Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap dies at 101 or 102

Bet you didn't know he was still alive. Well, I didn't; I was surprised. Reading the NYT obituary - it sure takes me back.

Deconstruct him

Under the marvelous title Dien Bien Fool (oh, how I wanted to steal that) journalist and blogging pundit Christopher Albritton in his blog Back to Iraq 2.0 takes on the job of addressing GWB's latest piece of imbecility (or at least the latest I know about, as I don't keep up with him as I should). I mean, of course, the address a few days ago to a VFW where he very clumsily attempted to use the "killing fields" of Cambodia 1975 as a reason to pursue the endless folly of the coalition quagmire in Iraq.
"Really, it’s hard to know where to start", he says. But he ends up here:

And finally Vietnam. In one speech, Bush had managed to drag out the knuckleheaded, right-wing argument that if only we’d stayed in Vietnam a little longer, we’d have won that sucker. If only the media and Democrats hadn’t been so hell-bent on undermining the troops…
This is a tricky subject for Bush, considering he spent the Vietnam years partying and “protecting” the Gulf of Mexico from the Viet Cong in a champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard. It’s also tricky because war critics have spent the past four years comparing the quagmire or Iraq to the quagmire of Vietnam — which, I might remind you, we lost.

After addressing the again wrong-headed analogy of the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, Chris also mentions "but the U.S. threw open its doors and took the “boat people” in. It has not done the same thing for Iraqis, instead forcing them to stay in a deadly cage or face the instability of life in Jordan and Syria."
The "killing fields" reference was very effectively dealt with by David Cortright on the blog "God's Politics" (Sojourner).

Learn from history! part II

Found at Dick Jones' Patteran Pages:

Quick Political Scholastic Aptitude Test

It consists of one (1) multiple-choice question.
Here's an alphabet-length list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:
a. China 1945-46
b. Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
c. Guatemala 1954
d. Indonesia 1958
e. Cuba 1959-1961
f. Guatemala 1960
g. Congo 1964
h. Peru 1965
i. Laos 1964-73
j. Vietnam 1961-73
k. Cambodia 1969-70
l. Guatemala 1967-69
m. Grenada 1983
n. Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
o. Libya 1986
p. El Salvador 1980s
q. Nicaragua 1980s
r. Iran 1987
s. Panama 1989
t. Iraq 1991-2003
u. Kuwait 1991
v. Somalia 1993
w. Bosnia 1994, 1995
x. Sudan 1998
y. Afghanistan 1998, 2001-2
z. Yugoslavia 1999

Q: In how many of these instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result?
Choose one of the following:
(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1
(f) zip
(g) squat
(h) nada

Tom Hayden tells it

A very powerful article by Tom Hayden in the Nation, concerning the myths of the Vietnam War and why now is the time to examine them and refute them.
"If I were George W. Bush, I would be terrorized by the eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry campaign. They look like men with scores to settle, with a palpable intolerance toward the types who sent them to war for a lie, then ignored their Agent Orange illness, cut their GI benefits, treated them like losers and still haven't explained what that war was about. They know Jane Fonda is a diversion from a larger battlefield. They are the sort who will keep a cerebral United States senator grounded, who have finally figured out who their real enemies are and who are determined that this generation hear their story anew. They are gearing up for one last battle. Chickenhawks better duck."
Thanks once again to non-blogging friend Joani for this link.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but . . .

I am apparently not the only person in the world to think that a lot of the mistakes of the Vietnam War are being repeated with Iraq. This particular opinion is from Max Cleland in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance." Heh heh. (I was alerted to this by the very excellent Earl Bockenfeld's Radio Weblog.)

Oliver North lost the Vietnam War --Joel Sax

I am apparently guilty of blog provocation now. (I am a bloggant provocateur.) Pax Nortona's blogger Joel was compelled to respond to my post below about getting out of Iraq now with this. But nobody likes my thing about omelettes and eggs. Boo hoo! I have another bon mot, an old omelette-egg trope as it were, which is to characterise both fascist types and nihilist anarchist types with "F**k the omelette, I just like breaking eggs!" (Could be that's the motto of Bush and the PNAC as well.) (By the way, I only censor my blog like that so that I can view it at work through the filter; in real life I am not at all squeamish about the f-word.)
But seriously. I still don't think justice or the Iraqi people would be served at all by an immediate withdrawal of the coalition. I think they should clean up their act. I think the height of evil is to be found in, amongst other things, the tax cuts, the military benefit cuts, and the persistent lying about both causes and outcomes.