We must learn from History
For those of us who lived through the Vietnam War and were subject to the drivel that dripped from the mouths of our national leaders, we have very little patience for the spin, the lies and the deceit that we are being fed again today. It was hard for us then and hard for us now to see so clearly the march of the inevitable leading to a national nightmare. Much like Cassandra, who bore the curse of being able to see the future but having no one believe her, most of the American people see the continued carnage in Iraq as unstoppable until we leave.
Just after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was rushed through the Congress, only two Senators voted against it: Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. Just after the vote in August of 1964 Morse had this to say:
“But one thing I do know – and that is we’re going to be bogged down in southeast Asia for years to come if we follow this course of action, and we’re going to kill thousands of American boys until finally, let me say, the American people are going to say what the French people finally said – they’ve had enough.”
Listen here:
Prophetic – and for being so courageous, he lost his Senate seat to Bob Packwood in 1968.
William Fulbright, engineered the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through the Senate, only to regret it. Looking back on those frantic days, when the Congress and the American people were bamboozled, and with the focus of the retrospectroscope with the uncovering of the White House tapes that so clearly showed President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, orchestrating, almost minute to minute, the Gulf of Tonkin incident he ruefully looked back:
“The events as they related them of August 4, 1964 were not true. In fact there was no attack at all – so it was they represented to us that we had been attacked which was all a phony and was false and the rationale for the resolution was if we’ll pass this quickly and unanimously, if possible, it will be a warning to the North Vietnamese and they will no longer infiltrate - they’ll quit - it’ll scare ‘em all - we’ll bloody their nose and they’ll stop and I suppose in Texas politics if you do that these people stop. It just didn’t work that way in Vietnam.”
Listen here:
It sounds all so familiar.
I wonder what Mr. McHugh will say years from now. How many more thousands do we need to sacrifice. Blood begets blood. Walter Cronkite puts it something like this: What is our duty to the dead – to sacrifice more in a cause where military victory is not only unattainable but inappropriate? That duty sustains wars, and that investment in blood makes retreat look dishonorable. Continuation is the hardest course to resist.
Particularly for those who view it from the distant perspective of the comfortable seats on Capital Hill; those who have never been to war and who see it from sterile safety of their congressional office cocoons or those who dress up and play soldier to vicariously experience war. In August 2004 and heard Mr. McHugh tell the Central Labor Council how his plane got shot at as they were descending into Baghdad.
I wasn’t impressed.
We must stop now before we have to build yet another black wall on the Washington mall with 57,000 names on it.
To hear more of Walter Cronkite and the beginning of the Vietnam calamity listen here from NPR:
Ted Ford on 29 Mar 2007 at 5:19 pm #
Why do most of us refer to the Iraq occupation as a war? The etymology of the word war derives from middle english. Originally spelled werre it was defined as organized violence between clearly defined groups with stated objectives. The preferred definition of the word war in Merriam-Webster is a state of open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations. Neither of those definitions fit Iraq. Occupation is defined by M-W as the holding and control of an area by foreign military force. The Iraq situation is clearly by reasonable definition an occupation not a war. Even our friends the Saudi Royals referred recently to, “the illegitimate occupation of Iraq.” Wars are patriotic endeavors while occupations aren’t. Its not a war. Its an occupation.
The reality is that the Bush administration has tied us to an occupation that has no chance of a positive outcome. And our congressman goes along apparently defining victory as that halcyon day when the Iraquis set aside centurys of religious difference and agree to turn in their weapons and live peacefully ever after.
End the occupation and do it now.
And one last semantic thought. Damn it. Call it what it was.
It was an escalation not a surge.