Monday, February 26, 2007

Comparing Wars

Vietnam & Iraq: From Quagmire to Quicksand
by Paul Abrams
from The Huffington Post

The Bush Administration insists that the Iraq War bears little resemblance to the Vietnam War. As with most of Bush Administration assertions, this claim bears little resemblance to the truth. Indeed, the similarities between Bush's Iraq War and Vietnam are many and granular. Incredibly, as if they denied all the lessons of the first tragedy, the generation that was itself stuck in the quagmire of Vietnam has mired its own children in the quicksand of Iraq.

The contexts were similar. We may not recall today the depth of fear of the "red menace" that pervaded the country in the 1950s/60s. People built bomb shelters. School children ducked under desks in civil defense drills. Television programming was interrupted with testing of an emergency warning system. Civil liberties came under fire as purported "communists" were outed. [Today, substitute terrorism for communism, duct tape for bomb shelters, color-coding for television instructions, destruction of civil liberties for blacklisting, and the differences are small. The communists were described as ruthless, inhumane, unreasonable, and harboring a world view antithetical to democracy and human dignity.]

If you're looking for a reasonable and rational comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, this would seem to be as good as any I've seen.

As a side bar, I remember the Red Menace and the air raid drills of the 1950s. As little children, we were told to hide under our desks at school, "Duck and Cover"! The fact of the matter was, if there had been an atomic explosion, it wouldn't have mattered one bit. We would have been toast.

It was all a fantasy and there were people behind it who knew it was a fantasy.

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