Vietnamization

Eugene Robinson is shrill.

Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam -- in fact, they went to great lengths to put distance between themselves and the military adventure they now describe as both necessary and noble. At the moment, though, I'm less concerned about their hypocrisy than their distortion of history.

To say the United States should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done -- something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them -- that would have led to some kind of "victory." Of course, Bush and the others don't say what that special something might have been, because they don't know. They're seeing nothing but a historical mirage.

Well, that "special something" was a nuclear warhead -- our failure to use that option in Vietnam continues to rankle neocons -- and we came remarkably close to getting into just such a shooting match with the Chinese at the time.

It's particularly galling that Bush/Cheney has changed the window of the debate on Vietnam. Yes, they are willfully misreading the history of the last days of our involvement in Southeast Asia, and they're using code words that are red meat to a dying breed of those who feel we stabbed the troops in the back. But what is especially maddening is that, in turning the debate to how we left Vietnam, we have eliminated the debate of why we were in Vietnam in the first place. It was a pointless loss of human life and a systematic deforestation of a region that is pretty much unprecedented in history. We shouldn't have been in Vietnam and that was a consensus view by 1965. By 1968 the President of the United States had ended the bombing of North Vietnam and had announced he would not run for re-election. By 1968 all of the major candidates were "peace" candidates. And yet, between 1968 and 1972 the Nixon administration actually resumed the carpet bombing of North Vietnam. My Lai occurred in March of 1968.

In other words, we kept killing even after we'd lost all interest in the war.