One Bright and Shining Moment

A heavy handed documentary about George McGovern. I resist using agiprop because it ain't quite that, although the opening sequence borders on it.

I am still puzzled by the Iraq = Vietnam narrative. In this documentary you have quite a few hardcore leftists baldly stating, "We fought on the wrong side in Vietnam." Their thinking, I imagine, is that Ho Chi Min was fighting an anti-imperialist war, not a communist revolution. Another argument, the conservative/ Real Politick argument against Vietnam would be - mind our own business and leave a non-important "piss ant" country (LBJ's term) like Vietnam to themselves.

I don't see how either of these arguments apply to Iraq. Clearly, we are not fighting on the wrong side in Iraq - opposing a Sunni Terror state under Saddam or a Sunni Terror state under Al Queda is not the side we should be fighting with. Maybe...just maybe...the Iraq is unimportant argument holds up. But we certainly cannot argue that Iraq is less important than Vietnam. Iraq is hugely more important from a strategic perspective, being a keystone state in the most volitile region in the world, which also happens to be the home of most of the known oil reserves.

In any case, it is clear by our actions anyway that Iraq is not Vietnam. Protests were large at first and now dwindled to nothing. Maybe the sad fact is we just don't care. At least that's the message in this blog post about the "never again" promise after the Holocaust.

Maybe we don't care that much if Saddam is in power, terrorizing his own people. Likewise, we don't care that much if our soldiers are over there fighting a confusing war. We cared about fighting in Vietnam, but could give a flying shit about the Khmer Rouge or Rwanda or Sudan...or even Afghanistan.

I guess the difference is this: in Vietnam there was a draft and American's were dying in fairly large numbers over a hopeless and unimportant cause. Let's not pretend that American bombs killing Vietnamese citizens mattered to public opinion...