War Stories

One of the interesting revelations from that brief flurry of commentary on the president's attempt to frame an Iraq-Vietnam analogy of his own was that the rightish and leftish segments of the American commentariate have fundamentally differing historical meta-narratives of the Vietnam War and its progression. They agree on names and dates, but little else and they are weighted very differently.

Vietnamese are pissed off at Bush’s Vietnam remarks:

I believe so. At the end of my term as President, my mom passed away after a long battle with cancer. She was single mother of two who lost her husband in the Vietnam War and these life challenges have instilled in me a sense of civic duty to help others.

Kissinger in the position of National Security Adviser—not Secretary of State—negotiated the "peace accord" with North Vietnam:

We might say at this point in time that the military started into the Iraq War hoping to avoid fighting a counterinsurgency war at all. Now that we're well into the fifth year of that war, and even further into the (now-)NATO intervention in Afghanistan, the generals have relearned the lessons of the Vietnam War counterinsurgency.

In 1968 George Romney, Mitt’s father, was a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and discovered very late in the game that supporting the Vietnam War was a loser of an issue so he changed his mind, claiming that he had been “brainwashed” by the military (Gene McCarthy commented that a “light rinse would of sufficed”).

But anti-intellectualism is a familiar ideological tack in the U.S., dating right back to our Puritan beginnings (and becoming even more entrenched after universities proved crucial in organizing opposition to the Vietnam War). Growing accustomed to this new vocabulary, I’d bet that after a while the hapless Post reader no longer finds a speech by major Republican mouthpieces like Limbaugh or O’Reilly quite so alien.

So, I expect more and more rumblings about a draft (perhaps under the rubric of "national service") from the left and right wings of the War Party. It is a slow campaign to soften up public opinion. The downside, as far as the imperialists are concerned, will be that, when the middle class sees its sons and daughters involuntarily hauled off to fight in Africa or Asia, those potential draftees will march in the streets as they did during the Vietnam War. But, by then it may be too late.

The Republicans are quaking in their boots; 2008 looms in their reelection minds. Flash back to 1968, the Vietnam War is raging and students are demonstrating, the Democratic convention implodes, and Richard Nixon rides into the Presidency, promising a “secret plan to end the war.” Democrats went from the New Frontier and the Great Society to losing a critical election.

Considering the implications of what I just stated, I am having serious deja vu with our current situation in Iraq in comparison to Vietnam. I was one of those hippie, ‘flower child’ kids who marched and demonstrated against the Vietnam war. I remember what it was like in the last days of the war that had polarized a nation for a decade, ravaged a country thousands of miles away and left the U.S. in a humiliating, devastating defeat (sound familiar?). Kevin Maloney, a U.S. Marine who arrived in Saigon just months before the final evacuation describes what it was like the last day of the evacuation: