The Language of Quitters

Posted on July 12, 2002 in Peace

The “not-as-bad-as” tune is being sung in a new key by apologists for the mystery war in Afghanistan. Like the Holocaust revisionists of whom I spoke earlier, they point to the atrocities of the past to justify the present. In this case, it is Vietnam, that war which every right wing nutcase believes was lost, not because we intervened in a civil war on behalf of a government that people did not want, but because we did not leave the shores of the Gulf of Tonkin a burning crater.

“It’s not like Vietnam” the defenders of the resident’s foreign policy whimper. They doggedly insist that we can succeed were other empires have failed in Afghanistan. They dream their dreams of carpet bombing and nuclear bombs and say that under Bush things will be better than ever before in the region.

The hints that this may not be the case are being ignored by the nattering nabobs of nationalist negativism. We have no reliable reports about what is going on in Afghanistan for one thing. The secrecy and the compliance of the American media ensures that we don’t know how bad things are. Reports that do leak out are seldom good. The attack on a wedding that happened a few days ago summons up ghosts of My Lai. One may rightly ask when will we have our Kent State in this? Combine this with the utter lack of a timetable or a clear objective and what you breed is everlasting war, a time of profit for defense industries but at the cost of our national reputation and moral integrity. This thing is going to cost us money, too, a lot of it. Unless Americans get smart and clip the wings from the budget turkey, the mortgage that Bush and Cheney have obtained will use our children for collateral.

But the problem may be rooted even deeper. After Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the Impeachment Imbroglio, the Starrish Inquisition, and the Stolen Election, Americans may have given up on the expectation of integrity for those in public office. Instead of striving for betterment, we are merely happy with the idea that we’re lousing up no worse than before. That’s makes us a nation of quitters.