Rewrite The History When You Goofed




Iraq: Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time
By Julian Delasantellis
June 6, 2007 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF06Ak04.html

If there's one group that knew a thing or two about the acquisition
and maintenance of political power, it would have been Ingsoc, the
dictatorial power elite (its name a bastardization of "English
socialism") from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. "Who controls
the past," Ingsoc told its cadres, "controls the future: who controls
the present, controls the past."

What this meant was that, if you had a governing elite or ideology
that felt it lacked the requisite historical legitimacy to rule, all
you had to do was go back and change the historical record to one that
better suited the elite's current needs.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this mission was tasked to the feared
"Ministry of Truth", where party functionaries, among them the story's
protagonist, Winston Smith, searched historical records - in Smith's
case, through old copies of The Times of London - to excise historical
events or personages that had fallen out of favor with the party. This
now inopportune "incorrect" history would then be sent down the
"memory hole"; party "newspeak" for the incinerator.

Surely, in an advanced democracy such as the United States, with its
vibrant free press and bewilderingly myriad sources of information,
the past is never updated to serve the present; there are no "memory
holes".

If that were true, the US would not be allowing itself to be bled
white in Iraq, and barely even knowing why.

Like most US holidays, Memorial Day, celebrated this year on May 28,
long ago lost most aspects of commemoration and veneration that the
name implies; for most Americans, it is "celebrated" as a three-day
weekend devoted to cookouts, picnics and getting a good deal at the
summer outdoor furniture sales.

One group that, in its own unique way, has tried to keep something of
the spirit of the holiday alive is called Rolling Thunder. Every
Memorial Day weekend since 1987, its members have rallied on the
Washington Mall, with many of the burly, black-leather-clad attendees
riding to the event on their US-built motorcycles, thus producing the
sound of "rolling thunder". ("Rolling Thunder" was also the
operational name for the bombing campaign the US Air Force and US Navy
conducted against North Vietnam from 1965-68.) The event is carried on
the C-SPAN cable public-affairs network, where I have watched it for
many years.

The original, and still central, rationale for Rolling Thunder is to
keep the POW/MIA (prisoner of war/missing in action) issue existent in
the public consciousness. Most Americans think this issue primarily
relates to US troops who never came home from the Vietnam War, but
Rolling Thunder does not limit itself to that era; it is searching for
live POWs from all of America's 20th-century wars still allegedly
being held by their captors.

One speaker at the recent rally, Lynn O'Shea, a spokesperson for the
National League of Families, sadly announced that the league was now
suspending its search for any possible live US POW/MIAs from World War
I, [1] presumably being held until recently by those eternally
nefarious troublemaking Hohenzollerns.

But with time causing the Vietnam POW/MIA issue to fade from public
awareness, in recent years, many of the speakers at Rolling Thunder
have been using their microphone time to express another consuming
passion, how infuriated they still are, more than a third of a century
since the war ended, at the anti-war protesters of the Vietnam War
era.

In previous years, it was always a crowd pleaser when Rolling Thunder
speakers took the opportunity to make pointed, non-publishable comment
on what they considered to be the sorry state of cleanliness of
Vietnam-era anti-war activist Jane Fonda's genitals.

It is only in this context that the following comments by John
Sommers, the executive director of the Washington, DC, office of the
American Legion, the veterans' service and advocacy organization,
become understandable.
We also just completed a successful mission, the American Legion and
Rolling Thunder working hard together along with other organizations,
to get a [Iraq] war funding supplemental appropriations bill passed
without any guidelines or deadlines on bringing home the troops.
Sommers feels proud that his organization's lobbying helped defeat the
recent congressional efforts to wind down the Iraq war. This might
seem a surprising position for a veterans-advocacy organization, since
it means that a lot more current US military personnel will get killed
in Iraq before they ever get a chance to be civilian veterans;
thousands of others will live out their lives as veterans with
prosthetic limbs or in wheelchairs. It certainly is not a position
shared by many of today's troops themselves; these days they regularly
seek out media outlets to express how pointless they now see their
current sacrifices in Iraq.

Apparently, for the veterans' advocates lobbying for the perpetuation
of the war, and perhaps for much of the United States as a whole, the
war has taken on a meaning and significance way beyond anything that
is actually happening on the carnage-drenched streets of Baghdad or
Diyala province.

For all the talk of the "controversial" Vietnam War, while it was
being fought, the war was not all that controversial. It was popular
with Americans up to around mid-1967. After the Tet Offensive in early
1968 it became wildly unpopular, right up to its conclusion in 1975.
After 1968, no US politician of any import advocated continuation of
the war to victory, and when North Vietnamese tanks rolled unopposed
into Saigon in April 1975, most Americans felt relief that they were
finally done with the place.

But as the United States feathered its hair and discoed its way
through the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and
metastasized in the national consciousness. The US lost a war. The US
lost its first war. This was unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the
Vietnam War had to be disposed of down the memory hole.

On May 28, 1984, at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia,
president Ronald Reagan said, "Those Americans who went to Vietnam
fought for freedom, a truly noble cause ... This battle was lost not
by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it
but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest
levels of government."

Since the nation no longer actually had to fight the Vietnam War, the
United States was discovering that it now actually liked the Vietnam
War. The revisionist-history project as applied to the Vietnam
experience was gathering full force. The war was no longer a bloody,
fatally mismanaged fiasco - it was now a "noble cause".

More important, the war was not lost by the troops - they actually won
the fight - but by other forces in society: first, the government,
then other societal forces.

The manhunt for the real losers of the Vietnam War was on.

James William Gibson, in his 1994 book Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary
Culture in Post-Vietnam America, elaborated on how these beliefs
evolved.
Defeat in Vietnam came to be viewed as the result of what the Joint
Chiefs of Staff called "self-imposed restraints". From this
perspective, technowar would have inevitably produced victory if it
hadn't been for the influences of liberals in Congress, the anti-war
movement, and the news media, who together stopped the military from
unleashing its full powers of destruction.
Gibson goes on to document a diverse compilation of US post-Vietnam
cultural manifestations that developed on the now-accepted belief that
defeat was caused by "self-imposed restraints".

Rambo: First Blood Part II and other POW-rescue movies indulged the
fantasy of going back to Vietnam and blowing to pieces as many
Vietnamese as possible, preferably but not necessarily limited to
communists. Thereby they were winning the war, and not having to be
concerned with the messy winning of the "hearts and minds" that posed
such a challenge in the actual war.

Beyond that, there arose a bewildering array of other cultural
illustrations of a US desire to change the actual historical record
and result of the Vietnam War, what Gibson called the "New War". Among
these were the rise of suburban weekend warriors playing paintball,
the idolization of mercenaries, and an innumerable parade of pulpy
paperback novels and B-grade movies that featured brave Vietnam
veterans brutally battling varied assortments of drug dealers,
treacherously spineless bureaucrats, and, especially, the anti-war
left.

Gibson elaborates on the enemy in the New War that the heroes are
fighting:
They have to contend with a different kind of enemy every step of the
way - "bleeding heart" liberals and complacent government officials,
moral cowards who refuse to fight. Why do these leaders make
themselves the enemy of courageous good men?
In the 1985 movie Year of the Dragon, Mickey Rourke, playing Vietnam
veteran turned New York City police detective Stanley White, laments
that, just as it was in the war, he is unable to fight Chinese drug
gangs with the vigor he would like:
This is a [expletive] war, and I'm not going to lose it, not this one.
Not over politics. It's always [expletive] politics. This is Vietnam
all over again. Nobody wants to win this thing. Just flat-out win.
In Chuck Norris' 1978 film Good Guys Wear Black, any shade of gray
between who is good and who is bad is not allowed, as Norris learns
that the last surviving members of his Vietnam commando unit are being
killed off by a State Department bureaucrat (from the Ivy League, no
less) who wants to open secret negotiations with Hanoi.

And, of course, at the beginning of Rambo: First Blood Part II, on
being tasked to return to Vietnam to rescue missing POWs, Sylvester
Stallone, who in reality spent the Vietnam War safely ensconced in
Switzerland teaching physical education at a girls' private school,
asks the question that has in essence become the pledge of allegiance
of the new Vietnam popular myth: "Do we get to win this time?"

Two movies act as perfect bookends to old and new Vietnam consensus.
In 1978's Coming Home, Vietnam veteran and war supporter Bob Hyde
(Bruce Dern) is the misogynistic brute, while paraplegic veteran and
war opponent Luke Martin (Jon Voight) is the sensitive, caring lover.
(Of course, part of Dern's justifiable rage, from the point of view of
pro-war forces, was that he had been cuckolded by his wife, who else
but the eternally treacherous Jane Fonda.) Sixteen years later, the
roles were reversed as noble and gentle Vietnam hero Forest Gump (Tom
Hanks) stepped in to protect his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Robin
Wright), from an abusive anti-war protester, played by Geoffrey Blake.

Inevitably, Vietnam revisionism got sucked down into the squalid
vortex that is US political debate. The political right found it one
of the most effective truncheons it had with which to beat the
political left. Many in the anti-war left matured into activists and
elective office holders of the Democratic Party, and with the anti-war
movement now shouldered with culpability for the only war that the
United States ever lost, the left found itself constantly on the
defensive, especially in gaining credibility in matters of foreign and
defense policy.

It was not as if there were so many more war heroes on the Republican
right; if anything, just as many Vietnam veterans entered US politics
as Democrats as Republicans. The major difference between the two
sides' Vietnam history was that most of those who later became leaders
of the political right spent their Vietnam era contentedly hugging the
protective security blanket of the student deferments that protected
them from involuntary conscription. On the other hand, many in the
anti-war movement burned from, and had their activism spurred by, the
guilt engendered by the phenomenon in which their ability to get and
stay in college protected them from the horrors of Vietnam; those
without the means or ability to do likewise, mainly the lower and
lower-middle classes, had no such readily available refuge. Those
young men subsequently found themselves drafted into frontline combat
in Vietnam.

Vietnam revisionism is also very prevalent in the current higher
officer classes of the US military; most of them were young junior
officers in Vietnam, so the theory's implicit absolving of that era's
military leadership from the incompetence and mismanagement of the
prosecution of that war is particularly appealing.

In 2004, the Democratic Party nominated John Kerry as its candidate
for president. Kerry was a genuine Vietnam War hero, being awarded the
Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, but mostly he had
gained fame from an eloquent two-hour anti-war address he delivered to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. During his 2004
campaign, he tried to emphasize the former and ignore the latter, but
when the Republican-allied Swift Boat Veterans for Truth reminded
Americans of his anti-war past (even to the extent of producing a fake
doctored photo of him together at a peace rally with, yes, Jane
Fonda), Kerry's campaign faltered and ultimately failed, losing to
incumbent George W Bush by more than 3 million votes.
For the many anti-war veterans who supported Kerry, the irony was
excruciating - a genuine war hero, Kerry, losing the election on the
issue of conduct during a war that the other candidate, Bush, used
every manner of artifice and exercise of privilege to avoid.

If anything, the "lessons" taken from September 11, 2001, had only
reinforced Vietnam revisionism. Even though there were absolutely no
points of ideological commonality, and more than 30 years of history,
between the actual enemies involved, atheist Vietnamese communists and
Islamic fundamentalist Arabs, a consensus seemed to develop that the
attacks represented a total discrediting of a central tenet of the
Vietnam anti-war movement, that peace was a possible, or maybe even a
desirable, national policy objective.

Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly silencing the truth with
repression and torture, the US national consensus had sent the truth
it no longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the memory hole. Now,
all that was needed was to prove the point with actual events, not
pulp movies, books and character assassination.

Along came Iraq. Iraq is the New War made flesh.

If Iraq could be won by suppressing the factors that allegedly caused
Vietnam to be lost, namely home-front perfidy, a final, virtually ex
cathedra affirmation of the truth of Vietnam revisionism could forever
enter the history books.

Until very recently, many commentators have noted how uncritically the
US news media accepted the Bush administration's prewar
prevarications, and then the ongoing optimistic assessments regarding
the Iraq war. This is in marked contrast to the early days of Vietnam,
where in-country journalists such as Neal Sheehan and the late David
Halberstam produced and had published realistic depictions of the
wildly mendacious and ineffective prosecution of the war that
ultimately caused it to be lost. Even in the early 1960s, their
realistic portrayals starkly contrasted with the sunny optimism of
officials in Washington and Saigon.

This dearth of contemporary journalistic honesty and courage should
not be surprising, since the reporting of the US media in Vietnam is a
major sore point for Vietnam revisionists. Supposedly, by doing their
job and telling the truth about the war, the US media weakened public
support for the war, once again, allegedly causing the US to lose a
war on the home front that it had been winning on the battlefield.

Whatever the truth of this allegation, as the Iraq war developed and
was initiated, the media by and large accepted Bush's rationales and
early assessments of the war and subsequent insurgency. With the surge
in patriotism that followed September 11 implicitly leading to a newly
reaffirmed and intensified national acceptance of Vietnam revisionism,
the media were determined that, whatever it took, they were not going
to get pinned with blame for losing another US war.

The ratings success of Fox News, shearing viewers away from more
"mainstream" CNN, and the fact that the media concentration of the
1990s had led to a situation where the vast majority of the news and
information Americans were receiving was coming from five
conglomerates, all led by Republicans, also supported this phenomenon.

Frank Rich of the New York Times has noted how many journalists now
look on their conduct during a March 3, 2003, prewar Bush press
conference with shame, when they uncritically accepted all of his
now-discredited reasons for going to war.

Today, with US casualty levels higher than they have ever been in the
four years of war, and with all the ever-changing Karl Rove-generated
and focus-group-tested rationalizations to justify the war (weapons of
mass destruction, September 11, "we'll stand down when they stand up",
fighting al-Qaeda, "they hate us for our freedom", spreading democracy
in the Muslim world, "they'll follow us home") now discredited, the
war still enjoys enough support to thwart all legislative efforts to
bring it to a quick conclusion. This is because, although veterans
groups such as the American Legion and the Swift Boaters may have
accepted Vietnam revisionism explicitly, most of the rest of the
society has also accepted it implicitly.

Up until recently, there were few more profitable businesses to be
engaged in in the US than producing those once-ubiquitous "support the
troops" magnetic ribbons that so many US vehicles displayed, their
very existence saying that the people were going to "support the
troops" in this war, because they didn't in the last.

On the few occasions when right-wing radio talk shows stop baying for
the blood of Mexican immigrants and talk about the war, the discussion
inevitably fades away from today's actual war to the theme that
opposition to the war is leading to a situation "just like Vietnam".
This is even though no effective peace movement has ever really
developed for this war; most of it disappeared when an exhausted and
dispirited Cindy Sheehan announced a withdrawal from her anti-war
activities last week.

As in Forest Gump, the image of the 1960s anti-war protester, a
personage now credited with stopping a war that the country really
wanted to fight, has been so soiled by Vietnam revisionism that
mainstream Americans want nothing to do with their modern equivalents.
Many anti-war legislators are hesitant publicly to oppose the war too
vigorously; they fear that, once again, the public will rise up and
punish them in the future for advocating what polling says the public
wants now - an expedited withdrawal from Iraq. War supporters say that
if you "support the troops" you must support the war in which they
fight. As of yet, the war's opponents have not been able to produce a
coherent counter-argument to this simple-minded but now daily greater
tautological exsanguination.

In John Le Carre's 1980 novel Smiley's People, retired British
spymaster George Smiley realizes he might soon have one last chance to
go up against the nemesis of both his professional and personal life,
KGB spymaster Karla. "He had been given, in late age, a chance to
return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them all ... no
peace, no tainted witness to his actions should disturb his lonely
quest."

This is the real quest for which today the United States battles in
Mesopotamia. For the veterans of Vietnam, a decisive victory in Iraq
would allow them somehow to validate the mindless pain and carnage of
Vietnam - we should have won, this proves we could have, too. For the
country as a whole, Iraq is a chance to return to the better US of the
past, before Watergate, and Monicagate and all the social pathologies
(drugs, divorce, sexual licentiousness, lack of proper respect for
authority, etc) that conservative commentators such as Robert Bork,
William Bennett and David Horowitz claim infected US society as a
result of the counterculture that grew out of the anti-war movement of
the 1960s.

Where does that leave today's troops, the actual object of the
"support the troops" mandate? They have now been forced into the role
of reluctant schoolchildren forced on to the football team by the
never-forgotten failure of their father on that very same pitch many
years ago.

What greater way is there to show disrespect to the troops than to
deny who they actually are?

In 1944, Pertinax ( a nom de plume for French journalist Andre Geraud)
published the book The Gravediggers of France, accusing his nation's
pre-World War II political and military leadership of the disastrous
incompetence and mismanagement that led to France's quick defeat by
the Germans in 1940. Today, the spinners of the lie that is Vietnam
revisionism are the Gravediggers of America. Into the massive
sepulchre they have dug is now entombed America's honesty, security,
foreign reputation and immediate future.

Along with 3,500 young American lives, and a countless number of
similarly placed Iraqis.

Note
1. With apologies to Dave Barry, I am not making this up; you can hear
O'Shea make this dolorous announcement on the RealVideo clip of the
rally, at minute 49, retrievable with a search for "Rolling Thunder"
on the C-SPAN website.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and
an educator in international business in the US state of Washington.
He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@xxxxxxxxxx

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