My last post and the song put me in mind of the Viet Nam War, and the Protest Movement it spawned. The history of that country was a confusing montage of occupations after World War II, which ended with the North and South divided and at war. Over the post-war years, the U.S. gradually slid into the war until 1964 [1]:
The massive escalation of the war from 1964 to 1968 was justified on the basis of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident on August 2-4, 1964, in which the Johnson Administration claimed that U.S. ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. The accuracy of that claim is still hotly debated.
On the basis of the alleged attack the U.S. Senate approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964, giving broad support to President Johnson to escalate U.S. involvement "as the President shall determine" without actually declaring war.
Sound familiar? a trumped up excuse to fight a war the President wanted to fight.
The futile War in Viet Nam went on for eleven years. Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers died, along with one and a half million Vietnamese people. For all those years, we were told we couldn’t leave. What would happen? We had to "win." Sounding more familiar?
So now, a bunch of people who avoided that war have started another one – trumped up excuses, have to win, opponents of the war aren’t patriots, etc. This last couple of weeks, Bush and friends are into making analogies with Britain’s appeasement of Hitler in the prelude to World War II.
Our Viet Nam debacle is a much better analogy. It’s a lesson our leaders dodged learning – not from conviction. It makes Bush’s statement yesterday to veterans particularly discordant:
Above all, it depends on patriots who are willing to fight for freedom.
Neither Bush, nor Cheney, nor Rumsfeld were patriots … willing to fight.
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