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Iraq: Stepping on the Vietnam Rake, Part 2
// Why Can't George Bush Just Admit It?
The first predictions that the war in Iraq will become another Vietnam for the United States appeared immediately after the operation to topple Saddam Hussein began. It is symbolic that this comparison was originally heard most often in none other than Moscow itself. We all remember how the grand old man of Soviet international journalism who made a name for himself exposing the rule of American militarists inflamed the television screen with a fire long gone but never lost. His knowledge, experience, and zeal have again turned out to be in demand: he could have explained to a new generation of Russians that in the 1960s and 1970s there was such a war in Vietnam, which had never been looked upon by Russia as anything more than a fashionable tourist destination. And that war became an indelible humiliation for the United States, just as the war in Iraq will unavoidably become as well.
The fact that those in the capital of the former superpower remembered about Vietnam in relation to Iraq before anyone else has its own logic: for many years, Vietnam was one of the clich?s of Soviet propaganda aimed at exposing American imperialism. And what's new, as the saying goes, is just something old that has been well forgotten, which applies as well in relations between Moscow and Washington. Then the comparison of Iraq with Vietnam was taken over by massive antiwar movements: not in Russia, where society, in contrast to "official television," had no interest in the war, but in London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and in America itself, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. The apotheosis of this mood was the 2004 presidential campaign in the United States, when the Democratic opponent of George Bush attempted to emphasize the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war in the United States.
Everyone in the world has waited for years to hear George Bush admit the legitimacy of comparing Iraq with Vietnam. After all, Iraq, as Vietnam was in its time, has finally become a common noun. That could turn up in the fact that the main difficulty for President Bush will be finding the optimum form of admitting the obvious while still saving face.
And then the sensational news flew around the world: President Bush compared the Iraq war with the Vietnam war. Can he really be ready to take responsibility for the colossal expenses that have accompanied the realization of his geopolitical project?
No, and the sensation died before coming to term. The head of the White House had something else in mind entirely. He said exactly the opposite of what people were waiting to hear from him. The meaning of Bush's clarification can be defined thus: in Iraq they are trying to use the same means of information war against the United States as they did then in Vietnam. But nothing is coming of it. Because America is not losing faith in its moral rectitude, and this war with terrorism will continue until the victorious end.
This is nothing more than the usual rebuke to those who waited for an admission from George Bush that, in Iraq, the United States has stepped on the Vietnam rake: everyone from Soviet veterans of the Cold War and the new wave of anti-American Russians to contemporary Western human rights activists and pacifists.
It may take another administration to really admit that Iraq is a second Vietnam, if that ever happens. The administration that started the war isn't going to say it. Just like the troops were withdrawn from Vietnam by someone other than the person who had originally put them there ten years previously.
Sergey Strokan
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 20, 2006
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