The War in Iraq

The Vietnam war betrayed the myth that the know-how of American power had the ability to resolve every issue, and history is evidently repeating itself. The delusion that military force can resolve every problem was supposed to have died in Vietnam, but it was revived in Iraq.

Nobody understood Vietnam and nobody understands Iraq. We bear witness to the killing made in our name, and we can only call it justice when the pictures are censored. War without end is not about justice. War without end is the insanity we have currently embraced.

This is nothing new. We are merely reliving the delusion and the paranoia that the Cold War produced. When American politics was nurtured by the atmosphere of the Cold War, the United States was constantly besieged by enemies of all imaginable kind. In the name of freedom and democracy, America betrayed its own principles about what is noble, true and right, rigged foreign elections and even plotted the assassination of duly elected leaders. Beseiged by what Nixon called, enemies from within and without, the list of Cold War casualties has never been counted because it is politically inconvenient.

History is repeating itself. If you listen to Richard Nixon's Cold War rhetoric, you will discover that George Bush is merely borrowing the justification of waging war, not in the practice, but in the name of preserving the world from evil.

When Richard Nixon was the President, he said, "We live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free institutions in the last 500 years. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."

The rhetoric of freedom was fine, but when we wage a campaign against foreign devils, the devil is in the detail. When we think that the only way to defeat the devil is to prove that we are more ruthless than the devil himself, we lose our moral authority and the support of the people in the process. That is what happened in Vietnam and that is what happened in Iraq, and there is no excuse, this time around.

This is one thing that John Kerry understands, firsthand, and that is why John Kerry should defeat George Bush in 2004. John F. Kennedy understood Vietnam, and John Kerry understands Iraq.

"There were four or five points I was trying to make before the invasion. One was that we were going to punch our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world and end up doing the recruiting for Al Qaeda. I said that I thought that we would do the race to Baghdad very well that the sheer military part would go well because our military is just very good, marvelous people, and our technology is awesome. But then the battle would change; we would be involved in urban guerilla warfare, and things would turn against us.

I said that I thought the movie that they were all watching in the White House and the Pentagon was Patton, and the movie they should have been watching was The Battle of Algiers [the 1966 quasi-documentary film about the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the late 1950s].

There is a moment in a war as there was in Vietnam and as there will be in this war where your military superiority is undermined or neutralized by your political limitations. And I thought the biggest miscalculation of all was a great underestimation of the colonial factor, just as there had been in Vietnam. In Vietnam the U.S. absolutely had refused to factor in the effect of the French Indochina War. And I felt the specter of colonialism would be a problem again in a more complicated way with Islam.

The greatest miscalculation was not about the weapons of mass destruction, but the idea that we would be greeted as liberators. When the Bush people kept talking about that, alluding to what happened in France and Germany after World War II, well, anybody who had been in Vietnam would have been wary of it. There was just no way we were going to be greeted as liberators in this part of the world. The Iraqis might want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but they would not want us to do it for them. I was saying these things before they happened and not just ex post facto."

David Halberstam was the best and the brightest.

The Big Picture Celebrity Justice

Next: David Halberstam's strange "accident".

Plus: Rumsfeld's world