Iraq: Vietnam or Viagra?

I think it was David Broder who suggested that boomers were going to be rehashing the arguments of the 1960s well into their dotage. And it appears that he's right. The surprising thing to me, though, is the number of people re-fighting the Vietnam War as a war we should have won - that is, that it was the Pinko Commie Fags protesting the war that lost the war for us.

This is perplexing to me mainly because it ought to be clear, after the period of time that has passed, that Vietnam was indeed a purely optional war; that the causi belli was flat-out wrong. The argument that we had to 'fight them over there' to keep from having to fight them here is apparently a keeper, though, and has been dusted off and re-used quite recently.

In any event, we did not prevail in Vietnam, and the world is not a global communist hegemony today, which pretty much shoots down the dispute right there. None the less, belligerents still call war protesters 'traitors' for challenging our purpose in Vietnam and lessening our 'will to win'. The question needs to be asked - if winning clearly wasn't needed for our national safety, what's the whining about?

Could it be that those who can't let it go feel that our national manhood has somehow been diminished by Vietnam? Suddenly the Iraqi incursion takes on new meaning; perhaps certain chickenhawks, notable for eschewing actual combat themselves, felt that winning an optional war would restore them to adequacy again.

Unfortunately, the lessons of the Cold War don't appear to have conveyed; then the enemy was 'communism', an ideology. Now the enemy is Islamic Fundamentalism (not 'terrorists', which only describes a technique), also an ideology. Rather than fighting an ideology with (duh!) ideas, which is proven to work, we chose the one SECULAR dictatorship in the area to prove our national manhood on.

I leave it as an exercise to the student to explain Abu Ghraib.