Seymour Hersh’s latest report in the New Yorker is profoundly depressing in any number of ways. Here’s one big way: each point Hersh makes brings the parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq debacles into clearer focus.
Sure, there are differences: There’s no draft today. (If there were, it’s hard to imagine the war ever being launched.) And there’s no mass protest movement with the same scale or social impact as the ’60s antiwar movement. (Not yet, at any rate.) Instead of a backdrop of Cold War thermonuclear horror, we’ve got a backdrop of post-9/11 terror nightmares.
But then there are so many similarities.
Let’s see: you’ve got the war that drags on for years without any indication of a clear strategy for winning or any clue as to who it is we’re really fighting or why they’re fighting.
You’ve got the hastily hatched plan to hand the war over to the locals and replace American boots on the ground with American bombs from the air.
You’ve got the score-settling civil war waiting to happen the moment the U.S. leaves.
You’ve got the policymakers attempting to scare the public with domino-theory-style scenarios of global disaster should the U.S. “mission” end in anything but victory — yet no one has offered a credible picture of that victory or a map toward it.
You’ve got the critics in Congress beginning to speak up and say the things that the dissenters in the military have been muzzled from saying.
You’ve got the corrupt president isolated, in denial, unwilling to face the reality of error and disaster, venturing forth only among supportive crowds and listening only to the murmurings of yes-men. (Bush’s millenarian religious belief is, however, unique to his disaster scenario, and unlike either of his Vietnam-era predecessors in disgrace, Johnson and Nixon.)
You’ve even got the beginning of covert operations in neighboring countries: If we could only block those foreign supply routes through Cambodia Syria, then victory would be ours!
Coming of political age as I did in the mid-’70s, my sense of the U.S.’s role in the world has always been shaped by the ghosts of Vietnam. Whatever mistakes we would make in the future, I thought as a teenager, we won’t ever make those ones again. I was naive; I didn’t reckon with the power of revisionist thinking and delusional leadership.
The invasion of Iraq, after all, was planned and managed by men who still think that the only U.S. mistake in Vietnam was not “staying the course.” They are still cherrypicking the intelligence today, just as they did in the selling of the war three years (three years!) ago. The only question now — as we leave the Iraqis to their fate and (under Bush or some clearer-eyed successor) return to the real war with al-Qaeda –is, how long will the madness continue, how many Iraqis and Americans will die, and how bad will the damage to the U.S. military be?
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