It's been a little while since I went off on
a complete rant. Hey, I've been busy.
But how can I ignore this chance? One of my favorite columnists, Jonah Goldberg, recently penned
a Vietnam column for USA Today. The basic gist was pretty simple -- can liberals stop bringing up Vietnam as an analogy to every minor scuffle that breaks out anywhere, anytime? I mean, when my flag football team got into a fight in law school, I'm pretty sure someone there made a Vietnam reference (well, it
was Cambridge).
Goldberg makes a great point at the opening -- to anyone born in 1975 (very close to the year I was born) Vietnam is about as distant as World War II. As a generation, we don't obsess over it, just like we don't obsess over the Civil War (except for geeks like me). Goldberg then observes...
The gravitational pull of Vietnam analogies is so powerful in some quarters that it can bend not only light but logic. At The New York Times, especially, there seems to be a hair trigger for such comparisons. It's as if their computers have macros designed to bypass the laborious and go straight to the lugubrious; so that R.W. "Johnny" Apple & Co. needn't even type words such as "quagmire" or phrases such as "echoes of Vietnam" when deadlines loom.
For example, on Day 24 of the war in Afghanistan, Apple wrote, "Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word 'quagmire' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?" Apple pondered. "Echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable." For some, the echoes stopped suddenly when the Taliban fell a few days later.
...But for many others, the beat goes on. Since the beginning of the second Iraq war, comparisons, insinuations, allusions to Vietnam have been a near-daily occurrence. Literally thousands upon thousands of articles and editorials make the analogy as though it were actually a novel insight. You get the sense that Earth could be invaded by Klingons and some editorialist would hear "echoes of Vietnam" amid their disruptor blasts.
This is a point that
others have made before. Hell, Goldberg even riffs off my Spanish-American War analogy (I don't mind -- in fact, he actually uses it far better than I did).
So what's got me aggravated? Check out
this column from Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher. He takes on Goldberg... and irritates the hell out of me in the process...
Of course, this is all one big “Duh,” the knocking down of the obvious. But this Goldberg variation is necessary. He needs to highlight the no-brainers to avoid the profound ways in which the wars are similar.
Let’s start with: the nation’s leaders lying to the American people to gain our involvement in the two wars. Don't take my word for it. Gallup found this week that half of all Americans now say that President Bush "deliberately misled" them on WMDs. In my Webster's dictionary, the first definition for "lie" is "to deliberately create a false or misleading impression."
Then, how about, watching the war drag on, month after month, with “pacification” said to be right around the corner (two or three times a year). We just came out of such a “turning point,” only to be told by General Richard Myers last week that the insurgency was as strong as ever, followed by a massive upsurge in attacks in the past few days.
Goldberg types told us the war was over two years ago, nearly over a year ago, and going just fine as recently as last week. Baby boomers remember the syndrome well: The Vietnam syndrome.
Yes, we have not yet been in Iraq 10 years. But military officials have said that we probably WILL have to be in Iraq for 10 years.
Then there’s the public disgust with the current war, which you’d never know even existed from Goldberg. Latest Gallup surveys find that 57% of all Americans now say launching this war was “not worth it,” even after the Iraqi elections. This is far ahead of the numbers for Vietnam, even after six years of our deep involvement there.
So maybe Iraq is actually Vietnam on speed, in some respects at least.
There's more, but spending this much space on Vietnam is already violating my personal code regarding that war. Now, Goldberg does a pretty good job defending himself,
here, and
here, and
here, and
here. His
readers even
pitched in. And plenty of others took sides on Mitchell, so he
printed letters from both sides.
Whoop-de-do and all that for the debate. I could care less.
No, this isn't the long-awaited and oft-promised Vietnam Rant. But call it a prelude.
In many ways, I think of Vietnam like I do Al Gore. Or disco. Or my high-school yearbook picture. They're all things that took place in the past, and belong there. I'm tired of discussing them. And I'm really tired of the people who lived through the moments trying to glorify their importance.
Yes, I'm admittedly being too flippant about something as terrible as a war where 58,000 Americans lost their lives. But I'm just matching the efforts of these self-appointed historians who dredge up Vietnam as a reference every time a member of the U.S. military passes gas on foreign soil. There's a difference, by the way -- I don't want to dredge up the painful memories of those who served and lived through the war for political purposes and would prefer to live in the present. Granted, there are those who would like to make sure we never forget the lessons of Vietnam. But I'd submit that it would be pretty hard to forget anything involving Vietnam when the banshees of the left invoke it every time third graders start brawling during recess.
Look, there are lessons that we can learn from Vietnam, but there are lessons we can learn from every war, and the historical myopia of those who constantly harp on moments from the 1960's has little to do with their ability to understand history. Heck, they
do understand history, and that's
why they harp on Vietnam -- as a matter of popular historical belief, it's the only war America ever lost. They'd cite other wars, but no one believes we lost any others (to quote John Winger in
Stripes, "
We've been kickin' ass for 200 years. We're 10 and 1!"). I suppose it's too much to ask them to educate the public about the War of 1812.
Look, Vietnam is used to enforce the same lesson every stinking time. This is the basic ethos of the baby boomer liberal on why Vietnam is historically important: "We lost that war, so how can we even think of fighting another war? War is bad, it's evil, it's terrible. We spent several years in college in the 1960's and realized this . It took many years where we protested instead of taking our final exams, smoked a ton of dope, and had sex with everything that moved, but this comprehensive scientific study proved once and for all that war is bad and should never occur. Ever ever ever. "
I could care less if Mitchell lived through the Vietnam War. So did plenty of other people. Many of them probably disagree with his assessment, but I'm glad he feels he can speak for many of them with confidence.
I don't care.If you want to talk about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any other military engagement, then talk about these engagements and
quit trying to tell me about Vietnam. I'm one of the more educated members of my generation, and probably have a longer attention span than most. And I enjoy military and American history. And re-hashing the social, military and historical conditions related to a war that took place for the most part before my life interests me about as much as watching Richard Gere act, or John Kerry speak. To be honest, those interest me more. Every time a liberal Baby Boomer raises Vietnam, they start resembling Abe Simpson ("I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time").
If we're talking about something that took place in Vietnam, or during the war, then let's talk about it. If we're talking about something else, then stop using the V word.
The Vietnam War ended 30 years ago. The debate about it will never end. But anyone using it as an analogy for Iraq, Afghanistan or anything else needs to be fed his own ear wax.
