How much longer are we going to keep saying that Iraq is not a rerun of Vietnam?
America?s two latest misguided wars are not carbon copies, to be sure, having occurred for different reasons, in different parts of the world, and against different enemies.
But in the lies, misrepresentations, tactical mistakes and continuing bull-headedness by the American leaders running them, the comparisons are all too close to dismiss by the Bush administration, desperately striving to separate the two wars in the minds of the public at home.
The latest reports of a mass murder of 24 Iraqi citizens in the town of Haditha, allegedly at the hands of a small group of U.S. Marines six months ago, can?t fail to resurrect memories of the My Lai massacre of 1968, disclosure of which a year later helped sour home front support for the war in Vietnam.
Like the My Lai story, ferreted out by a tenacious freelance reporter, Seymour Hersh, in the face of diligent Pentagon efforts to cover up the incident, the Haditha killings have come to light in an investigation by Time magazine that finally lit a fire under the U.S. military.
Time turned its evidence, including a vivid videotape by an Iraqi journalism student, over to American military officials in Baghdad, and an official inquiry has been under way, with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee kept abreast.
Perhaps because the My Lai story at first met resistance from the U.S. military and climbed in its shock value as more details came to light, its disclosure had a jolting impact on our consciousness at home. Many Americans had entertained the notions that our troops would never be guilty of such an atrocity.
It remains to be seen whether, after the My Lai experience, Americans will have become inured to another example of how our own people can, under the physical and emotional stress of war ? particularly one as in Vietnam wherein the enemy has a certain anonymity ? commit such acts.
One of the principal congressional proponents for a draw-down of American troops from Iraq, Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Marine veteran of Vietnam and staunch defender of the military, has already attributed the Haditha killings to such pressures. Immediately criticized by supporters of the war as politicizing the tragedy, Murtha has charged another cover-up.
In the case of My Lai, accumulated war-weariness fed a growing demand among protesters against continued American involvement in Vietnam to seek a negotiated settlement there. Whether the same will happen regarding the commitment in Iraq seems less certain, given President Bush?s repeatedly stated intention to destroy the insurgency there, not negotiate with it.
The latest civilian shootings have been attributed to alleged retaliation by the group of Marines after one of their comrades was killed by a roadside bomb. A U.S. spokesman initially reported that the Marine and 15 civilians were killed by the bomb and that the other Marines returned the fire from “gunmen” who “attacked the convoy with small arms fire.” That contention is now disputed.
Over Memorial Day weekend, American television screens aired parts of the videotape showing bodies of the victims wrapped in blankets as local Iraqis mourned them and carried them from a makeshift morgue in the town.
Also over the weekend, President Bush at West Point compared himself to President Harry Truman in pursuing the Cold War against the Soviet Union, another war that began on an American president?s “watch” and eventually ended with the collapse of our adversary.
But the Cold War was one of containment behind the nuclear shield, not a hot one launched by the American president to rid a foreign country of a dictator not of his liking. And it ended not with conquest but with erosion from within the Soviet Union, as collective action and patience,from the West finally won out.
In any event, the Pentagon?s eventual forthcoming response to the Time investigation is a welcome one. But the incident seems certain to fuel the increasing public pressure for an American draw-down from a war that looks more and more like another version of the old mistake in Vietnam.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
