Mother Jones: "Is Iraq Vietnam on Crack Cocaine?"

[Inland]

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/08/vietnam_and_iraq.html

On the April day in 2003 when American troops first entered Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young suggested that Operation Iraqi Freedom was "Vietnam on crack cocaine." She wrote presciently at the time:


"In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."

That language -- and the Vietnam template that goes with it -- has never left us. Only this week Republican Senator and presidential hopeful Chuck Hagel, who served in Vietnam, publicly attacked the administration's Iraq policy for "destabilizing" the Middle East and suggested that the President's constant "stay-the-course" refrain was "not a policy." He added, "We are locked into a bogged-down problem not... dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

snip

In his stay-the-course VFW speech, you could feel that the President now found himself in a new and confusing situation. Step by step, he's slowly been backing up. This time -- contradicting the anti-Vietnam, no-attention-to-casualties playbook he has long been working off -- he specifically spoke the numbers of dead American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, something of a first for him. Though he never mentioned Cindy Sheehan's name, he might as well have. Its absence acted like a presence, all but ringing from the speech. Read it yourself and you can sense the degree to which he is now uncharacteristically on the defensive. Even to friendly crowds, he finds himself answering questions that, not so long ago, never would have come up. Wherever he is, he is now essentially responding to what is, in effect, an ongoing news conference with the nation in which challenging questions never stop being tossed his way.

snip

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Mother Jones, was uncovering before it was cool, we could use her now!

Iraq,is just Trickie dicks boys doing what they do best, fucking the world up in the name of Democracy.

[rodeodance]

2. "Its absence acted like a presence," yes, it was sooo obvious

[newswolf56]

3. Sorry, but as long as the Left remains stuck on the Vietnam...

analogy, it will never develop an adequate analysis of what is happening today. Vietnam was ultimately an expression of capitalism's bottomless terror of Communism: the Vietnamese were no threat to America or Americans until we invaded their country. From the Middle East we have a very real threat -- witness not only 9/11 but the (Iraqi organized) attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 -- a threat that has been manipulated by the most malevolently devious administration in U.S. history to further the oligarchy's post-Soviet, post-New Deal agenda of concentrating wealth and dis-empowering the working class everywhere on the planet.

In Vietnam we faced NO threat (other than -- say again -- the one we manufactured by our own presence). In the present situation we face TWO threats: (1)-the external threat of Jihadist terrorism (a threat that dates from the very birth of Islam and is 1,376 years old); and (2)-the internal threat of the global oligarchy as it seeks to reduce all working people to chattel. The reality of (1) is proven unequivocally by history, modern and otherwise. In the context of (2), note how the oligarchy has already manipulated the Jihadist threat into a rationale for effectively suspending constitutional rights: this clears the way for the violent suppression of the labor and economic protest that is sure to characterize the future, as the oligarchy continues its methodical dis-empowerment of workers and concentration of wealth -- for example as in skyrocketing fuel prices and outsourcing. As the consequences of this huge take-back become ever more ruinous, the oligarchy (in the person of the Bush Administration) will undoubtedly find further rationale to impose additional restriction, leading eventually to unabashed tyranny.

Indeed in this context the Vietnam analogy actually serves the oligarchy because it blinds the rest of us to what is really happening.

Unfortunately, the American Left savagely purged all its intellectuals during the New Left-Old Left schism of the '60s, so the likelihood today's Left will develop the requisite analysis is probably nonexistent outside of DU: the only website in the nation where these issues are being properly discussed.

[Inland]

4. The vietnam analogy is that of a bad war, not why it is bad

The premise is, first, a war that isn't going well or was purposeless from the beginning, and then the statements as to why the mere going badly or lack of purpose is insufficient reason to stop.

I note your arguments about oil and real threats that we miss while in Iraq, but I don't think that changes the essential analogy.

I think Chekov said something to the effect that all happy families are alike but all unhappy families are unhappy in a unique way. I think that's true for wars; Iraq is a unique fuckup. But the extrication process seems familiar enough.