Another Vietnam- / Iraq-war similarity for your list... neither of them graced by any military-age members of the Bush or Cheney families.
Jesus, it's like clowns spilling out of a Volkswagen, isn't it?
I think Hitch is onto a loser, here.
Personally I would prefer to see volkswagens spilling out of a clown. Not that I dislike clowns or anything.
You don't? Good lord. Why ever not?
There's a line on Juan Cole's latest which says:
Gradually the remaining 5,500 British troops in the south are being concentrated near the airport
I'm not sure he quite means it exactly as that sounds. Or maybe he does...
Anyone can do the It Is/It Ain't Vietnam bollocks. What would really impress me is if Hitch would argue both the similarities and the differences between Iraq and the War of Jenkins' Ear.
"No wooden ships firing smooth bore cannons on the Shat-al-Arab, matey boy!"
"Ah yes, but lots of buggery amidst the dunes."
If I recall, some years ago Hitch went out of his way to compare Iraq to the American War of Independence - presumably IEDs are the new muskets, or something...
And Christ, I've just read a news report suggesting that Bush made allusions to The Quiet American.
It's been three years since I read it - can anyone point me towards an interpretation of this that doesn't include "The President has gone gaga"?
Hitch and the American War of Independence? Bless. What a dear he is.
I have occasionally amused myself at parades and historical hoo-haas by approaching costumed reenactors and asking "Who are you supposed to be?"
They usually reply "Minute men".
To which I riposte, "No wonder your wife looks so bloody miserable".
Then I scarper because they have muskets, bayonets and usually no sense of humour.
Wonk wonk!
Personally, I've always wanted to attend a re-enactment of the war on drugs.
I just can't decide which war I want them to re-enact.
Iraq's not really going to be much good for the re-enactors of the future is it? All you'll have on one side, is a load of people who really want to go home without dying, and on the other, some suspicious-looking blokes burying a dustbin with some wires sticking out of it.
Iraq's not really going to be much good for the re-enactors of the future is it?
No, but it's going to be a riot watching the cheerleaders.
I think war reenactors are odd coves. If you like it that much, join the bloody TA, they have old equipment up the ying yang (much like George Melly's young friends used to describe their predicament).
If I had to choose however, I think I'd plump for reenacting the De La Warr pavillion of Bexhill-Upon-Sea.
I dimly recall a story in the National Lampoon, announcing a conclusion to the War on Poverty. You knew it was definitely the end because a last helicopter was shown taking off from the embassy roof.
We didn't have the Onion when we were kids.
can anyone point me towards an interpretation of this that doesn't include "The President has gone gaga"?
I go with the theory that "The President's speech-writing corps has been infiltrated by sly subversives". The next time Bush is prating about the role of religion in American public life, don't be surprised if he manages to invoke the Harry Powell character from "Night of the Hunter".
I wouldn't be surprised if he started banging on about the power of the Dark Side, these days.
In fact, it'd be a relief - at least it'd be out in the open...
Too late.
We also have to work, though, sort of the Dark Side, if you will
-- Dick Cheney, 16 Sept. 2001.
Did he mean the film or was the idea to suggest that the President had read a book?
I believe that's left to the apparatchiks, Justin...
Hitchens is really shaky about his history, by the way.
Hitchens:
The Vietminh, later the Vietnamese NLF, were allies of the United States and Britain against the Axis during the Second World War. The Iraqi Baath party was on the other side
Reality: The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was founded in 1945. The Vietminh became the People's Army of Viet Nam, not the NLF.
Hitchens: Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in proclaiming Vietnam's own declaration of independence, a note that has hardly been struck in Baathist or jihadist propaganda.
Reality: Ho did indeed do this, but it was utterly hypocritical of him to do so, because he had been a hard line Communist for the previous twenty years, even having moved to China to serve with Mao's army.
Hitchens: Vietnam was resisting French colonialism and had defeated it by 1954 at Dien Bien Phu; the real 'war' was therefore over before the US even landed troops in the country
Reality: this is a point of analogy, not disanalogy.
Hitchens: The subsequent conflict was fought to preserve an imposed partition of a country striving to reunify itself; if anything, the Iraqi case is the reverse
Reality: Of course the South of Vietnam (former Cochin China) did not want to be reunified with the North. This was not just because the North Vietnamese were insane, brutal, Chinese-backed totalitarians (although they were). Vietnam had never really been governed as a single state in anything like its modern boundaries. A glance at a map showing the bloody great mountain range in the middle shows why.
(continued)
Hitchens:The Vietnamese leadership appealed to the UN: the Saddamists and their jihadist allies murdered the first UN envoy to arrive in Iraq, saying that he was fit only for death because he had assisted in securing the independence of East Timor from Indonesia
Reality: No they didn't. The North Vietnamese always planned to win on the battlefield. The United Nations occasionally sponsored peace talks, but the Vietnamese were, oddly enough, not inclined to waste much time in jurisprudence.
Hitchens: Vietnam never threatened any other country; Iraq under Saddam invaded two of its neighbours and declared one of them (Kuwait) to be part of Iraq itself
Reality: Vietnam regularly invaded Laos and Cambodia, using them as bases and supply lines and dragging Cambodia into the war.
Hitchens:Vietnam was a victim of chemical and ecological warfare; Iraq was the perpetrator of such illegal methods and sought to develop even worse nuclear and biological ones
Reality: The North Vietnamese used punji stakes, which are biological weapons. They also pioneered the use of ecological warfare in their attempted genocide of the hill tribes. They really were very nasty people indeed.
Hitchens: Vietnam neither sponsored nor encouraged terrorist tactics beyond its borders; Iraq under Saddam was a haven for Abu Nidal and other random killers and its 'insurgents' now proclaim war on Hindus, Jews, unbelievers and the wrong sort of Muslim
Reality: The entire point of the Vietnam War was the theory that Vietnam aimed to destabilise the rest of IndoChina, and at the time the US was full of people making all sorts of ill formed and unspecific claims just like that one Hitchens just made.
(continued)
Hitchens: There has for years been a 'people's war' fought by genuine guerrillas in Iraq; it is the war of liberation conducted by Kurdish fighters against genocide and dictatorship. Inconveniently for all analogies, these fighters are ranged on the side of the US and Britain.
Reality: At least there are no specific claims about Vietnam in this one. I note, however, that there were plenty of guerillas on the side of the US in Vietnam, not least the heroic Montagnards (the survivors of the genocidal policies of the North Vietnamese among the hill tribes).
Hitchens: The Iraqi Communist party and the Iraqi labour movement advocated the overthrow of Saddam (if not necessarily by Bush), a rather conspicuous difference from the situation in Indochina
Reality: It is an utter calumny on the Iraqi Communist Party to claim that they are similar to the 1970s Vietnamese Communist Party. The idea that "not necessarily by Bush" is a minor point of detail in Hitchens' attempt to claim support from Iraqi trade unions is surely whimsical.
Hitchens: The American-sponsored regimes in Vietnam tended, among other things, to be strongly identified with one confessional minority (Catholic) to the exclusion of secular, nationalist and Buddhist forces. The elected government in Iraq may have a sectarian hue, but at least it draws upon hitherto repressed majority populations - Kurds and Shias - and at least the American embassy works as a solvent upon religious and ethnic divisions rather than an inciter of them.
Reality: This is horseshit and at least Hitchens basically admits it.
Hitchens: President Eisenhower admitted that if there had ever been a fair election in Vietnam, it would have been won by Ho Chi Minh
Reality: Ho died in 1969 and was not actively involved in the war from the mid sixties onwards. Eisenhower stopped being President in 1961. This is like talking about the Iraq War in terms of what Margaret Thatcher said about the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Hitchens: The Americans in Vietnam employed methods ('search and destroy'; 'body count') and weapons (napalm, Agent Orange) that targeted civilians. Today, those who make indiscriminate war on the innocent show their hand on the streets of Baghdad and are often the proxies of neighbouring dictatorships or of international gangster organisations
Reality: As early as 1958, the Viet Cong had murdered as many as 20% of all village leaders in the South.
The summary here is that Vietnamese Communism was really bad. Awfully, genocidally bad. The US claim to be supporting a fledgling democracy against totalitarian murderers was much better than it is now. And it was still correct to be against the Vietnam War.
Hitchens: is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.
Reality: Hitchens is a tit.
Jesus Dsquared, I suspected Hitch was being a little fast and loose with the facts, but that's quite a catalogue. If you're correct, this column is even more fatuous than his Lancet survey one...
(My knowledge of the Vietnam war is pretty much limited to Tim O'Brien books, fanboy military hardware sites and treasonous Hollywood movies.)
The Spanish might not agree, but the world would have been spared a lot of hassle if there had been a Spanish Civil War Reenactment Society. It would have given Hitchens his opportunity to dress up as George Orwell and play Homage to Catalonia to his heart's content, rather than cheer-leading for a substitute war in Mesopotamia.
It was a liberation -- we won't have it called an invasion.
Quite right, nyomythus - cuddle of freedom sounds better.
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