I was reading Martin Luther King’s speech about Viet Nam on, of all places, Juan Cole’s blog. Juan Cole is a Middle East Scholar whose commentary is almost too informed to follow, but so far, the only source I’ve found that seems to understand what’s at stake there. He was applying King’s comments on the Viet Nam war to our current situation in Iraq. It was sad to read what he had to say for a lot of reasons. King really was a great man. His comments were made with respect to everone involved. He wasn’t just thinking about our soldiers or our plight, he was thinking about the Vietnamese people. It was sad because we don’t have someone talking like that right now. It was sad that he was killed. But that’s not what was saddest to me.
Yesterday, when Al Gore said that both the Viet Nam War and our War with Iraq were started based on false information, I wish he’d said more. In neither case was the false information just a mistake. In neither case was the false information even the reason we went to war. We went to war because someone thought it was a good idea to go to war, and jury-rigged the information to fit in order to allow going around American constraints on starting war on our own. They were both trumped up wars, sold to the American people with outright lies – not just false information. It was falsified information.
The thing that made me saddest was that King was talking about how we should handle dealing with a war we started that should not have occurred. And here we are 40 years later talking about how to deal with a war we started that should not have occurred. It didn’t even have anything to do with the falsified information, it had to do with the crackpot idea a bunch of neoconservatives had that toppling Saddam Hussein would do something to solve the problems of the Middle East.
Now they’re thinking about Iran, and our doing the exact same thing. As much as I’d love to see Bush et al slammed because of their corruption and their disregard for our Constitution, I would more like to see them called to task for lying to start this war. We did it again, with people howling about another Viet Nam the whole way. As Americans, there’s a lesson we haven’t yet learned. There may be a war in the Middle East in the future that ought to be fought, but this wasn’t it – by a long shot. There may be some correct thing we should do about the September 11th, 2001 attack, but this wasn’t it – by a long shot.
But we still did it again. We found another reason to start an ill-conceived war. That’s the part that really matters. We are the world’s pugilists. That’s what’s sad…
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.