Vietnam and Iraq: promoting democracy, and forgetting about it

Do people learn from the mistakes of the past? One would hope so.

When it comes to Iraq, however, we clearly have not. Hundreds of thousands of our soldiers -- men and women like us with families, lives, hopes and fears -- have been sent there by a president and his political allies to fight a mission based on lies. A mission based on lies is, by definition, a flawed mission, no matter how dedicated our soldiers are or noble our ambitions. Many observers have made an analogy with Vietnam, in terms of the military being "bogged down." It's a cliche, but it's true. Let's not dance around the definition. We are currently bogged down in Iraq.

The political similarities between Vietnam and Iraq should also be considered. In the 1960s, our leaders constantly talked about the struggle to promote democracy and all of the good work we were doing fixing roads and building schools. Sound familiar?

Nowadays, few people in Vietnam care about the elections we helped oversee, or the schools we helped build. The older people remember the deaths, the bombs, the hatred. There are lots of younger Vietnamese who respect and appreciate America now, but it's not because of our actions of 30 or 40 years ago. Instead, it's the trappings of modern society imported from outside, the possibility of making a decent living thanks to the interconnected global economy, and the distant promise eventually having more control over their destinies than is possible in an authoritarian country.

I am not the only one to be making comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. I saw this letter, signed by Eugene Burkhart, in the Daily News Tribune newspaper (my local paper), part of which I am excerpting below:

It is proper and just that we remember and honor those who died in the Vietnam War. Each name on the wall represents a unique and precious story of loss and sacrifice. But all those stories are also part of a larger story, the great national tragedy that was the Vietnam War. We do a disservice to those most affected by that war if we are unmindful or untruthful about it. We should not forget the fallen soldiers nor should we forget the war they died in. Let us then remember that war -- no matter how hard and painful that might be.

Let us remember how the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident at the start of the war, and would lie again and again.

Let us remember Vietnam, a small country of rice paddies and villages on which more tonnage of bombs was dropped than in all of World War II.

Let us remember how George W. Bush and most middle-class youth were able to avoid the war; and how the fighting and dying fell on a disproportionate number of Afro-Americans and those from low-income families.

Let us remember that those politicians and Americans (the so-called silent majority) who most supported the war largely forgot the veterans when the war was over.

Let us remember the over 58,000 Americans and over 1 million Vietnamese who died in that war.

And finally, when we remember that this war did not make us any safer, did not protect our liberties, did not defend us from an aggressor nation or from any real threat to our national security, and that we as a nation seemingly have learned nothing from it, then let us bow our heads in sorrow and shame, and pray that God may forgive America.

The rest of the letter is here.