If Iraq like Vietnam, why's there no Coppola movie?
LINWOOD BARCLAY
The White House is mightily cheesed off at suggestions Iraq has turned into some sort of Vietnam for George W. Bush.
When Senator Ted Kennedy made that comment — and he wasn't exactly the first to make or think it — the Bush administration was dismissive. They said it was about what you could expect from a pal of John Kerry, the guy who's got the Democratic presidential nomination in the bag and hopes to defeat Bush this November.
And Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld even got into a debate with an uppity reporter over the definition of "quagmire," something Vietnam might have been, he said, but Iraq certainly is not.
Fact is, the White House says, there are a number of substantive differences between the war in Iraq, and the war in Vietnam. To prove its point, it has released a list of them:
Iraq is over here, and Vietnam is way, way over here, to the right.
Francis Ford Coppola hasn't made a movie about Iraq. He hasn't even started casting.
During the Vietnam War, while the country's young people were being sent into battle, rich Americans back home had to do without huge tax cuts. Not this time! Today, well-to-do Americans don't have to make any sort of financial sacrifices — in fact, they're coming out ahead! — while the country's young men and women are being sent into harm's way.
There were lots of protest songs written about Vietnam, like "Give Peace a Chance" by John Lennon, "Bring 'Em Home" by Pete Seeger, and "The Story of Isaac" by Leonard Cohen, but hardly any protest songs about Iraq have been recorded yet by major artists.
Uh, hello? Did you ever hear anyone talking about huge oil reserves in Vietnam?
As the war in Vietnam dragged on and seemed more and more hopeless, the United States was forced to send over thousands more troops to try to get a handle on the situation, but today ... whoa, hang on, let's just move on to the next item.
A few weeks after the war in Vietnam began, the president at the time wasn't able to land on an aircraft carrier and declare "Mission accomplished!", now was he?
Vietnam was not hiding weapons of mass destruction, was not actively developing biological and chemical and nuclear weapons, and did not have missiles that it could launch in 90 seconds, unlike the nation of Ir--. Actually, again, let's go on to the next item.
Okay, say "Iraq." Now say "Vietnam." Do it again. Two syllables, three syllables. They share a couple of vowels, and that's it.
Vietnam was not preparing to attack the United States but, as we knew way back in early 2003, based on our impeccable intelligence resources, Saddam Hussein was getting ready to ... look, you're not going to believe this, but maybe you should scratch this one off the list, as well.
Vietnam had lots and lots of jungles, and Iraq does not.
The United States didn't actually start the Vietnam War. So there!
In Vietnam, the U.S. didn't end up finding, in a hidey-hole, the very guy who was in no way responsible for a major attack on U.S. soil.
The presidents who presided over the Vietnam War never had their picture taken with the troops while holding a fake turkey.
During the Vietnam War, you'd never have seen stodgy ol' President Johnson or humourless President Nixon at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner, doing a funny slide show that mocked their intentions in Vietnam, unlike our current president, who can, incredibly, find some yucks in invading a country — and leaving thousands dead in the process — to find something it turns out was never even there.
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E-mail Linwood Barclay at lbarclay@thestar.ca. |
