"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." -- George Santayana
I can't tell you how many times I've had a conversation with other activist veterans from "The Sixties" (roughly, from the Civil Rights struggles of the late-1950s through the anti-Vietnam War mid-'70s), where variations of the same unbelieving lament is expressed:
"I never thought I'd have to do this all over again!
"I'm marching in the streets against yet another lying, incompetent administration. I thought we Americans would have learned history's lesson by now that absent an imminent war coming our way, we should not invade and occupy other countries, especially when we don't speak their language and haven't got a clue about the social, religious and ethnic complexities at work in those cultures.
"If we invade and occupy under those circumstances, the best we can hope for is a quagmire, a stalemated war that seems to go on forever. I thought our leaders would have figured out that nationalists under attack have more endurance for such wars than we have for fighting and not 'winning' them."
Certainly, we activist veterans learned those lessons, as, in a sense, did Bush#1, who got in and out of Iraq quickly in the first Gulf War. But the current crop of America's leaders -- the reckless BushCheneyRoveRumsfeld crew, their GOP lackeys in the Congress, and the corporate-owned mass-media outlets -- behave as if history has no relevance to their actions. No wonder so many American historians and ordinary citizens rate Bush as the worst president of all time.
'NAM & IRAQ -- A WORLD OF QUAGMIRES
In Vietnam, a small country that had successfully resisted invaders for centuries, the technologically-superior U.S. military was fought to a standstill by a rag-tag guerrilla army that was disciplined, determined, infinitely creative -- and, most importantly, fighting on their own soil.
Five American presidents had been told by their best Pentagon and Southeast Asia experts that there was no way that the U.S. military could prevail in Vietnam, that the best they could hope for if they invaded and occupied the country was endless stalemate. "Victory" was out of the question.
But each of those presidents, acting out of personal arrogance and a badly-flawed belief system, thought he would be the one to achieve victory, and so each of them kept taking the U.S. deeper and deeper into the quagmire. Truman supported the French in hanging on to Vietnam; Eisenhower OKd taking over from the defeated French forces; Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson kept sending more "advisors" and then hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops down the 'Nam rathole. (Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, we learned decades later, knew as early as 1967 that Vietnam was unwinnable, but the slaughter went on for eight more years!)
FAULTY BELIEFS STILL ALIVE
Among the faulty beliefs underlying America's tendency toward foreign misadventures:
* that military superiority in terms of technology and firepower guarantees that the U.S. will never be defeated.
* that American "exceptionalism" -- roughly, that God favors America over all others and thus will protect its enterprises -- will work its magic.
* that colonialism is still a viable model for how the world should be governed, with the weak "third-world" nations being at the mercy of the strong industrialized ones.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
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