This is getting at the real core historic issues that drive our wars. Or as was Friedman's point, I think, it's such deeper, misperceived issues that make our wars ultimately unwinnable and virtually endless -- because they aren't really about what they seem to be about emotionally.
We will lose Friedman at this point as we delve too deeply into the meta-narratives driving the emotional Middle East quandary.
For example, if we can recognize the anti-colonial, nationalistic truth about the Vietnam War in order to finally move on and if we can even apply that to ISIS and see it as an anti-imperial, nationalistic response to history and, specifically, our invasion and occupation of Iraq, might we apply that anti-colonial reality to other crises?
Palestine was part of a region colonized by Europeans. With the endorsement of the United States and others, Britain passed its mandate of control over Palestine to Zionist Jews. In this process of making whole the Jewish people who had been so horribly decimated by European Christians in Europe were legitimate nationalistic impulses of native Arab peoples ignored and trampled on? Is this why the Israel/Palestine struggle is so intractable? The argument given against the validity of such a narrative reality is to completely ignore it and to present a Darwinian narrative of ethnic struggle and eternal violence. It comes down to winners and losers.
It is said history moves in a dialectic manner: thesis engages with an antithesis and we get a synthesis, which becomes a new thesis, etc, etc. Parting-of-the-fog recognitions like Friedman's are important in this process. If an American consensus could finally get the Vietnam War right and see it less as a moment of glory to desperately hold onto and more as a cautionary tale as to what to avoid, the United States might liberate itself a bit and be freer to move forward. All it took for Friedman, the champion of globalization, was "a week of being love-bombed by [the] Vietnamese," who some of us once wanted to bomb back to the stone age.
Getting free of past quagmires only requires a different state of mind. Without conceding anything in the area of authentic self-defense, in the final analysis, Friedman's recognition about Vietnam shows the long-range wisdom of the peace movement's familiar chant, Make Love Not War.
ADDENDUM
The two images, here, were taken from the front pages of two websites focused on the meaning of the Vietnam War. They are meant to characterize the differing emphases of the two informational websites. The one at left is from the government's well-funded site for its Vietnam War Commemoration Project. It shows a local event in which the Pennsylvania National Guard was awarded an official Vietnam War 50th Anniversary Flag (behind the men) and other items like the framed photograph, which reveals a rather serene image of a commercial airliner of the time in a simpatico relationship with a Vietnamese farmer. The photograph on the right is from the Full Disclosure website and shows a quite different image of Vietnamese peasants. It's what's off camera and what has caused such horror to be registered on the faces of these peasants that Full Disclosure members feel needs to be put into the public record.
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