by Carlhole » Tue 03 Oct 2006, 02:07:34
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('source', '"')State of Denial" is best read in tandem with Joan Didion's assessment of Cheney in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. With that as background, one conclusion that suggests itself is that — from the beginning — Iraq really has been about Vietnam. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been the Iraq war's principle advocates and architects. As Woodward now reveals, they've even introduced Henry Kissinger back into the equation, and he now is Bush's most frequent nongovernmental advisor on foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld were bright young men headed for the top during the Nixon and Ford administrations, both of whom thought of themselves, as others did, as future presidents. Though the disaster in Southeast Asia hardly ruined them, a certain stigma has attached itself ever since.
For them, the Iraq war, the whole wrenching debate over domestic spying, the detainees and unitary executive power is all about Vietnam. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Kissinger all have been convinced for decades that the country drew all the wrong historical and governmental conclusions from Vietnam. The Reagan era intervention in Central America was a first attempt to overturn those conclusions, but it foundered on the arms-for-hostages scandal. Once George W. Bush — for a set of Freudian family issues too tedious to belabor — put himself in their clutches, he became the instrument of a Cheney/Rumsfeld/Kissinger attempt to abolish 30 years of history and their enduring resentment that their youthful exercise of power ended in failure, death and disaster.
As Keith Olbermann said on his show yesterday regarding Kissinger: "He's baaaack!
The comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam began almost immediately and they continue, although I don't think they are all that similar, maybe a little bit in style of dysfunctional command...
In Iraq, I at least know that that is where 112 billion barrels of oil lie. So it's not hard to get a clue about Iraq. And thus I can understand Henry Kissinger's statement that "there is no exit strategy except for victory". That statement means that the US MUST control Iraq's oil and occupy the country indefinitely.
I've read histories of the Vietnam War. And when I've finished them, I've been left with one overriding question in my mind. That is: "What the fuck were we there for?"
One would think that having lost a war, that America would suffer the loss of something very precious or critical to our national well-being. But what did we lose by losing the idiotic war in Vietnam? Pride? Who cares?
Nothing happened afterwards (except for poor Cambodia immolating itself).
The Vietnamese struggled to get back to normal having ejected all foreigners finally after 4 decades. No domino effect. We here in the US racked our brains wondering what had gotten into us. Then we constructed perhaps the most somber war memorial in the world.
We have been enjoying improving economic trade with Vietnam for years now. They've finally been able to get back to being the beautiful people they are living in the beautiful country that is Vietnam. What could possibly be squirming in Henry Kissinger's toad of a mind that would want any different result? What alternative was he so frustrated in creating? Why was it worth dropping more ordnance on dirt-poor Vietnam than was dropped in all of WWII?