Sound Familiar?

I have disconnected from NPR and TV for almost two weeks now, but I cannot seem to resist online columns at lunch, including my favorite, Dan Froomkin, White House Watch, washingtonpost.com. Today, I ran across a new one for me, Glenn Greewald's column on Salon.com. He pulled statements from Time magazine made by military officials during the Viet Nam war. It is frightening how the same things being said about Iraq were being said about Viet Nam.

There is so much that is wrong about the war, our president and our foreign policy. Sometimes I wish Bush would just say, "I am investing the rest of my presidency in tirelessly working to end this war and make Iraq peaceful. I am going to engage with countries and leaders around the world, and do everything I can to get our troops home - to right the wrongs our country has heaped upon Iraq." Sigh...it will never happen.

And so, for now, our politicians play political kabuki theater because the democrats are too scared of losing their majority by appearing weak and the republicans will not admit they were wrong and we really fucked up and the rest of us are left scratching our heads, saying don't they get it, while more and more of our soldiers die in a forgotten land as we flip our TV sets from the depressing sights on the news to the mind numbing, sickly sweet sugar of American Idol. Sigh...this is why it is easier to disconnect.

With all that said, it's not that things are bad, for most of us in America. The middle class is fat and happy, me included. It's just, sometimes I think things could be so much more wonderful, for us and for the rest of the world, if our country and our leaders had different priorities and different ways of looking at the world.

When I drive home I sometimes think about what I would do if I were president, the things I would say, the way I would run the country. Ahh, what a perfect world this world would be if only I were president. But, I'm not. Not yet...



Anyway, here are the statements from Time during the Viet Nam war. Notice the dates; every couple of years we apparently "turned a corner" in Viet Nam, and if we could only stick things out a little longer, because "there are signs of hope." Sounds familiar:

Time Magazine, Friday, May 17, 1963:
How is the war actually going? Measured against the desperate situation that faced General Maxwell Taylor on a fact-finding mission for the President 19 months ago, there is room for qualified optimism. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a conference with service chiefs in Pearl Harbor last week, the Pentagon said "the corner has definitely been turned toward victory."
No one was setting any timetable, but U.S. military chiefs and South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem say that the war should be won "within three years." There are many soldiers in South Viet Nam who consider this wildly optimistic; some believe that the war may never be won. But almost everyone agrees that things have improved.

Time Magazine, Friday, March 31, 1967
Nonetheless, a note of optimism permeated the conference. "There are many signs that we are at a favorable turning point," the President said at the outset. That theme was elaborated in detail as U.S. and South Vietnamese officials met on Nimitz Hill, the U.S. naval headquarters overlooking the Philippine Sea. . . .
The military situation in Viet Nam gave ample cause for confidence. South Viet Nam's Premier Nguyen Cao Ky said that the Communist forces in his country are "on the run" and pictured the supply system in the North as "in near paralysis.

"Time Magazine, Friday, March 28, 1969:
"Progress" in Viet Nam is a relative and fragile thing at best. But within limits, a prognosis of progress seems more valid than at any time since the U.S. arrived.
The history of the war is all too painfully graven in false optimism. Again and again, U.S. hopes have been raised by officials armed with gleaming statistics and pollyanna rhetoric. First the U.S. "turned the corner" in Viet Nam; then there was "light at the end of the tunnel," "the enemy was on the run," and the attrition rates, the kill ratios, and all the other jargon of victory rolled on and on.
Since they have been proved wrong so often in the past, U.S. experts are careful not to parade their latest positive assessments; indeed, they almost tend to conceal them. But those currently in charge of the war in the field are convinced that "the curve is up" at last.