Vietnam

The giggle of the day came when NPR said that Bush said there were important lessons to be learned from Vietnam. Answer 1, of course, is who knows whether he was sober for any prolonged period during the Vietnam War. But here's what he actually said:

President Bush, on his first visit to a country where America lost a two-decade-long fight against communism, said Friday the lesson from the Vietnam War is that it will take time for freedom to trump hatred in Iraq.

Unfortunately, this is a disguised version of the standard nationalist counternarrative of the war. The truth, which almost everyone had to realize at some point, is the truth that the war was an unwinnable bloodsink. The counternarrative states that we lost only because protestors sapped our will. Instead, we need to "fight to win," which is to say lock all the protestors up, grit our teeth, and keep fighting until Doomsday.

Uncountered, this ideology could infect all of America with repression and bloodthirst. We need to remember that while Iraq may not be the same as Vietnam, it's just as much of a quagmire, and leaders are indifferent to that as they leverage it into power for themselves.