It seems to have slipped past the window so fast that hardly anyone noticed it, what with the obsessive/compulsive coverage of the New Hampshire primary. Of course the US being what it is, anything that occurred more than a week ago is uninteresting and irrelevant no matter how interesting and relevant it is.
There is one subject that I've argued about on the Web more than any other. Long before there were blogs; in fact long before there was a Worldwide Web, there were content providers and bulletin boards and other places where the reprehensible right wing rabble could strut their views about how Nixon did nothing wrong and the Viet Nam war was a valiant struggle for American freedom against an enemy who attacked our Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. That Lyndon Johnson used that attack to gain the power to make a huge military commitment to a war that claimed as many as 2 million lives, many of them civilian, is not a matter of conjecture, but that the incident ever occurred is - or was until now.
I've been called a traitor, an idiot, a Communist, a Pinko and worst of all, a Liberal for maintaining that it never happened and those accusers have had their smug, war-loving way for decades. I would love to think that the NSA review of classified signals which now proves that it was invented would chasten them, but I'm sure it doesn't. The excuse is already emerging that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara truly had reason to believe that the bogus attack was real and the evidence "unimpeachable" so the undeclared and illegitimate war was as legitimate as our invasion of Iraq under false pretenses.
The sort of people that think Vietnam was glorious, necessary and all about Freedom aren't often persuaded by facts, particularly when the facts prove that they are and always have been on the side of needless death and destruction. The sort of people most of us are don't even care one way or another, whether out of Chauvinism, ignorance or preoccupation with the wonderful world of entertainment. It's with their help that America's foreign exploits over the last hundred years or so often have resembled the actions of some guy with an inferiority complex who goes looking for bar fights and tells himself it's really all about how somebody spilled his beer or smiled at his girlfriend.
Did the Bush administration try it all over again in the Strait of Hormuz? How can anyone know for sure? How can know anything in a country where people would rather believe than think and where nobody really cares? So I should feel vindicated, but I don't. I should be pleased to see the truth prevail at long last, but I'm not because the truth just doesn't matter.
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3 comments:
It is at a sad place we find ourselves.
I say this with absolutely no sarcasm at all....I find it much safer to believe just the opposite of whatever Bush says as that is usually much closer to the truth. I predict some very drastic and desperate moves this last year of his presidency in his attempt to form some kind of a positive legacy. He will stop at nothing to achieve that.
Bush seems to be betting on an Israel/Palestine deal but I don't think he will be the last to bet on that.
Yes it is a sad world and sadder for the fact that the truth doesn't matter. The fact that the Gulf Incident never happened will soon be overwhelmed by the mythology that it did because this is a war loving culture and a culture that never has been comfortable with civilization.
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