The real Vietnam Syndrome is amnesia

[dumpster_baby]

From the NY Press by Matt Taibbi; Taibbi excoriates America for what it did to Vietnam and what it is doing to Iraq. What he really gets him is that whenever we talk about Vietnam, we talk about the 58,000 American soldiers who died there. But we NEVER mention the 1-3 MILLION Vietnamese and Laotions who died. And now we are comparing to Vietnam the 600 or so American soldiers who have died in Iraq, but guess what? We NEVER mention the 10,000-15,000 IRAQI citizens and soldiers who have died there in this war--so far, anyway.


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If anyone needs a hint as to why the rest of the world hates us so much, this is why. Thirty years after the fact, America still insists on looking at Vietnam as "our national tragedy," the tragedy apparently being 58,000 dead, a regrettable loss of public confidence in the institution of the presidency, a brief period of political turmoil on American campuses, an enduring hesitancy to use military force. Just look at our movies about Vietnam: the tragedy is always the poor Vietnam vet who comes home and suffers through a long period of monosyllabic turmoil and intermittent employment, doomed to live out his days limping around his hometown in boots and a shabby field jacket, wondering where his life went so wrong.

Right. That's the tragedy. Not the indiscriminate murder of one-sixth of Laos. Not the saturation bombing of wide swaths of rural Indochina. Not the turning of ancient cultures into moonscapes. Not the napalming of children or the dropping of mines and CBUs into civilian villages for scare value.

This process is starting all over again. With 58,000 looming in the background, we are starting a new count, which is up to about 640 as of this writing. Do we even count the number of Iraqi dead? Maybe in the daily battle reports, but you have to really look for a running total. I've seen numbers ranging from 10,000 to 15,000, but it's never anything like the concrete numbers we grimly and tearfully assign to coalition deaths. As in the past, we're content to let that other figure drift off into an estimate.

When this whole mess is over, I'm sure we can expect more of the same. With half of Mesopotamia turned to glass, we will build a sunken wall to our boys and give an Oscar to the first director with enough balls to do Saving Private Lynch. We have no shame in this country.
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more here:
http://www.nypress.com/17/15/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

[Solon]

1. Apparently history can be written by the losers as well.

At least when it comes to our own propoganda at home.

[OneBlueSky]

2. hit's the nail right on the head . . .

I still get furious every time I see a report about the 700 or so killed in Iraq . . . as if American lives are the only ones that count for anything . . . props to Mike Taibbi for expressing it better than I ever could . . .

[izzie]

3. It is always the same. We never say how many Fr or Rus died in WW2

Just we saved every one.Always one sided to up grade your self.Heck I have heard some one say that having slaves really was not so bad,for the slaves. People can talk them selfs into anything.

[FloridaPat]

4. There was a report right after the invasion that had 30,000-40,000

Iraqi citizens killed. Yes, this looks a lot like Vietnam. And now I understand Vietnam because of what we're doing in Iraq. This is murder. The officials that run our country should be in jail for murder.

[htuttle]

5. For all the talk of the 'lessons learned from Vietnam'...

...it's clear that the US government only learned a single lesson: "Control the press coverage."