...if you don't move the lightning rod.
I keep quoting this guy as if he'd authored the only book I've ever read but Norman Solomon's War Made Easy, especially the part about the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, reads like a prologue of what's going on in Iraq. Or it would if Solomon didn't use it as a parallel to Iraq. And, while better minds than mine (including Solomon's) have laid out pretty convincing arguments as to the Lincoln/Kennedy assassination coincidences between Vietnam and Iraq, let me pipe in for a moment.
We're not talking about a mere set of coincidences, a random convergence of serendipitous events. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only coincidence between Johnson and Bush that we're seeing is that both men hail from the state of Texas (and, if you want to get technical, Dubya was born in Liebermanland. Daddy was born in Milton, MA, making both closet native New Englanders).
No, far from being one stupendously catastrophic parallel after another, what we're seeing in Iraq is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because all the Bush administration is doing is using the teacher's manual of the LBJ playbook used during Vietnam. This refined and expanded playbook, which largely conflates media access with actual information and supplants real reportage with mere coverage, is the unmoved lightning rod drawing the bolts that strike the White House daily.
What's scary is that today's warhawk neocons have learned nothing from Johnson's and Nixon's foreign policy blunders in Southeast Asia. At the very least, you could use such a black, blood-blotted history as a template of how not to fight a foreign insurgency. The Vietnam War that exploded in the faces of the men who'd won the presidency by two of the biggest landslides ever and made Johnson's successor (thanks also partly to Watergate) the most hated and unpopular president ever (until now) served not as a cautionary tale but as an inspiring real-life story.
Essentially, what we're seeing here is a Neocon of La Mancha administration that, in daring to dream the Impossible nightmare, embodies not just the worst parts of the Johnson/Nixon administrations but one that has taken those fatal, bubonic- and plutonium-infested deficiencies and has made them even deadlier.
As insane as LBJ's and MacNamara's (and later, Nixon's and Kissinger's) compulsion was to halt the spread of communism in SE Asia, we'd never once heard, "We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." (And Kennedy nipped that talking point in the bud during the Cuban Missile Crisis).
And as much as Johnson hated dissent and distrusted the press, it never would have occurred to the man who'd lobbied hard to pass and sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to curtail our civil liberties. True, communists never attacked us on our own soil like al Qaida has. But that fact, too, hardly covers this administration with glory.
Nixon, too, it could be argued, spied only on Democratic National HQ. The Bush administration, which is more paranoid than teenagers smoking pot in a courthouse bathroom, seems to think that this nebulous GWOT is a giant drinking glass to be put to the wall of America (ironic, is it not, that George Wiretap Bush otherwise never seems to care about what we think or say or feel?). Even the baleful, sinister Lord of Yorba Linda, in his most feverish, paranoid delusions, never would've resurrected Hitler's power play on his countrymen and rechristened it the USA PATRIOT Act.
While Johnson (and especially Nixon, who should've known better through LBJ's example) underestimated the resolve and stamina of an indigenous insurgency fighting occupation, Bush went five steps better:
1) After 9/11 provided him with his own Gulf of Tonkin carte blanche, Bush then disbanded the Iraqi army (unlike the S. Vietnamese army with whom we'd worked closely), single-handedly creates an insurgency, an enraged terrorist organization that had already wounded us on his watch and became its biggest recruiter. We then, instead of beefing up the American presence (Johnson, for the most part, grudgingly gave Westmoreland the men he said he'd need), keeps the standing army at relatively anemic levels while the enemy's presence only grew.
2) You can't say that LBJ or RMN were in this for the money. We didn't invade and occupy Vietnam because their Daddies and VP's worked for major defense contractors and oil services companies that just happen to benefit the most from such an invasion. We didn't invade Vietnam because we wanted to corner the rice market. Halliburton executives are still, by far, the best armored, best protected, best fed and best compensated Americans in Iraq.
3) Even adjusted for inflation, Iraq is already threatening to cost us more than Vietnam did in its 14 years ($140,000,000,000, or ten billion a year). Bob Herbert puts the actual figure at a trillion. Bush has already publicly admitted that he has no intention of ever pulling out the troops during his reign.
4) Vietnam was never about religion. Does adding Allah to the equation make the Iraqis and other Muslims less or more dangerous?
5) Even Johnson and MacNamara had enough sense to not start one war, then another, then another without first resolving either of the two previous ones. What are we seeing here? A forgotten baseball bat in the driveway, an abandoned Segway on its side in the front yard and the Bicycle Chief taking off on a third ADHD-fueled pursuit to change the world one bullet at a time.
Or maybe he was just distracted by the ice cream man.