Who says Iraq 2002 is like Vietnam circa 1960?

aka "Neocon Logic Games"

3 October 2002

Senator/Veteran Tom Daschle warns today that the Bush Administration may be heading into another Vietnam. Well, it just ain't so, and here's why:

In the late 1950s, General DeGaulle, wiping wet French blood from his hands, warned Kennedy against what the American President was contemplating in Vietnam. France was right. Again on Iraq, France warns. But this time, France is wrong, and they don't know anything about imperialism anyway, so why would we care what they think?

Kennedy advisor McGeorge Bundy believed that "that in the final analysis, the United States was the locomotive at the head of mankind, and the rest of the world the caboose" and this widely shared view helped justified Vietnam. In complete contrast, the Bush strategy is "based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better." There is a major difference here and if you can't see it, you are probably a pinko.

During the Vietnam era, payoffs of both Congressional hawks and liberals helped increase federal spending in war pots as well as domestic pots. Today, Bush's liberal farm bill, his liberal favored campaign finance reform, and liberal education bill have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his massively increased military/intelligence budget and his requests of Congress to support his war, now and without question or analysis. Works for us. Do you have a problem with that?

In Vietnam, contrary to the popular myth , the media was notably supportive up until Walter Cronkite's famous antiwar editorial in February 1968. In contemplating unilateral war on Iraq today, most of the media are not only supportive, they are vociferously so, and any opposing media voices are just freedom hating imbeciles anyway.

Throughout Vietnam, intelligence was politicized, mangled, twisted and used by politicians and Pentagon spokesmen to support pro-war arguments. In the case of Iraq, you won't see this, because Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has got his own intelligence machine now, controlled by the Pentagon. Look, we know what to do with the intelligence, and if you doubt it, you are hopelessly unpatriotic and naive. And quite possibly, you have an ugly mother.

In Vietnam, war advocates in the White House and the Pentagon lied blatantly to the American people, even when faced with incontrovertible facts. OK, got me there.