Page 3 of 3 COMMENTARY Iraq: Yes,
Rambo, you get to win this time By Julian Delasantellis
memory
hole. Now, all that was needed was to prove the
point with actual events, not pulp movies, books
and character assassination.
Along came
Iraq. Iraq is the New War made flesh.
If
Iraq could be won by suppressing the factors that allegedly
caused Vietnam to be lost,
namely home-front perfidy, a final, virtually
ex cathedra affirmation of the truth of
Vietnam revisionism could forever enter the
history books.
Until very recently, many
commentators have noted how uncritically the US
news media accepted the Bush administration's
prewar prevarications, and then the ongoing
optimistic assessments regarding the Iraq war.
This is in marked contrast to the early days of
Vietnam, where in-country journalists such as Neal
Sheehan and the late David Halberstam produced and
had published realistic depictions of the wildly
mendacious and ineffective prosecution of the war
that ultimately caused it to be lost. Even in the
early 1960s, their realistic portrayals starkly
contrasted with the sunny optimism of officials in
Washington and Saigon.
This dearth of
contemporary journalistic honesty and courage
should not be surprising, since the reporting of
the US media in Vietnam is a major sore point for
Vietnam revisionists. Supposedly, by doing their
job and telling the truth about the war, the US
media weakened public support for the war, once
again, allegedly causing the US to lose a war on
the home front that it had been winning on the
battlefield.
Whatever the truth of this
allegation, as the Iraq war developed and was
initiated, the media by and large accepted Bush's
rationales and early assessments of the war and
subsequent insurgency. With the surge in
patriotism that followed September 11 implicitly
leading to a newly reaffirmed and intensified
national acceptance of Vietnam revisionism, the
media were determined that, whatever it took, they
were not going to get pinned with blame for losing
another US war.
The ratings success of Fox
News, shearing viewers away from more "mainstream"
CNN, and the fact that the media concentration of
the 1990s had led to a situation where the vast
majority of the news and information Americans
were receiving was coming from five conglomerates,
all led by Republicans, also supported this
phenomenon.
Frank Rich of the New York
Times has noted how many journalists now look on
their conduct during a March 3, 2003, prewar Bush
press conference with shame, when they
uncritically accepted all of his now-discredited
reasons for going to war.
Today, with US
casualty levels higher than they have ever been in
the four years of war, and with all the
ever-changing Karl Rove-generated and
focus-group-tested rationalizations to justify the
war (weapons of mass destruction, September 11,
"we'll stand down when they stand up", fighting
al-Qaeda, "they hate us for our freedom",
spreading democracy in the Muslim world, "they'll
follow us home") now discredited, the war still
enjoys enough support to thwart all legislative
efforts to bring it to a quick conclusion. This is
because, although veterans groups such as the
American Legion and the Swift Boaters may have
accepted Vietnam revisionism explicitly, most of
the rest of the society has also accepted it
implicitly.
Up until recently, there were
few more profitable businesses to be engaged in in
the US than producing those once-ubiquitous
"support the troops" magnetic ribbons that so many
US vehicles displayed, their very existence saying
that the people were going to "support the troops"
in this war, because they didn't in the last.
On the few occasions when right-wing radio
talk shows stop baying for the blood of Mexican
immigrants and talk about the war, the discussion
inevitably fades away from today's actual war to
the theme that opposition to the war is leading to
a situation "just like Vietnam". This is even
though no effective peace movement has ever really
developed for this war; most of it disappeared
when an exhausted and dispirited Cindy Sheehan
announced a withdrawal from her anti-war
activities last week.
As in Forest
Gump, the image of the 1960s anti-war
protester, a personage now credited with stopping
a war that the country really wanted to fight, has
been so soiled by Vietnam revisionism that
mainstream Americans want nothing to do with their
modern equivalents. Many anti-war legislators are
hesitant publicly to oppose the war too
vigorously; they fear that, once again, the public
will rise up and punish them in the future for
advocating what polling says the public wants now
- an expedited withdrawal from Iraq. War
supporters say that if you "support the troops"
you must support the war in which they fight. As
of yet, the war's opponents have not been able to
produce a coherent counter-argument to this
simple-minded but now daily greater tautological
exsanguination.
In John Le Carre's 1980
novel Smiley's People, retired British
spymaster George Smiley realizes he might soon
have one last chance to go up against the nemesis
of both his professional and personal life, KGB
spymaster Karla. "He had been given, in late age,
a chance to return to the rained-out contests of
his life and play them all ... no peace, no
tainted witness to his actions should disturb his
lonely quest."
This is the real quest for
which today the United States battles in
Mesopotamia. For the veterans of Vietnam, a
decisive victory in Iraq would allow them somehow
to validate the mindless pain and carnage of
Vietnam - we should have won, this proves we could
have, too. For the country as a whole, Iraq is a
chance to return to the better US of the past,
before Watergate, and Monicagate and all the
social pathologies (drugs, divorce, sexual
licentiousness, lack of proper respect for
authority, etc) that conservative commentators
such as Robert Bork, William Bennett and David
Horowitz claim infected US society as a result of
the counterculture that grew out of the anti-war
movement of the 1960s.
Where does that
leave today's troops, the actual object of the
"support the troops" mandate? They have now been
forced into the role of reluctant schoolchildren
forced on to the football team by the
never-forgotten failure of their father on that
very same pitch many years ago.
What
greater way is there to show disrespect to the
troops than to deny who they actually are?
In 1944, Pertinax ( a nom de plume
for French journalist Andre Geraud) published
the book The Gravediggers of France,
accusing his nation's pre-World War II political
and military leadership of the disastrous
incompetence and mismanagement that led to
France's quick defeat by the Germans in 1940.
Today, the spinners of the lie that is Vietnam
revisionism are the Gravediggers of America. Into
the massive sepulchre they have dug is now
entombed America's honesty, security, foreign
reputation and immediate future.
Along
with 3,500 young American lives, and a countless
number of similarly placed Iraqis.
Note 1. With apologies to
Dave Barry, I am not making this up; you can hear
O'Shea make this dolorous announcement on the
RealVideo clip of the rally, at minute 49,
retrievable with a search for "Rolling Thunder" on
the C-SPAN website.
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant,
private investor and an educator in international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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