So what would that well-known Vietnam war-evader George Bush have wanted the US actually to do in Vietnam rather than withdraw when it did??
That excellent question was raised by a very good friend of mine this evening after we watched the TV news item about Bush’s appearance today at the annual convention of the “Veterans of Foreign Wars” organization, and the way Bush brought into his speech there strong “warning” that a too-hasty US withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences for Iraqis and others in the Middle East just as bad, or perhaps worse, than the “consequences” that he claimed resulted from the US’s too-hasty withdrawal from Vietnam…
Bush was explicitly picking up there on the argument to that effect that recently retired Pentagon official Peter Rodman and liberal uber-hawk Will Shawcross made here earlier this summer.
Bush said:
- Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.
Here’s what they said: “Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.” I believe these men are right.
He acknowledged– how could he avoid doing so?– that Vietnam ” is a complex and painful subject for many Americans.” He also did not, for that audience of veterans, say anything about his own semi-service in those years in the Texas Slackers’ Air National Guard.
He said,
- The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism — and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people…
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”
Read that carefully. First of all, none of those was really a new phenomenon, or even, really, a new term.
Second, the terms of the Paris Peace Accords were that, after the “decent interval”, the North Vietnamese could have the whole of Vietnam and exercise sovereignty within it. Maybe Nixon and Kissinger should have driven a harder negotiating bargain that would have included some guarantees for the welfare of those previous collaborators who were “left behind.” But they didn’t. And actually, though thousands of former Vietnamese collaborators with the US forces did suffer from “re-education” etc, that suffering was of a completely different order of magnitude to what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s.
So what could a longer-lasting US presence in Vietnam have done to prevent the Cambodian genocide?
One can make a very strong case indeed that it had been the US’s previous actions in Southeast Asia– and principally, the horrendous aerial bombardments that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed against the country from their bases in Vietnam and elsewhere– that fatally weakened Sihanouk, empowered the Khmer Rouge, traumataized/brutalized untold thousands of Cambodians, and thereby set the stage for the genocide that followed.
And in the end, it was the army of united Vietnam that ended the genocide, by marching in to Phnom Penh and toppling the Khmer Rouge regime.
So again, as my friend asked: What would George W. Bush have done differently, if he had been president in Nixon’s place and had kept the US troops in Vietnam for even longer, that could have prevented the Cambodian genocide?
Bush didn’t tell us that. Instead, he used the speech to try to wrap himself in some of the glory of General Douglas Macarthur and thus present himself as a wise and idealistic– if sometimes sadly misunderstood– wartime leader of the nation.
(One final note: Rove may be gone from the White House. But the Bushite spinmeisters are seeming a lot more agile these days than the Democrats. Too bad that Bush seems so easily able to use this whole “aura of war” business to out-maneuver them. One thing it shows is that they all, except Kucinich, seem really unwilling to stand up and present any kind of a compelling alternative to the whole testosterone-soaked “bellophilia syndrome”. Instead, they’re all just playing along with it, desperately trying to present themselves as “just as tough as Bush” on war/peace issues. Sad. Very sad indeed.)
Update/correction, Fri. evening: Add Bill Richardson to the list of clear thinkers on Iraq among the Democratic Party hopefuls. That makes two.
Helena
for a quick pithy demolition of Mr Bush’s tenuos grasp of history
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/nol/newsid_6950000/newsid_6959100?redirect=6959168.stm&news=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&bbram=1&asb=1
Corelli Barnet the British Academic Historian has a 15 second comment 1 minute 15 into the “Americans comment on Bush’s speech” clip.
I suspect the analogy Bush is using is incorrect.
A better analogy is Gallipoli.
Evacuation
Following the failure of the August Offensive, the Gallipoli campaign entered a hiatus while the future direction was debated. The persistent lack of progress was finally making an impression in the United Kingdom as contrasting news of the true nature of the campaign was smuggled out by journalists like Keith Murdoch and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett discrediting Hamilton’s performance. Disaffected senior officers such as General Stopford also contributed to the general air of gloom. The prospect of evacuation was raised on 11 October 1915 but Hamilton resisted the suggestion, fearing the damage to British prestige. He was dismissed as commander shortly afterwards and replaced by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro.
The situation was complicated by the entry of Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Central Powers. On 5 October 1915 the British opened a second Mediterranean front at Salonika which would compete for reinforcements with Gallipoli. Also Germany would now have a direct land route to Turkey, enabling it to supply heavy siege artillery which would devastate the Allied trench network, especially on the confined front at Anzac.
Having reviewed the state of his command, Monro recommended evacuation. Kitchener disliked the notion of evacuating the peninsula and made a personal visit to consult with the commanders of the three corps; VIII Corps at Helles, IX Corps at Suvla and ANZAC. The decision to evacuate was made.
Apologies for my own tenuous grasp of spelling in the previous post.
Try testing the logic of “if we don’t fight them there, they will follow us home”
If they can get in after withdrawal they can get in before withdrawal.
The Saigon syndrome
Leader
Thursday August 23, 2007
The Guardian
It is surely a sign of desperation in the White House that President Bush yesterday cited the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 as a reason for not withdrawing from Iraq any time soon. “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam,” he told American veterans, “is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields’.”
Referring to other wars in Asia, Mr Bush declared that US support had turned South Korea into “a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East”, while “the ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq”.
In effect, Mr Bush was urging Americans to be patient about Iraq on the grounds that unpopular conflicts elsewhere have come good in the end (or would have done eventually in the case of Vietnam if Congress been less obstructive). Far from stiffening the public’s resolve, though, this may do little more than raise questions about the president’s eccentric view of history and the conclusions he draws from it – including his attempt in yesterday’s speech to equate Japan in the 1940s with al-Qaida today.
His view of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, though shared by some Republicans, is bizarre too. It was not withdrawal but intervention in neighbouring Cambodia that led to the killing fields. Anger at American bombing (intended to disrupt North Vietnam’s supply lines) brought down the Cambodian government and triggered the Khmer Rouge’s brutal revolution.
Comparisons between Japan in 1945 and Iraq today are also unhelpful and misleading. The US occupation of Japan, which lasted until 1952, followed a war – not an invasion launched under false pretences – and Emperor Hirohito was allowed to remain as head of a unified country, untroubled by the divisive conflicts now raging in Iraq.
Yesterday’s speech was aimed at countering “the critics, the downers and the sceptics” (as Mr Bush put it), ahead of next month’s report from General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, on progress – or, more honestly, the lack of it – in Iraq.
“To withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating,” the president warned. But how, exactly, can the job be done? All Mr Bush could offer yesterday was the blithe observation that pessimists had been proved wrong about Japan – and so, presumably, the dwindling number of optimists about Iraq will eventually be proved right, somehow.
Juan Cole is picking up rumours of a military coup being planned for Baghdad.
http://www.juancole.com/
Ah those Quiet Americans.
Seeing as we started on Vietnam we might as well go back to Vietnam (Well Mr Bush started it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem
Coup and assassination
Main articles: 1963 South Vietnamese coup and Arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem
On orders from U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, refused to meet with Diệm. Upon hearing that a coup d’etat was being designed by ARVN generals led by General Dương Văn Minh, the United States gave secret assurances to the generals that the U.S. would not interfere. Dương Văn Minh and his co-conspirators overthrew the government on November 1, 1963.
The coup was very swift. On November 1, 1963, with only the palace guard remaining to defend President Diệm and his younger brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, the generals called the palace offering Diệm safe exile out of the country if they surrendered. However, that evening, Diệm and his entourage escaped via an underground passage to Cholon, where they were captured the following morning, November 2. The brothers were executed in the back of an armored personnel carrier that was taking them to Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters.[54] Diệm was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery next to the house of the US ambassador, Lodge.[55]
Aftermath
Upon learning of Diệm’s ouster and death, Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said, “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.”[56] The North Vietnamese Politburo was more explicit, predicting: “The consequences of the 1 November coup d’état will be contrary to the calculations of the U.S. imperialists … Diệm was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Diệm. Diệm was one of the most competent lackeys of the U.S. imperialists … Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d’état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last.”[57]
After Diệm’s assassination, South Vietnam was unable to establish a stable government and numerous coups took place during the first several years after his death. While the U.S. continued to influence South Vietnam’s government, the assassination bolstered North Vietnamese attempts to characterize the South Vietnamese as supporters of colonialism.[citation needed]
During my first year of college in 1965-1966, the Republican candidate for governor of California, Ronald Reagan, mounted a vicious campaign against all us “draft dodging” college students whom he claimed showed insufficient patriotism for not wanting to fight and die in the jungles of Southeast Asia for our “noble South Vietnamese Allies.” Six years later after completing my “military obligation” in the U. S. Navy — which service I chose instead of going to prison for not allowing the Army to draft me — I returned from eighteen months in Vietnam to resume my interrupted education at California State University Long Beach in February of 1972.
Imagine my joy at finding the campus crawling with the sons and daughters of wealthy South Vietnamese “allies” who, like our own Dick Cheney and AWOL Deputy Dubya had “other priorities” — namely, fighting no “Viet Cong” during the day while spending many of their evenings staging rallies and fund-raisers for their “compatriots” in the NLF. I never once heard Governor Reagan threaten to kick them out of college like he did me six years previously.
To hear the no-show Deputy Dubya Bush now profane the memory of my friends and high-school classmates who perished where neither he nor his “noble Vietnamese allies” would bother themselves going — well, I guess I’ll just have to plead an inadequate lexicon to express my contempt at such monumental, although all-too-typical ignorance.
As anyone with even a smattering of historical knowledge knows, the American military defoliated, carpet-bombed and free-fire-zoned the Vietnamese agricultural economy into utter ruin, which deliberate policy drove millions of homeless peasants off their land and into festering slums and refugee camps where they could only make a desperate “living” as whores servicing the Americans. When America finally couldn’t sustain the mounting costs of totally subsidizing a war-ravaged Vietnamese “service economy,” South Vietnam collapsed like the house of cards America made it. It took the North Vietnamese decades to even begin to repair the damage and restore some semblance of economic life to that country. Meanwhile, America simply pouted, sulked, spit and spun maudlin myths in self-pity at not having “won” something Americans could never even describe. For decades, America refused to help rebuild the country America itself had wantonly wrecked. Deputy Dubya Bush knows not just nothing of America’s role in devastating not just Vietnam (North and South) but nothing about how the American military devastated Laos and Cambodia physically — and America, economically — as well.
A desperate and duplicitous dunce, the current President of the United States can’t close his flapping jaws any longer because of the silver boot stuck permantly between both his lying lips. A pathetic and palpable pathogen, our prevaricating President Bush has brought us lower than even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did at their most maniacal. Even worse to contemplate: he and his invertebrate enablers in the Democratic Party “leadership” haven’t yet finished making fraudulent fools for the ages of themselves and a pariah for the present out of our country. Damn his and their dulled and glassy eyes.
Michael
I was thinking about what your president has done last night.
He just failed his History Viva Voce.
On worldwide TV.
Michael
I was thinking about what your president has done last night.
He just failed his History Viva Voce.
On worldwide TV.
My computer insists that it is still late August of 2007, even though the air outside does seem a bit chilly, but our president seems to have magically projected himself forwards to somewhere around January 2008. Whatever became of that ballyhooed Petraeus and Crocker Show that I was anticipating only a couple of days ago, as I distinctly seem to recall?
If I suffer from Rip van Winkle Syndrome, tell me, somebody, did P&C talk about Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, then, instead of quite different disturbed provinces more immediately under their own thumbs? Or have they come and gone and discussed the condition of the former Iraq under Republican Party stewardship with dark and discouragin’ words? Did they resign rather than do the required performances, or resign for health reasons, or get fired by some chickenhawk à la Douglas MacArthur, or what? Where are they now?
(But no, forget the funning, the Preëmptive Retaliation folks are intellectually depraved past all spoofery.)
Anyway, Dr. General Petraeus of Princeton and West Point is literally not there at all, which seems rather amazing in an oration aimed at a military audience (sort of), especially when you consider that right up until this latest swerve in the Party line, America and the world were given the distinct impression that Mr. Bush was going to defer to his technocrats and hired hands before deciding exactly what blunder comes next.
That pretence was thoroughly incredible all along, given the basic nature of the militant GOP, but I certainly expected it to be persisted in for a couple more months at least. If they are ever to manage to get to stay in the former Iraq forever, they badly need to buy time at this point, as it seems to me, and therefore I’m puzzled by this premature switch from the “Trust David!” warcry to the “Prevent Genocide!” warcry.
“A week is a long time in politics”: these folks have a very long way to go before they safely arrive at “President Giuliani,” after all.
Only a year ago, it used to cost “only” 8 to 9 billion dollars a month to “buy time” for the Cheney-Bush Buy Time Brigade in Iraq. Now, it costs 12 billion per month (or 72 billion dollars per Friedman Unit). As with the collapse of America’s failed War on Southeast Asia thirty-five years ago, the purchase of ever shorter periods of procrastination at ever greater cost per unit of bought time in Iraq goes by a well-understood (in Economics 101) name: the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. Getting stuck going the wrong way on this asymptotic curve inevitably leads to total economic collapse.
When the collapse comes for America, China and Russia will have accumulated so many trillions of dollars of reserve capital that their investments in Iraq and Iran will earn them riches and renown far beyond the dreams of avarice. Of course, defeated deadbeat thug America will slink off to deserved ignominity begging for more free-lunch handouts after robbing the piggy banks of America’s own children to pay for the ruination of their future before they ever got the chance to make it their own present.
Eating their own seed corn has become a treadmill way of life for Americans over the course of the Dick Cheney Shogunate Regency; but sowing their own fields with salt, so to speak, takes inculcated ignorance far past the ingrained idiocy one has come to expect of the Land that Forgot Time. An illiterate Texas bumpkin now pronouncing historical lessons about wars he never experienced or read about would take the cake if the Republicans and their shell-shocked Democratic doormats hadn’t already eaten it while claiming to still have it, too.
An excellent rebuttal of the “the situation will be worse if we leave Iraq” argument.
However, the article should have credited Bill Richardson, as well as Dennis Kucinich, for coming out strongly for an immediate and complete exit from Iraq.
Joy, you’re quite right. I shall try to add that in as an update to the main text.
The United States, having created the conditions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, then withdrew: result mass persecution of its erstwhile allies and genocide. Withdrawal was a no brainer decision for the US at the time – it did not hurt US interests at all, the repercussions were only felt by the millions of ordinary Asians left without protection after the US’s departure.
However in the case of Iraq, withdrawal is clearly extremely injurious to US interests because the region is crucial to the oil supply on which the US and world economies depend.
Would President Billary allow herself to be the the first female Commander in Chief to withdraw, lose a war, facilitate a nuclear armed Iran into turning Iraq into a vassal state and throw the US and global economy into turmoil? I don’t think so, but others might.
Can’t see any US withdrawal from Iraq unless Cindy Sheehan enters the race and wins it.
The terms of the Paris Peace Accords were not “that, after the “decent interval”, the North Vietnamese could have the whole of Vietnam and exercise sovereignty within it”.: They were that the PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government) and the North Vietnamese were entitled to aid and to remain in their positions pending elections to be soon held after a decent interval. Of course everyone knew that the Communists/NLF/PRG/Viet Cong would win; Kissinger and Nixon basically signed their opponents longtime political program so it was essentially a treaty of surrender as argued. This was recognized within the South and the left in the US (cf Chomsky), but Nixon and Kissinger immediately mischaracterized the treaty in the US mainstream media as some kind of victory and violated the terms in order to prop up the South and prevented the agreed elections. At least that is what I remember.
The US aerial bombardment of Cambodia has recently been documented to be far worse than previously thought by Ben Kiernan et al in The Walrus. He argues as you do that it led to the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan’s Wikipedia article has the precise reference.
Mike Gravel of Pentagon Papers fame should be added to the list of candidate Dems against the war in Iraq.
“Bush: Remember Vietnam
President points to price paid by Cambodians and Vietnamese when U.S. withdrew troops in 1970s. George W. Bush invoked the ghosts of Vietnam yesterday in an 11th-hour push to gain congressional support for his troop surge in Iraq. AFP: Vietnam By Dummies (Prof. G.W. Bush Lecturing). MusicTravel: EDWARD HERMAN: From Vietnam To Iraq. Third World Traveler: Vietnam: The War the U.S. Lost + The Legacy of Agent Orange [in Vietnam] [-DEPLETED URANIUM in Iraq.]”
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/news.php
bb,
“Cindy Sheehan enters the race and wins it”
If you excuse me to be off topic here, I really puzzled with comment like this which tell us HE or SHE they can flip all case of Iraq.
The reality to this, US not a directorship administration, those who hold the power in US not the president as a person but there is a small elite behind the curtains those who play their games despite all sort “Feels Good” speeches and words coming and going in US race for presidential race.
So not Cindy Sheehan or any other can change the course and politics in US until the time come those elite think or under pressure from the public so they move for change and choose a public figure and introduce Him or Here, this will bring the change that planed previously and agreed behind the scenes.
This victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) will take Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda over Nancy Pelosi and You-Know-Her any day. Sandbagging sell-outs — of whatever gender or political party — who subordinate the interests of working-class America to crony corporate crooks and bellicose, bullying Zionists do not impress me in the least.
At any rate, as Michael Hirsh of Newsweek recently wrote: “In fact, when it comes to mixing religion and politics, the most backsliding we’ve seen in the developed world in recent years has been right here in the United States, with the rise of the evangelical right.” Although New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof considers this relapse into national narcolepsy “A Great Awakening,” much of the secular developed world — which includes revovering Vietnam now, as well — sees America clearly as an a-historic, Roman relic. Unfortunately for the world, the recrudescence of reactionary religion in America places the most awful destructive weaponry in the hands of ignorant and mediocre maniacs only too eager to misuse it for personal and Seizure-Class aggrandizement. Chalmers Johnson has it absolutely right when we observes that processes of imperial/military corruption have gone too far and infected the former American republic too deeply for any hope of recovery. Cindy and Jane know this. Nancy and You-Know-Her either do not or don’t care.
In summary: America (subject) has (auxiliary) imploded (verb) from (preposition) monotheistic (adjective) militarism (common noun).
“which includes revovering Vietnam now,”
Yes its right time with US economy have a B IG problems to take the eyes and hearts far from this major development inside US
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20042837/
The Vietnam analogy “ANALOGY FATIGUE” as some put it
Helena
I do suppose you have spotted the damage young Mr Bush did to himself and his cause on TV two days ago.
The New York Times uses the words Fantasy Bizzarre and Surreal about his description of Vietnam in its editorial this morning.
Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.
If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.
The few allies left in Iraq will now look at the replays and say “This guy is making decisions based on this kind of third rate thinking and misunderstanding of history. It is time to start loading up the vehicles and driving for the frontier before we get sucked in any further” The Brits have announced they are getting out of Basra Palace in the next week or so.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2155361,00.html
If you replay the TV clips again have a look at the body language. Look out for either signs of extreme stress, or signs of being on medication to combat the stress. At points in the video I wondered if the man started to look like Nixon.
It absolutely destroys any possibility of support for or agreement to attacking Iran from the Europeans, Thank God. On the basis of Mr Bush’s demonstrated lack of grasp of History, Strategy, and Diplomacy any General Officer would have to ask about any such plan “Has the author gone quite mad?”
It is possible that the only people left in the WH are Regent University graduates, and this is what they were taught about Vietnam. Bush himself was too booze-sodden to remember much about the era.
Shell the town and kill the people.
Drop the napalm in the square.
Do it on a Sunday morning
While they’re on their way to prayer.
Aim your missiles at the schoolhouse.
See the teacher ring the bell.
See the children’s smiling faces
As their schoolhouse burns to hell
Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
And mow the little fuckers down.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/60297
War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities: How Killing Becomes a Reflex
A creeping crypto-fascist coup d’état has already occurred in the former American Republic. And although James Madison said that “an elective despotism is not what we fought for,” his lethargic and lemming-like descendents have finally managed to passively sumbit to one — and all without fighting for anything worthwhile whatsoever.
That the ludicrous likes of “5-Deferment Dick” Cheney and the AWOL Deputy Dubya Bush could have pulled this off at only the cost of some cheap, primitive word magic explains why I wrote “Fernando Po, U.S.A.” This epic saga of the post-linguistic North American Boobies chronicles the desultory demise of language formerly used as a tool for critical thinking. As George Orwell had Symes say to Winston Smith in 1984: “You don’t appreciate the beauty of the destruction of words. Why, do you know that by the year 2050, no one alive will be able to understand a conversation such as we are having now?” Amazingly, the Boobies of Fernando Po, U.S.A. (circa 2000-2007) have managed to beat Syme’s predicted deadline for the calculated collapse of historical memory by 43 years.
No one at all familiar with North American Boobies should find it the least surprising that the hapless American puppet, Nuri Al Maliki, should now find himself blamed by the Boobies who installed him in office for the monstrous mistakes his foreign Boobie American occupiers made before and since they stole “sovereignty” from Iraq and then gave it back, sort of, only not, or something like that. And with the Boobie Keystone-Cops now trying frantically to foment a “coup” against their own puppet Maliki — in order to “democratically” install another of their former puppets Allawi — it has become painfully obvious that no one alive in the Boobie American government today can understand the conversation America once had in Saigon, South Vietnam with the North Vietnamese transplanted puppet Ngo Ðinh Diem over forty years ago.
Language — as an intellectual defense against despotisms — died a long time ago in Boobie North America. A continental population once possessed of limitless cultural and scientific possibilities has now regressed to a little island of insecure, inbred illiterates. Sitting mezmerized before their television “campfires,” Americans have to “see” gesticulating goofballs miming madness before they think they understand what some unspecified “someone” has ordered them to do.