This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that’s 
not a typo nor a brain fart – Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It’s kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us – swap a few nouns around and you’ve got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ’s escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China were hoping that the U.S. was going to “turn and run from Vietnam” and that to pull out would be “disastrous”.
Now, if you go to the speech and substitute “Mahdi Army” for “Vietcong”, “Syria” for “Hanoi”, “Iran” for “the Chinese”, and “cut and run” for “turn and run”, you’d swear he was speaking for the Bush administration circa, I don’t know, last week. This, recall, is an iconic liberal talking – people like Ronald Reagan were advocating flattening the place, paving it over, and painting stripes on it at that time (I kid you not), which is not so different from what some have said recently about Iran in polite company, come to think of it. Goodman also played an excerpt of a speech Kennedy made two years later, during a presidential campaign stop, when he had turned against the war. Much of what he said on that occasion reflects the kind of pragmatic opposition you often hear from liberals about the Iraq war these days – that it was a “mistake”, that it has been mismanaged, and that we have not been sufficiently insistent on the client government to clean up its act. Remarkably similar rhetoric.
RFK said a lot of things that year, some of it more principled, and you had the feeling that there was some movement in him along the lines of what the entire country was going through. Really, today, we have less of an excuse than folks did in those days – we have the experience of Vietnam to draw on, whereas this was new territory politically in the 1960s. And I suppose, for sentimental reasons, I always assumed that he would have ended that war sooner if elected, though I have very little concrete to go on in that regard. Same thing with Obama. His statements on Iraq carry a certain amount of equivocation, and it’s hard to say with any certainty that he will bring the Iraq hell-disaster to a close. One thing we can be sure of – the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being foisted on Iraq as we speak reflects the actual planning goals of this war more accurately than any public statements from our fearless leaders. That document will set us up for the long term military presence the war’s authors sought from the very beginning – a goal that’s very unpopular in the U.S. and in Iraq… which is why they’re not talking about it much.
So… from Bush/Cheney/McCain’s point of view, the war is nearly won, whether they’ll say so or not. That SOFA is the brass ring – worth the lives of all the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed thus far and yet to be killed in its defense. Let’s call Washington and tell them we want no part of it.
luv u,
jp
Lesson one: if you find yourself staked out in an abandoned hammer mill with your bandmates, never… never let your resident mad scientist work unattended. Negative consequences will be had.
Sure, this sort of thing is bound to happen with a creative mind, right? Our Mitch is always throwing something together. Marvin (my personal robot assistant), after all, is one of his greatest inventions (and, not coincidentally, one of the greatest pains in my ass). Trouble is, unlike other idle hobbies and casual interests, what Mitch creates tends to have a mind of its own. That’s why I became a bit concerned when he chipped his Frankenstone sculpture free of its moorings. My colleagues tried to reassure me. “Relax, Joe,” they would say, “Mitch obviously prefers freestanding three-dimensional art.” This surprised me. (Not because of what they were telling me, but because they had not addressed me with my usual nickname “fucker.”) So I tried to put my concerns out of mind.
kicking up a fuss because someone had walked off with it yet again. (Sometimes I think there’s a bit of the pirate in that old man.) But the footfalls were heavier than that. Sounded like they were breaking through the floorboards. Shortly thereafter, I saw a sinister shadow in the hall. Totally unrelated to the stomping, as it happens. (Just a bit of water damage on the drywall – nothing to get worked up about.) Nonetheless, those steps were strange, unnerving. And when I rose the next morning, the Frankenstone statue was gone. That’s right – GONE! Just a faint trail of stone dust leading out into the hall.
sight of my mom pulling the Kennedy bumper sticker off my bedroom door, her grave expression rendering the news superfluous. A sliver of the sticker remained on that door for some time. Nasty days indeed.
We need to fix this – this tendency we have to sit on our hands while outrageous crimes are committed in our names. We need to stand up when we’re being ripped off by the pirates and speculators whose representatives currently occupy the White House and halls of Congress. Failure to do so only encourages them to continue doing the same thing. Even now they’re talking about Iran almost constantly; even now they’re blackmailing the Iraqi government into allowing permanent U.S. bases in that country. They feel confident in doing all this (and more) because, aside from a little harmless unpopularity, their crimes have cost them nothing.