Why we fight.

This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that's not a typo nor a brain fart - Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It's kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us - swap a few nouns around and you've got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ's escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China were hoping that the U.S. was going to "turn and run from Vietnam" and that to pull out would be "disastrous".

Now, if you go to the speech and substitute "Mahdi Army" for "Vietcong", "Syria" for "Hanoi", "Iran" for "the Chinese", and "cut and run" for "turn and run", you'd swear he was speaking for the Bush administration circa, I don't know, last week. This, recall, is an iconic liberal talking - people like Ronald Reagan were advocating flattening the place, paving it over, and painting stripes on it at that time (I kid you not), which is not so different from what some have said recently about Iran in polite company, come to think of it. Goodman also played an excerpt of a speech Kennedy made two years later, during a presidential campaign stop, when he had turned against the war. Much of what he said on that occasion reflects the kind of pragmatic opposition you often hear from liberals about the Iraq war these days - that it was a "mistake", that it has been mismanaged, and that we have not been sufficiently insistent on the client government to clean up its act. Remarkably similar rhetoric.

RFK said a lot of things that year, some of it more principled, and you had the feeling that there was some movement in him along the lines of what the entire country was going through. Really, today, we have less of an excuse than folks did in those days - we have the experience of Vietnam to draw on, whereas this was new territory politically in the 1960s. And I suppose, for sentimental reasons, I always assumed that he would have ended that war sooner if elected, though I have very little concrete to go on in that regard. Same thing with Obama. His statements on Iraq carry a certain amount of equivocation, and it's hard to say with any certainty that he will bring the Iraq hell-disaster to a close. One thing we can be sure of - the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being foisted on Iraq as we speak reflects the actual planning goals of this war more accurately than any public statements from our fearless leaders. That document will set us up for the long term military presence the war's authors sought from the very beginning - a goal that's very unpopular in the U.S. and in Iraq... which is why they're not talking about it much.

So... from Bush/Cheney/McCain's point of view, the war is nearly won, whether they'll say so or not. That SOFA is the brass ring - worth the lives of all the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed thus far and yet to be killed in its defense. Let's call Washington and tell them we want no part of it.

luv u,

jp