Read it and weep. What a great essay.
The most unattractive trait of the American empire is American arrogance, which the president embodies and which this war elevated. It is not simply that we have a good system. It is the system everyone else should have. It is the best system, and we are the best people. We can mend rivalries so ancient that they not only predate our nation but the birth of Christ. We will install the leaders we like in a country we scarcely understand, leaders who will either be seen as puppets by their people or who will eventually turn against us. We have been here before.
“In Vietnam we didn’t have the lessons of Vietnam to guide us,” says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war. “In Iraq we did have those lessons. The tragedy is that we didn’t pay attention to them.” Or maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who pay the price.
Definitely read the whole thing. It’s a classic.
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By Keir
Sure “the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. ” In Vietnam the war was gradual, and the US had been involved 20 years earlier by allowing the French to regain control of liberated Indochina and actively supported the South Vietnamese regime in 54 right after the bloody Korean War. All this in the context of a definite foreign policy. Iraq is so troubling because that foreign policy has been replaced with the Bush doctrine of pre-empive strikes.
October 27, 2005 @ 4:34 pm | Comment