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August 22, 2007
Iraq is Nothing Like Vietnam/Oh Yes it Is – The Front Man
By Michael Bonanno
Like sands through an hour glass, so will be the wars of our lives.
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There are too many countries on the planet with too many various forms of governance for any one nation, no matter how large and powerful, to attempt to cookie cut the entire planet in its image.But this isn’t what Iraq is all about at all, is it? It’s been reported that there are at least three small city sized American military bases in Iraq from which Iraqis of any social class are forbidden. We have built small American cities in what used to be the sovereign nation of another people.
There is a definite pattern developing here.
First, Western Europeans slaughtered the rightful occupants of the land we now call The Americas, moved westward, building states and cities as they moved. In the process, they murdered and, ultimately, pounded the indigenous people who survived into the lowest class of citizen in a land that was rightly theirs.
We did the same in Cuba when two “great white fathers” fought each other for the right to debase and torture and abuse those for whom Cuba was a rightful home.
In South Korea, the Koreans became the “subjects” of the intruding Americans. In this case, they had a choice of relenting to a “great white father” or a “great yellow father”. Nonetheless, Koreans were, and still are, second class citizens in their own country. The only difference is that the “industrial” part of the military/industrial complex has spelled the military part.
In Vietnam, there were Vietnamese owned establishments into which what Americans called “Gooks” were not allowed to enter. Multinational corporations, with the blessing of the government, have since made a deal with that former “enemy” to use the inhabitants of that country as slave labor for those very same multinational corporations, as they have with so many totalitarian governments. Middle class and poor American families paid a high price to ensure that the average Vietnamese would remain poor at best and in squalor at worse. Who won that war? The totalitarian Vietnamese government and The Corporacracy won that war.George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The middle class American who believed the unbelievable that puked from the mouths of The Regime prior to March of 2003 either forgot the past or never learned about it. They are now paying the same high price for the benefit of the same Corporacracy.
The Front Man may have sounded stupid with today’s speech, but, no matter how stupid he sounds and no matter how many people the polls show disagree with The Regime’s policies, especially in how it’s proceeding in Iraq, 35-40% still agree with it and that’s frightening. Much of that number comes from the middle class, the very people who are suffering the most for invisible weapons of mass destruction which morphed into an impossible conspiracy between Iraq and Al Qaeda to pull off 9/11 which, in turn, has morphed into bringing liberty to people on whose land The FUSA (The Former United States of America) is building city sized military bases that bar Iraqis from entering.Before he said that this war was like Vietnam, The Front Man said that this Iraq was a different kind of war and not like Vietnam at all. He was right both times.
First, it’s like Vietnam, the wars mentioned above and other wars that have preceded this one in that the poor man fights for the rich man’s rights.
Unlike Nam, this is the kind of war which will last forever in spite of which leg of The Corporacracy’s pair of pants, the blue leg or red leg, is installed as leader of The FUSA. It’s different in that we and those we leave behind may never again have to wait 30 or 40 years for another war based upon lies.Like sands through an hour glass, so will be the wars of our lives.
Michael Bonanno is an associate editor for OpEdNews.
He is also a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's government's job to help the needy and that leaving the people's well being to the so called "private sector" is social suicide.