Crapocalypse Now Redux

Check out this NYT article on G-Dub in Hanoi:

Mr. Bush spoke of driving by the lake where Senator John McCain’s plane crashed nearly 40 years ago, focusing less on Mr. McCain’s long imprisonment afterward than on the fact that “he was, literally, saved, in one way, by the people pulling him out.”

Thank you so fucking much for “saving” Senator McCain, and by saving I mean:

On October 26, 1967, McCain's A-4 Skyhawk was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile, landing in Truc Bach Lake. He broke both arms and a leg after ejecting from his plane. After he regained consciousness, a mob gathered around him and stripped him of his clothing. He was then tortured by Vietnamese soldiers, who bayonetted him in his left foot and groin. His shoulder was crushed by a rifle butt. He was then transported to the Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton. Once McCain arrived at the Hanoi Hilton, he was placed in a cell and interrogated daily. When McCain refused to provide any information to his captors, he was beaten until he lost consciousness. Alexander, Paul (2002). John McCain: Man of the People

McCain, who unlike Bush, was an actual combat pilot and a damn good one at that, withstood torture upon torture in the name of his country, yet Bush is willing to dismiss all that by calling his captors saviors. I cannot even begin to tell you how disgusted I am by that.

The story continues, however:

For Mr. Bush, who had never set foot in Vietam before, this visit is something of a tightrope walk. America’s defeat here is increasingly being mentioned in comparison with how Iraq may turn out, and Mr. Bush was careful to stress that in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, defeat is not an option for the United States.

Yes – clearly defeat was an obvious option in Vietnam from the start. That is exactly what the administration said throughout that conflict. Oh wait, no – we lost sixty thousand soldiers believing in our just and infallible cause to democratize and liberate a foreign nation, and then eventually realized this may not have been such a hot idea. Whoops. Can we at least say we’re fighting for Oil or something else worth dying for? The people need a real material cause.

I also like the statement that Stanley Kranow makes in the end:

The easy summation is that Vietnam began as a guerrilla war and escalated into an orthodox war — by the end we were fighting in big units. Iraq starts as a conventional war, and has degenerated into a guerrilla war. It has gone in an opposite direction. And it’s much more difficult to deal with.

We “won” the war in a matter of weeks. It was our incessant need to promote democracy and autonomy of the indigenous people rather than imposing strict martial law and a puppet dictator with an army of primarily local soldiers (and I hope by now the US has learned how to properly keep one restrained) that kept us there, suffering casualties as we try to gently pacify people who never wanted us there in the first place. Whichever party you affiliate with (although perhaps especially for us Libertarians) it's getting ever easier to lose faith in the government.