by William Greider, The Nation
| It's all about Vietnam, doncha know. |
The presidential pageant has now risen full in the sky and is blocking out the sun.
| He's gonna expound on the glory of Democracy in Action? |
Until November, we dwell in a weird half-light, stumbling into spooky shadows but shielded from the harsh glare of the nation's actual circumstances.
| Oh. Sorry. Guess he's not. He's gonna whine... |
Down is up, fiction is truth, momentous realities are made to disappear from the public mind. The 2004 spectacle is not the first to mislead grossly and exploit emotional weaknesses in the national character. But this time the consequences will be especially grim.
| Translation: the Left is losing again, and knows it. |
| It's doubtful it's going to be close enough to try to steal this time... |
The United States is "losing" in Iraq, literally losing territory and population to the other side.
| Except that we aren't, but don't let that stop you. This is the Left's meme-of-the-week. |
Careful readers of the leading newspapers may know this, but I doubt most voters do. How could they, given the martial self-congratulations of the President and relative restraint from his opponent?
| Yeah, $60 million in spending by the Democrat 527's and no one accepts the "real story" in Iraq. Go figure. |
| It's prob'ly because Bush doesn't wear a tin hat. The Nation expects Bush to appear on a reviewing stand out in front of the White House any time now, wearing a polished tin hat and a gaudy uniform, to review the Old Guard as they go goose-stepping by — kinda like the footage Fox runs every time they talk about North Korea. For some reason, The Nation seldom mentions North Korea. I dunno why... |
High-handed minded pundits tell us not to dwell on the long-ago past. But the cruel irony of 2004 is that Vietnam is the story.
| It is at The Nation. To the rest of us, the story alternates between 9-11 and Britney's breasts... |
The arrogance and deceit--the utter waste of human life, ours and theirs--play before us once again. A frank discussion will have to wait until after the election.
That sentence makes no sense. "The arrogance and deceit" — referring to Bush? A minor leaguer next to Kofi, Sammy, Bashir in Sudan, the Ayatollahs in Iran, the princes and holy men in Riyadh. Oh, he's mean enough and tough enough to handle the likes of Qazi and Fazl and Sami and Yasser and probably Bashir in Syria, but it takes a team effort to deal with the terror drivers. The "frank discussion" is going on even as we speak blog, in places like this. The Nation and William Greider just isn't paying attention. The Bush team can't engage in "frank discussion" like we do here for fear of giving away their intentions to the heavy hitter terrs. |
| Yep, all Vietnam, all the time. It's the last time the Left thought critically about a war. |
Several Sundays ago, an ominous article appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times: "One by One, Iraqi Cities Become No-Go Zones." Falluja, Samarra, Ramadi, Karbala, the Sadr City slums of Baghdad--these and other population centers are now controlled by various insurgencies and essentially ceded by US forces.
| Some sections are tough for us right now. The enemy does get a vote. But 85 to 90% of the country is at relative peace, and that's pretty good. |
| In 11 of Iraq's 18 provinces there are virtually no U.S. casualties. If it wasn't so blasted complicated in HTML, I'd put up a map with colored dots showing the locations of attacks and the number of casualties. Further, the vast majority of casualties are from skunk attacks — roadside bombs, rockets, mortars, and car bombs. We lose very few guys in whites-of-their-eyes shootouts. But like I say, William Greider isn't paying attention. So why should we listen to his opinion? |
This situation would make a joke of the national elections planned for January.
| All it really means is that the dummies end up without a vote. |
| I've always had difficulty with the idea that people who don't believe in democracy, who regard it as a Jewish plot, should be allowed to vote. |
Yet, if US troops try to recapture the lost cities, the bombing and urban fighting would produce massive killing and destruction, further poisoning politics for the US occupation and its puppet government in Saigon--sorry, Baghdad.
| He hasn't been paying attention to how we fight, since that would conflict with his world view. |
| Like I say, he hasn't been paying attention at all... |
Three days later, the story hit page one when anonymous Pentagon officials confirmed the reality. Not to worry, they said: The United States is training and expanding the infant Iraqi army so it can do the fighting for us. That's the ticket--Vietnamization. I remember how well General Westmoreland articulated the strategy back in the 1960s, when war's progress was measured by official "body counts" and reports on "new" fighting forces on the way.
| Vietnamizing that war might have worked if the Democrats hadn't cut off the funding. And it was Abrams that made the strategy go. |
But this time Washington decided the United States couldn't wait for "Iraqization," a strategy that might sound limp-wristed to American voters. The US bombing and assaults quickly resumed.
| Oh, so we can go to these places after all? |
The Bush White House is thus picking targets and second-guessing field commanders, just as Lyndon Johnson did forty years ago in Indochina.
| Not according to what I've heard. The suits are involved, of course, because the military operation that kicked Sammy out is over and done with, mission accomplished. Iraq is now "sovreign," and we have to accomodate the pick-up team running the country. If we were imperialist hegemons, we'd just level the places that give us trouble, sow the ground with salt and call it peace — that's what I'd have done before handing over power. But I'm not in charge and neither, thankfully, is William Greider. |
Bush is haunted by the mordant remark a US combat officer once made in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
| Bush is a lot more haunted by the image of planes crashing into New York and the Pentagon, another time when William Greider wasn't paying much attention... |
Meanwhile, Bush's war is destroying the US Army, just as LBJ's war did. After Vietnam, military leaders and Richard Nixon wisely abolished the draft and opted for an all-volunteer force. When this war ends, the volunteer army will be in ruins and a limited draft lottery may be required to fill out the ranks.
| Which is why both the Army and the National Guard recruiting quotas are being met. |
| The professional Army (and Marines and Air Force and Navy) form an unstoppable military machine. At this point in history (and everything eventually changes) there's not an army in the world that can stand up to them. Because they're a professional force, they're not as large as the cannon fodder draftee armies of the past. The support functions and some of the maneuver functions, are filled by reserves and National Guard. They're the ones taking the brunt of it right now, while the maneuver divisions refresh and refit. |
After Iraq, men and women will get out of uniform in large numbers, especially as they grasp the futility of their sacrifices. Yet Bush's on-the-cheap warmaking against a weak opponent demonstrates that a larger force structure is needed to sustain his policy of pre-emptive war.
| Nothing of the sort is demonstrated. |
Kerry says he wants 40,000 more troops, just in case. Old generals doubt Congress would pay for it, given the deficits.
| And Kerry wouldn't have those 40K do anything useful anyways. |
Iraq is Vietnam standing in the mirror. John Kerry, if he had it in him, could lead a national teach-in--re-educate those who have forgotten or prettified their memories but especially inform younger voters who weren't around for the national shame a generation ago. Kerry could describe in plain English what's unfolding now in Iraq and what must be done to find a way out with honor. In other words, be a truth-teller while holding Bush accountable.
| Kerry hasn't yet said anything in plain English, but I suppose it could happen. |
Kerry won't go there, probably couldn't without enduring still greater anger. His war-hero campaign biography inadvertently engendered truthful slanderous attacks and still-smoldering resentments.
| Yeah, wonder why all those vets still hate his guts? |
| If he hadn't done what he did when he came back, maybe people would have bought what he said he did while he was there. |
Kerry, like other establishment Dems, originally calculated that the party should be as pro-war as Bush, thus freeing him to run on other issues. That gross miscalculation leaves him proffering a lame "solution"--persuading France, Germany and others to send their troops into this quagmire. Not bloody likely, as the Brits say.
Bush can't go near the truth for obvious reasons.
If elected, he faces only bad choices--bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq, as Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, or bug out under the cover of artful lies. The one thing Bush's famous "resolve" cannot achieve is success at war. Never mind, he aims to win the election instead.
| Afghanistan is won. Iraq, with all the problems, is much closer to won than lost. |
So this presidential contest resembles a grotesque, media-focused war in which two sides skirmish for the attention of ill-informed voters.
| They're "ill-informed" because they don't agree with dickless here. |
Bush won big back when he got Iraq off the front pages and evening news with his phony hand-off of sovereignty and his chest-thumping convention. But then his opponents--the hostile insurgents in Iraq--struck back brilliantly like all the dead Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive and managed to put the war story back in the lead on the news (might we expect from them an "October surprise" of deadlier proportions?).
| Sure, if they have a death wish. |
| I'm sure there will be an "October surprise," actually a string of them. I think Kerry's going to bring out the big bucket of slime they've kept in reserve all this time — I have no idea what it is, and I'm hoping Rathergate was it. I think the terrs in Iraq are going to burn a lot of hard boyz to enhance the odor of quagmire that people like William Greider are so eager to sniff — MoveOn.org's using the word itself in its latest commercial. I think the Swifties might have their own October Surprise lined up for Kerry, and probably Bush has something planned. So it should make for an eventful month. |
In this fight, Kerry is like a bystander who might benefit from bad news but can't wish for it. Most combat correspondents, with brave exceptions, hesitate to step back from daily facts and tell the larger truth. Maybe they are afraid to sound partial.
| Hasn't stopped Dan Rather. |
The timing of events in Iraq does not fit propitiously with the election calendar. A majority has already concluded that it was a mistake to fight this war, but public credulity is not yet destroyed. A majority still wants to believe the strategy may yet succeed, that Iraq won't become another dark stain in our history books. During Vietnam, the process of giving up on such wishful thinking took many years. The breaking point came in 1968, when a majority turned against the war. LBJ withdrew from running for re-election. Nixon won that year with his "secret plan" to win the peace. The war continued for another five years. US casualties doubled. This time, public opinion has moved much faster against the war, but perhaps not fast enough. People naturally are reluctant to conclude that their country did the wrong thing, that young people died for a pointless cause.
| Since we didn't, and they didn't, it will certainly be a long time. |
If the war story does stay hot and high on front pages, a collapse of faith might occur in time for this election, but more likely it will come later. Nixon won a landslide re-election in 1972 with his election-eve announcement that peace was at hand, the troops were coming home. In the hands of skilled manipulators, horrendous defeat can be turned into honorable victory. Temporarily at least. When the enemy eventually triumphed in Indochina, Nixon was already gone, driven out for other crimes.
| Democrats never paid for theirs. |
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