The Worst and the Dumbest

Jim Lampley is fast becoming my favorite political blogger, and he's a sports caster!

Today's missive is spot-on.

In the process of helping my sixteen-year-old with a term paper last week, I had occasion to re-read David Halberstam's The Best and The Brightest and Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie. It was striking to recall how once the Pentagon was in control of all communication out of Saigon, beginning in earnest about 1964, government accounts of the war employed no political or social context to help establish what was really going on in Vietnam. The military perspective was that the South Vietnamese were being threatened by Communism, and ought to be just as fearful of that as we were on their behalf, and by God, as soon as they would simply learn to stand up and fight for themselves the right way this thing would be handled. For Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Commanding General William Westmoreland and their support staffs, the politics of anti-Communism were unequivocal, irreversible and blinding. The South Vietnamese in general, the Army of Vietnam in particular, shared little of their true believer conviction, and that in the end was decisive.

Read the whole post.

It is fascinating that the situation in Iraq is resembling Vietnam more and more as each day passes, and yet, the American public has yet to connect the dots. You could do a find/replace of Vietnam/Iraq and "Robert McNamara"/"Donald Rumsfeld", and Saigon/Baghdad and the statements above about could just as easily have been about today's news.

I've written about the parallels before:

What really bothers me is that those who refute the comparison with Vietnam by asserting that "we aren't seeing the levels of casualties we did in Vietnam" seem to forget that Vietnam lasted for over ten friggin' years! In the first 5 years, there were a total of 1,864 killed in action with 7,337 wounded. In Iraq, we're nearly at that level after only two years, and thanks to modern medicine and protective body armor, the rate at which our troops are being wounded rather than killed is actually much higher.

In fact, if you add in the total of coalition partner deaths in Iraq, we're at 1,834 today. Only 30 shy of where we were after 5 years in Vietnam.

Now, the Pentagon is admitting that we may be stuck in Iraq for "many years". You'd think that the Pentagon would have learned its lesson in Vietnam. In fact, they had, yet the neo-cons flipped off all of the sensible Generals who said we needed more troops, they ignored Powell's admonitions against going to war, and then they tossed the post-war planning from the State Department in the dumpster because they thought they knew better. They were the true believers.

Many are claiming that we can't leave now, we're too committed. I say, bullsh*t. We should just get out, now. Give the money allocated to killing people in Iraq (culture of life my ass) for the next year to the U.N. and have them oversee any restoration. The Iraqi people are not cave-dwellers. We may have bombed them back to the stone age, but they have the skills and the education necessary to rebuild the mess we have created.

As long as we remain, we are not helping, we are only making things worse. Sure, there's sectarian fighting between the Shi'a and Sunni extremists. However, as long as we remain, those in power, and those few, untrained Iraqi troops will cede the responsibility to the U.S..

My head hurts every time I hear Doofus, or his mouthpiece McClellan, tell reporters that "we're making progress" in response to reporters pointing out that the death toll is mounting ever more rapidly. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is getting worse by the day. Even some of the military leaders are questioning our ability to win this war. The worst part is that this had nothing to do with the GWOT until we invaded Iraq.

Of course, we don't get a sense for just how bad things are because there are precious few reporters left in Iraq and what few there are are hunkered down in the "Green Zone". The Cable News (if you could call it that) has become the propaganda arm of the administration. Even their reporters are identifying with the administration/republicans. Fair and balanced, what a crock of sh*t. Don't expect to learn any bad news about Dear Leader or Iraq from them.

The sad thing is that today, Congress voted on an amendment that you probably won't hear about on CNN or Faux. The amendment was to the bill for the Pentagon's $441B funding for next year (which of course omits the funding that will be needed to prosecute the war in Iraq and Afghanistan because the administration likes to cook the books), and sought to have the Pentagon and White House produce an exit strategy post haste. The vote did not pass. I am a bit surprised that many Democrats voted against the amendment, but then again, Congress is in the bag. A rubber stamp for the war criminals in the White House at least until 2006.

I guess the only good news is that the administrations web of deceit is unravelling. Larry DiRita has been caught in an outright lie about the allegations of Koran abuse at Gitmo. The Downing Street Memo won't go away. Their nominee for U.N. Ambassador has been less-than-truthful with the Senate Foreign Relations committee... the list goes on and on. All the while, Douchebag's approval numbers continue their inexorable nosedive. I guess you can fool some of the people, some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Maybe America is finally awakening from its narcolepsy since 9/11 and realizing that the emperor has no clothes.