Still fighting the Vietnam War

For some reason, USA Today ("All the American Idol News That's Fit to Print") enlisted that leader of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, Jonah Goldberg, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

When last we checked in on him, Jonah was being smacked around by Juan Cole. So it comes as no surprise that he has had the inspired insight that Iraq is nothing like Vietnam.

In Iraq, meanwhile, it's nothing but insurgency now. But, unlike the Viet Cong, Iraq's insurgency is ideologically diverse. Some are terrorists seeking to impose a pan-Arab theocracy, some are looking to restore the secular bacchanalia of fear they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein, and others are just gangsters. Vietnam was a jungle war that started against the French in the 1950s. Iraq was a desert war that permanently toppled Saddam's regime in a month. The technologies in play are incomparable. The terrain, the political will and ideologies behind the efforts, the cultures ? almost every single point of comparison doesn't add up ? save the common bravery of America's military. Perhaps most important: Casualty rates are vastly different.

Well, except that both were entered into on the basis of false intelligence in response to an unlikely threat, and support for both was ginned up by claiming that it's all about bringing democracy to a benighted people -- at the point of a gun. But let's put those comparisons aside, okay?

And Lucianne's spawn does have a point when he writes

Of course, there are some similarities between Iraq and Vietnam ? including the press' attitude toward both. But such similarities are inherent to all wars and national struggles in a republic such as ours. The Spanish-American War, for instance, would probably be a far more fruitful point of comparison for critics of the Bush administration, but that would require they read up on it first.

Indeed, the D.C. cocktail party circuit pundits did support the war in Vietnam initially because they knew that the press and Washington establishment knew what was best, as did their successors in 2001 and 2002. Both now as then, the press were complicit in cheerleading as war became more and more of an inevitability. It wasn't until things began to seriously unhinge that the press turned a more critical eye on the Pentagon's conduct in both conflicts.

And he is right about the Spanish-American War. That war too had it's "smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud" in the accidental explosion of the USS Maine, and it too freed a people under the merciless thumb of an autocratic government. A people who soon grew less grateful as they chafed under the thumb of the new occupier.

But Goldberg's larger point is that it's because of "the ego of aging baby-boomers," the "myth" of Vietnam is kept alive and is constantly being refought by liberals, who can't let go of their "glory days."

There's an enduring myth that Vietnam was a singular evil undone by America's idealistic youth, holding hands and singing songs in one voice for peace. This reflects the ego of baby-boomer liberals more than the facts. Not only did large numbers of young people support the war, but in the annals of unpopular wars, it wasn't that special. In 1968, Sol Tax of the University of Chicago cataloged anti-war activity from the Revolutionary War until the beginning of peace negotiations and found that Vietnam ranked as either the fourth or seventh least-popular war in American history.

I hate to point out to young Jonah that 1968 was a full seven years before the fall of Saigon. Hell, John Kerry hadn't even gotten those purple hearts which gnaw at people like Jonah so much. But no matter.

The irony of all of this is that it isn't liberals who pine to burn a draft card or two. It's the Right that simply can't let Vietnam go. They continue to blame the press for the loss of the war, or LBJ for not giving the Pentagon a free hand to exterminate the North Vietnamese, or Nixon for being such a bleeding-heart. And they continue to promote the canard that the troops returning home from Vietnam were spat upon by hippies at the airport.

Because all of that helps feed their victimization and allows them to lift up their noses and convince themselves that only they are loyal Americans, that only they will ever be on the right side of history.