Page 1 of
3 COMMENTARY Iraq: Yes,
Rambo, you get to win this time By Julian Delasantellis
If there's one
group that knew a thing or two about the
acquisition and maintenance of political power, it
would have been Ingsoc, the dictatorial power
elite (its name a bastardization of "English
socialism") from George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four. "Who controls the past," Ingsoc
told its cadres, "controls the future: who
controls the present, controls the past."
What this meant was that, if you had a
governing elite or ideology
that
felt it lacked the requisite historical legitimacy
to rule, all you had to do was go back and change
the historical record to one that better suited
the elite's current needs.
In Nineteen
Eighty-Four, this mission was tasked to the
feared "Ministry of Truth", where party
functionaries, among them the story's protagonist,
Winston Smith, searched historical records - in
Smith's case, through old copies of The Times of
London - to excise historical events or personages
that had fallen out of favor with the party. This
now inopportune "incorrect" history would then be
sent down the "memory hole"; party "newspeak" for
the incinerator.
Surely, in an advanced
democracy such as the United States, with its
vibrant free press and bewilderingly myriad
sources of information, the past is never updated
to serve the present; there are no "memory holes".
If that were true, the US would not be
allowing itself to be bled white in Iraq, and
barely even knowing why.
Like most US
holidays, Memorial Day, celebrated this year on
May 28, long ago lost most aspects of
commemoration and veneration that the name
implies; for most Americans, it is "celebrated" as
a three-day weekend devoted to cookouts, picnics
and getting a good deal at the summer outdoor
furniture sales.
One group that, in its
own unique way, has tried to keep something of the
spirit of the holiday alive is called Rolling
Thunder. Every Memorial Day weekend since 1987,
its members have rallied on the Washington Mall,
with many of the burly, black-leather-clad
attendees riding to the event on their US-built
motorcycles, thus producing the sound of "rolling
thunder". ("Rolling Thunder" was also the
operational name for the bombing campaign the US
Air Force and US Navy conducted against North
Vietnam from 1965-68.) The event is carried on the
C-SPAN cable public-affairs network, where I have
watched it for many years.
The original,
and still central, rationale for Rolling Thunder
is to keep the POW/MIA (prisoner of war/missing in
action) issue existent in the public
consciousness. Most Americans think this issue
primarily relates to US troops who never came home
from the Vietnam War, but Rolling Thunder does not
limit itself to that era; it is searching for live
POWs from all of America's 20th-century wars still
allegedly being held by their captors.
One
speaker at the recent rally, Lynn O'Shea, a
spokesperson for the National League of Families,
sadly announced that the league was now suspending
its search for any possible live US POW/MIAs from
World War I, [1] presumably being held until
recently by those eternally nefarious
troublemaking Hohenzollerns.
But with time
causing the Vietnam POW/MIA issue to fade from
public awareness, in recent years, many of the
speakers at Rolling Thunder have been using their
microphone time to express another consuming
passion, how infuriated they still are, more than
a third of a century since the war ended, at the
anti-war protesters of the Vietnam War era.
In previous years, it was always a crowd
pleaser when Rolling Thunder speakers took the
opportunity to make pointed, non-publishable
comment on what they considered to be the sorry
state of cleanliness of Vietnam-era anti-war
activist Jane Fonda's genitals.
It is only
in this context that the following comments by
John Sommers, the executive director of the
Washington, DC, office of the American Legion, the
veterans' service and advocacy organization,
become understandable.
We also just completed a successful
mission, the American Legion and Rolling Thunder
working hard together along with other
organizations, to get a [Iraq] war funding
supplemental appropriations bill passed without
any guidelines or deadlines on bringing home the
troops.
Sommers feels proud that his
organization's lobbying helped defeat the recent
congressional efforts to wind down the Iraq war.
This might seem a surprising position for a
veterans-advocacy organization, since it means
that a lot more current US military personnel will
get killed in Iraq before they ever get a chance
to be civilian veterans; thousands of others will
live out their lives as veterans with prosthetic
limbs or in wheelchairs. It certainly is not a
position shared by many of today's troops
themselves; these days they regularly seek out
media outlets to express how pointless they now
see their current sacrifices in Iraq.
Apparently, for the veterans' advocates
lobbying for the perpetuation of the war, and
perhaps for much of the United States as a whole,
the war has taken on a meaning and significance
way beyond anything that is actually happening on
the carnage-drenched streets of Baghdad or Diyala
province.
For all the talk of the
"controversial" Vietnam War, while it was being
fought, the war was not all that controversial. It
was popular with Americans up to around mid-1967.
After the Tet Offensive in early 1968 it became
wildly unpopular, right up to its conclusion in
1975. After 1968, no US politician of any import
advocated continuation of the war to victory, and
when North Vietnamese tanks rolled unopposed into
Saigon in April 1975, most Americans felt relief
that they were finally done with the place.
But as the United States feathered its
hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to
the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and
metastasized in the national consciousness. The US
lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was
unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam
War had to be disposed of down the memory hole.
On May 28, 1984, at the Arlington National
Cemetery in Virginia, president Ronald Reagan
said, "Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought
for freedom, a truly noble cause ... This battle
was lost not by those brave American and South
Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by
political misjudgments and strategic failure at
the highest levels of government."
Since
the nation no longer actually had to fight the
Vietnam War, the United States was discovering
that it now actually liked the
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
