One trick pony

There’s an old joke about the guy taking a Rorschach test. With each new picture his answer is “that’s two people having sex.” I’m beginning to see a problem here,” says the psychiatrist. “It’s not my problem” says the patient. “You’re the one showing me the dirty pictures.”

So when I hear that George W. Bush finds a lesson in the American Viet Nam experience and that the lesson is that “Freedom takes a long time to trump hatred” and that this means we have to keep occupying Iraq for a long time – I’m beginning to see a problem. If every comet in the sky, every burning bush, every letter written on the wall screamed “get out of Iraq” he would see an argument for staying the course.

Never having been to the former object of America’s imperialist passions and anti-communist hysteria, Bush seems to be totally oblivious to the fact that we never were supporting freedom in that country and that we never allowed free elections and that we killed at least a million people many of whom were women and children and innocent peasants so that they would be forced to accept a kind of government we found preferable for economic reasons, its massive corruption and suppression of civil rights notwithstanding. He doesn’t seem to understand that peace only began when America went home.

If there is a lesson in Viet Nam, it’s to stay the hell out of such struggles. When Bush argues patience with Iraq he’s either convinced that we’re idiots, is an idiot himself or is so demented that he sees and hears only in terms of his obsession. Our patience with a war that killed 50,000 Americans and lasted over a decade and ended with our defeat was far greater than our patience with Bush’s war and regardless of the circumstances under which we will inevitably exit Iraq, peace will not be the result of our occupation.

The lesson of Viet Nam is that the stakes we insisted we had there; the insistence that this was a fight for our freedom and that the “lights of freedom will go out all over the world” if we withdrew were all lies or misapprehensions, despite the passion with which these arguments were made and despite the cries of treason that met doubters.

The Vietnamese have always had a long memory and so too do the people of the middle east. The Iraqis and the Iranians remember how we sabotaged their freedom long before we claimed to be fighting for it and whether or not they ever achieve the kind of liberal democracy and equality under the law for all people we claim is our goal, they will only achieve it without our occupation.