As the bombs fell, another video began airing, lacking the overproduction Hollywood glitz for which ISIS has bcome known, but, instead, offered up a simple stripped down "lecture" by British hostage John Cantlie who says he is a doing it because his government abandoned him and he has no choice.
While it surely is a propaganda effort, Cantlie, makes a point that most of our media has not had the guts to make, saying, quite sensibly and in an understated way, "In this program, we'll see how the Western Governments are hastily marching towards all-out war in Iraq and Syria without paying any heed to the lessons of the recent past."
And
then, the V-word was introduced for the first time: "Not since Vietnam have we
witnessed such a potential mess in the making."
Interestingly, a day earlier, I had an email from the Vietnamese-American filmmaker, Tiana, who is finishing a film on Vietnam's victorious General Giap who held off the foreign invaders and turned the tide against them.
Tiana was asking for my advice on how to present the enormous scale of the body count after the first invasion. There were 500,000 deaths among the French forces, including civilians and the African people they brought to fight for them in a defense of colonialism that the US supported first with money, then, threats of nuclear war and, finally, with over 60,000 American lives.
Remember that the U.S. escalation in Vietnam came during the Presidency of a "liberal" Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, just as this war (or show of war) is being launched by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama. (Don't forget that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel for his role as a peacemaker in that carnage, while his counterpart, the Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, rejected and denounced the Prize.)
There are analysts who believe that by reacting they way Washington is to ISIS, the U.S. is actually playing into their script and building their prestige.
Ultimately, this is a propaganda war, not just a military conflict. It is to influence the direction of the Arab World. We have already seen interviews with ordinary people in Iraq who say that government backed troops there have been more brutal to them than ISIS. They don't feel like they have many good options.
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