On 11 April, the day of General Patraeus' testimony to Congress, Teacherken wrote one of his highly recommended diaries, this time analyzing Gen. Patraeus' testimony to Congress and pushing us to ponder a question that the General was posed by our elected representatives in Congress, and that many of us have asked ourselves:
"Where does this conflict and occupation in Iraq end?"
[T]eacherken suggested that:
The moment they decide it is no longer in their interest, our position [in Iraq] becomes totally untenable.
That, however, supposes that they [the Bush cabal], have control over events in Iraq. I don't believe that they do. Moreover, I believe that the answer to that question is not to be found in Iraq at all.
"Sherman, set the WABAC machine to...
...May 4, 1970." A sunny day on the campus of Kent State Univeristy in Kent, Ohio.
I brought you here to this one tragic moment in time and space because this is where the Vietnam War came to an end. No, that war did not end in the jungles of Vietnam, or in the city of Saigon, or in the halls of Congress, or even in the Hall of Mirrors in Paris. It ended with the lives of 4 innocent American students (and the wounding of nine others) on the Campus of Kent State.
Why? Because that is when the war in Vietnam finally came home to America.
This pulitzer prize winning photo shows a young woman in utter grief as a classmate lay dead, facedown on the pavement. That photo is also a metaphor. The girl became the American people (read her t-shirt), and the young man our nation.
Until that event, the war in Vietnam was a war "over there"; on the other side of the world, in a strange and foreign landscape. Sure, young men were dying daily, their names published in the local newspapers. The youth were demonstrating; they were burning their draft cards and going AWOL to Canada and Sweden. But, Middle America largely sat back, mumbled to themelves, they listened to Walter Kronkite like we listen to Keith Oblermann, and they bitched and whined, but they mostly waited passively for "this to end."
All the while, Congress was running hearings just like the ones we saw this week. Another set of Generals and officials offered the same platitutudes and outright lies. Nixon was telling America that victory was just around the corner.
But that day in May, at Kent State, America had already been involved in some manner in Vietnan for 20 years. There were more than 50,000 American deaths and nearly 1 million dead Vietnamese. The end was nowhere in site.
A day after the shootings at Kent State, riots broke out on campuses all over America. Then, five days later, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. There was something different about this demonstration. It was not composed of typical peace activists, hippies, and veterans. The crowds were filled with ordinary Americans and they did not demonstrate peacefully.
Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969-74 recalled the Washington demonstrations saying:
The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that’s civil war.
Nixon had to be taken out of the White House for his own security and flown to Camp David.
It would still be another 4 years before Nixon would resign. It would be five more years before all American soldiers came home from Vietnam.
I contend that we are not even close to an end in the folly that is underway in Iraq. We won't even be able to perceive an end point until this folly in Iraq, in some tragic way, comes home to ordinary Americans in a way that will cause them to take their anger to Washington in palpapble, and perhaps even distructive ways.
Thus, my response to teacherken's question of "where does this end?" is to pose another question. "When does this explode?" When does civil society break down in some catharitic moment that will breach the damn holding back the reservoir of rage building up in America?
One final note, the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are astounding. The fact that John McCain is the Republican candidate will bring that war back to us many disturbing and haunting ways. I suggest that we all take the time to learn about that conflict, because the same arguments will be used in defense of the folly in Iraq.
And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still...put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends, or by madmen to disaster. --Joseph Campbell, Forward to The Masks of God, 1969.
For further reading, I suggest Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (New York: Balanitine Books, 1989).
Update: Thank you to teacherken for your inspiration and comments. I aknowledge that you were looking at the issue from a slightly different angle, but I felt it was worth deflecting a bit.
Live long and prosper.
Update 2: My pick for best comment:
"Pointing bayonets at protesters, then protesting" by Juan4all
I was in college and the National Guard in San Francisco in the late 60's. I was called up for every Berkeley protest (Peoples Park - 250,000 protesters) and the burning of Watts.
During the same period, I also went to class, participated in student strikes and demonstrations.
I have had no stranger experience than pointing a bayonet at protesters, then joining protests when not on National Guard duty.
One thing I do know is that, after such an experience, you can smell the explosion coming. I've been smelling it for about a year now. Expect it to come sooner rather than later.
The stench of rottenness is beginning to waft out and the noses of the general populace are beginning to twitch. Like any decaying thing, once the stench begins, it rapidly gets worse. This is what we are beginning to see with each "new" revelation of the depth of criminality of this regime.
Oddly, Obama's straight-forward truth is providing a contrast that only emphasizes the depth of the stink. Obama's campaign may well be the catalyst that yields an explosive reaction to the stench-causing decay.