After a brief and successful war with Iraq, President George Hw Bush affirmed in 1991 that “Vietnam's ghosts have been deposited under the Arabic desert sands.” Bush referred to what was commonly called “Vietnam syndrome. “The idea was that Vietnam's war had marked the American psyche so much that we always lost confidence in American power.
Major Bush President was partially correct. Iraq's first war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power, in former Yugoslavia and other places, with the general approval of the media and the public.
But when the youngest bush, Clinton's successor, released wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Vietnam's syndrome returned with revenge. Just three weeks after the United States attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2002, the famous New York Times correspondent, RW Apple, wrote a piece headed “a remembered military quagmire: Afghanistan as Vietnam.”
“As an unpleasant spectrum of an unhappy past,” Apple wrote, “the ominous word 'Aturdir' has begun to pursue conversations between government officials and foreign policy students, both here and abroad.”
“Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?” He asked rhetorically. “Vietnam's echoes are inevitable,” he said.
During the next 12 months, the newspaper executed almost 300 articles with the words “Vietnam” and “Afghanistan” in them. The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times directed articles that mentioned Iraq and Vietnam at an average rate of more than twice a day (I looked for it 20 years ago).
The tragic irony is that President George W. Bush did what his father could not: he exorcised the spectrum of “another Vietnam”, but also replaced him with the spectrum of “Another Iraq. “
That is what echoes in the reaction to President Trump's decision to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. We are all familiar with clichés over the generals who fight against the last war, but journalists and politicians have the same habit of covering the square plug of current events in the round hole of previous conflicts.
Trump's decision to bomb Iran, who supports widely, with warnings, is a fair game for criticism and concern. But Iraq's syndrome cosplay cheats more than he instructs. To begin with, no one is proposing “boots on the ground”, no matter the “occupation” or “construction of the nation”.
The debate about whether George W. Bush lied to us in the war on the subject of weapons of mass destruction is more tendentious than the conventional wisdom on the left and the right would make you believe. But it is also irrelevant. There are no serious observer disputes that Iran has been chasing a nuclear weapon for decades. The only live question is, or was: how close I will have to have one?
Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, told Congress in March, in my opinion, that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” On Sunday, the presenter of “Meet The Press”, Kristen Welker, asked Vice President JD Vance: “So why throw this strike now? Has intelligence changed, Mr. Vice President?”
It is a good question. But it is not a solid base to insinuate that another Republican president uses defective intelligence again to take us to a war, Like Iraq.
The dispute on whether this was a “preventive” attack instead of “preventive” loses the point. The United States would be justified by attacking Iran Even if Gabbard was right. Because? Because Iran has been committing war acts against the United States, and Israel, for decades, mainly through terrorist representatives that created, trained, financed and directed for that purpose. In 1983, Hezbollah's militants exploded the United States embassy in Lebanon, killing 63. Later that year, the United States marine barracks exploded, also in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. In later decades, Hezbollah and other Iranian representatives have orchestrated or attempted the murder of Americans repeatedlyeven during the Iraq war. He even authorized the murder of President Trump, according to Joe Biden's Justice Department.
These are war acts that would justify an answer even if Iran had no interest in a nuclear weapon. But the fanatic regime, whose followers routinely sing “Death to America”! – is chasing a nuclear weapon.
For years, the argument not to get that program has rested largely on the fact that it would be too difficult. The facilities are too hardened, Iran's representatives are too powerful.
That is the intelligence that has changed. Israel crushed the militants of Hezbollah and Hamas and eliminated much of Iran's air defense system. What once seemed a discouraging assault on a death star became a tray compared.
None of this means that things cannot get worse or that Trump's decision will not end up being unfortunate. But whatever that scenario, it will not look much like what happened in Iraq, except for those who are not willing to see it otherwise.
@Jonahdispch
