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 Editorials | Opinions | February 2007 
Another Looking-Glass War
 Sam Osborne - PVNN
For those that would rather revise than learn from history, it is apparently never too early to set about its rewriting. Right-wing hawks are already explaining away the error of making war in Iraq as was done with the one in Vietnam. Their revised version of the Iraqi quagmire shifts responsibility away from George W. Bush and his Republican enablers and onto those that understand the folly of it all. How so?
These right-wing ideologues are determined practitioners of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda technique of telling a lie over and over until it becomes an unchallenged version of history. Their portrayal of the Vietnam War as a cut-and-run disgrace is a good example. The revisionist’s telling and retelling starts with dissembling the reason for our entry in and withdrawal from Vietnam, and begs the question as to the lesson to be learned.
The confabulators insist that our exit from the Vietnam War was an avoidable defeat that damaged our nation’s vital interests. They blame the loss on those that saw the war from its start to have been an unnecessary, life wasting, resource squandering, and reputation damaging blunder made worse by continued bullheadedness. Perchance it sounds familiar?
Though reason would suggest that victory or defeat in any war should be measured in terms of why it is waged, those that have revised the history of the Vietnam War avoid mentioning its purpose. Our entry into Vietnam was supposed to block the advance of communism as foretold by the Domino Theory. What’s the latest explanation for why we launched a war on Iraq?
The Domino Theory , that led us into Vietnam, contended that if a former Southeast Asian imperial possession were to become communist there would be a step-by-step advance of this doctrine across the South Pacific right to the shores of God only knew where. So when the French had their disaster at Dien Bien Phu and pulled out of South Vietnam we went in to stop the dominoes from falling.
In portraying defeat as being at the heart of the Vietnam debacle, revisionists disregard the real and historic fact that we left and the dominoes never fell, an indication that we need not have gone into Vietnam in the first place. Thus, the mistake was not in getting out, but in ever getting in. Might we now be staying in Iraq to avoid getting out?
Just recently President Bush made a diplomatic invasion into South East Asia and says that while he and the First Lady were on a sightseeing ride through Hanoi, “Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam.”
Even more amazing is that on this same historic visit to Vietnam Bush made the following now-versus-then observation, “the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately and it is hard work in Iraq.”
Hum, if “they” includes him and us, what should be made of someone’s willingness to launching a preemptive war that is taking longer and proving harder to stop than to start? And what might the lesson of history be if Bush were to end the war in Iraq the way Nixon did in Vietnam, by just declaring victory and bring our brave troops home?
Maybe we should ask Little Alice of Wonderland; in historic reflection these two mistaken conflicts might be seen as Looking-glass Wars. Of course the president is already getting advice from the Mad Hatter, when he is not down in Texas hunting his friends.
So riddle us this Mad Hatter, if the dominoes that did not fall in Southeast Asia were to likewise not fall in the Middle East, will you and history’s revisionist make any noise about it? |
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