a scratch.
As Hunter T wrote in ’72, “we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen, with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” Yes, this rabid vicious national moment was “lived with” and we were lullabyed to sleep each night with hands still soaked in foreign blood.
The FIRST step toward making amends for this crime, for Vietnam, for so many other imperial invasions and expansions and assasinations and coups, is to finally build the case for us to become a civilized, compassionate people who can finally say “enough”. Enough to the shame brought upon us by the Charles Grainers and Lt. Calley’s and Henry Kissingers and George Bushes and Lyndon Johnsons and Richard Nixons and Dick Cheneys. Perhaps we can start to undo the shame brought upon us by the shallowness with which far too many of us fall for the lies of murderers, eager to bask in the warm glow of their glory, washed in the blood they spill in waves.
The shame was in starting this damnable war, a shame that can only be redeemed by a heart-felt promise that we will never do it again.