Here I go again, whining and sermonizing about that pesky war over there in Iraq and our failure to stop it forthwith…
James Carroll’s column today made me do it (emphasis mine):
Like legions of Americans, I have long since concluded that the Iraq war is misbegotten and must end, but I HELPLESSLY WATCH AS IT CAREENS ALONG, like a runaway train from an old movie, with “responsible” figures from the Pentagon to the White House to Congress to opinion makers continually pouring more fuel into its boilers. Throttle on!
Here is the disconnect that matters this August: A vast population of shamed US citizens, seeing the war as key to multiple unfolding disasters, regard it as the most pressing issue in the world. But so what? PRIVATE BROODING DESPERATELY SEEKS A MODE OF PUBLIC ACTION, YET IS THWARTED.
The American myth is that such concern gives form to the political process, never more so than during a presidential election. But there, too, as the candidate debates steadily show, the DEFINING NOTE IS ONE OF INEFFECTUAL DETACHMENT.
Every day about three additional American kids lose their flesh-and-blood lives over there and others are maimed. Informed, engaged and politically active though we may be on BMG, we are allowing ourselves to dissociate from this reality and go on with our daily lives. It feels otherworldly and it does not feel right to let this war go on. The candidates and we, the people, should be insisting that it be brought to a halt now, in as orderly a way possible, but starting now, not in 2008 or 2009 (or beyond).
This is/should be about valuing life – not needlessly wasting human life – a concept that seems to have lost meaning. Help me with this, folks, if you can. If we discuss anything but the war, I feel like we’re just dancing around the elephant.
and from such a small country lost their lives because the Eisenhower Administration did not like the projected outcome of an election in 1956. The sixties seethed with moral outrage. U.S. casualties were much higher. There was a draft in place, so the war affected more parts of the populace. And still it dragged on — including a totally gratuitous bombing of Hanoi that resulted in no change at all to the ultimate peace agreement. It dragged on through a U.S. sponsored coup in Cambodia that set off a chain reaction leading to the Pol Pot massacres. It dragged on through napalm dropped on civilians burning holes into flesh. It dragged as chemicals to kill vegetation were dropped on the countryside and dykes were bombed flooding peasants.
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The current Administration lives in a weird kind of bubble: the President is convinced he is right and History or God will prove him so. LBJ and Nixon did not have that eerie self-certainty. They faced large Democratic majorities.
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And still the war dragged on.
I wish I could say that simple moral witnessing could stop the Iraq Occupation, but, tragically, it didn’t work in 1969
…three million Vietnamese killed in the various Vietnam wars. There were several wars in the de-colonialization era.
I have seen much higher estimates, too, but you are probably right. One million is likely too low.
…LBJ was stuck between the proverbial rock and the hard place. The rock was the fact that the Republicans in 1948 had successfully gotten the US public to blame the expansion of communism in Eastern Europe on the Democrats(!). And, given the fact that China was lost(!) during the Truman administration, the Democrats were to be blamed for that also, irrespective of the fact that the then ruling Kuomintang–who subsequently fled to Taiwan–were incredibly corrupt.
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The hard place is that the US government, through Eisenhower and later JFK had supported, then overthrown, more than a few Vietnamese governments. It was the last coup (that got rid of Diem) shortly before JFK’s assassination, that essentially made the Vietnam War, America’s war. The US government really did never understand what the basis for the war was: it was largely a religious war. Catholics (the elite under the French) vs. Buddhists (the common people).
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Analogy to Iraq today: the civil war is also a religious war. Sunni vs. Shi’ia. The Kurds are really of the radar screen. So are the Americans.
I was with you until you got to the religious war stuff. I’ve read a bit on Vietnam — admittedly a while ago, and I’ve never come across a hint anywhere that it was a Buddhist-Catholic animosity.
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I feel that way sometimes too, and I feel like the war distorts the presidential campaign as well. But remember WHY we campaign — to remove the elephant and end this war. Unlike Vietnam, which both parties bear responsibility for, responsibility for this war rests with one man. He chose to fight it (lying about the reason) and he chooses to prolong it.