THE VIETRAQ WAR: FROM TACTICAL TO STRATEGIC ABSURDITY

Oooooo…that smell,
can’t you smell that smell…
the smell of death surrounds you.
-- Lynyrd Skynyrd

Today in class we watched Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary “Hearts and Minds.” Anyone who doesn’t think Iraq is a rerun of Vietnam should watch this film. The cultural construction of a faceless, anonymous ‘other’ fosters an unconscious racism. Recall General William Westmoreland’s now infamous statements: “Well, the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Creating this less than human “other” facilitates the demonization necessary to justify a technological war where collateral damage is a non-issue. Perpetuating the idea that those facing the onslaught were racially, and ethnically, expendable, made it much easier to implement ‘Operation Sideshow,’ the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia in 1972.

Unlike the Vietnam War, the media presence in Afghanistan and Iraq has been so tightly controlled as to negate any public outcry generated by on the ground reportage. What the graphic war photography of the 60s missed that Davis’s film provided was footage of everyday life in Vietnam. What the public in the present conflict has not been exposed to is representational war photography and media footage of everyday life in Iraq and Afghanistan. This lack of media oversight is, no doubt, what allowed the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison and Haditha to go unnoticed for as long as they did.

What follows are excerpts from an interview between Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith of the German Magazine, “Der Spiegel” (10/07), and Seymour Hersh.

HERSH: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he’s talking about it or not. Wwhen he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring parties together. He’s not saying that anymore. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You’re going to have a Kurdish north. You’re going to have a Sunni area that we’re going to have to support forever, And you’re going to have the Shiites in the south.

SPIEGEL: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in disaster. How valid are the comparisons to Vietnam?

HERSH: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerilla war and doesn’t know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys don’t care. They see it but they don’t care.

SPIEGEL: If the war does end in defeat for the US, will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?

HERSH: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic. How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front, though, we’ll rationalize it away. Don’t worry about that. Again, there’s no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We’ll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.

SPIEGEL: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?

HERSH: Oh yeah. They’ve done a better job since. But back then, they blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who’s going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he’s going to put everybody in jeopardy and he’s secretive and he doesn’t tell the Congress anything and he’s inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become more important. The first amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible failing. I’m asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they’re going to have to live with it.

Hersh is right, the Times does STINK. Witness the sad fact that they employ William Kristol as a regular columnist.