The Fromson File

MORE BLAH BLAH: Migod, here we go again. The Vietnam scenario revisited! In the past week, a new generation of American generals has told the press in Iraq that not only have their forces uncovered a large number of enemy cells. They also have pounced on dozens and dozens of enemy documents that will prove be a bonanza for American intelligence. It was a theme repeated ad nauseum in Saigon that caused eyes to roll in the Five O’Clock Follies, the nightly press briefing in the Rex Hotel. When these disclosures arrived from Baghdad, I could not help remembering a triumphant General William Westmoreland exiting a helicopter in the town of Cu Chi to stride to what he proclaimed was was the headquarters of the Viet Cong. It was a“now we’ve got “em where we want ‘em” kind of boast- that made front page news in the U.S. the following day and dominated the network news programs that evening. But the war went on for years after. That was one of the innumerable myths we heard throughout the war. But once the shooting stopped, American politicians and generals assured the nation they would never again repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. Re-assuring stuff for those of us who witnessed those mistakes first hand. But bam! The next generation seems to be plunging ahead toward the same dead end in Iraq, buoyed by the same dreary assertions of more than three decades ago. This is neither a Republican or Democratic issue. But the Democrats seem to be afflicted by AMD or what I call Attention Memory Disorder. They signed on to President Bush’s war on Iraq the same way they enlisted in Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. In both cases, they accepted the President’s word without first demanding an independent investigation by the Congress. Did the Democrats forget or merely choose to ignore the grim lesson of the ill-fated Tonkin Gulf Resolution that the U.S. Senate endorsed approved almost unanimously in 1964. To wage war, the American people should be shown conclusively that it was necessary to safeguard U.S. national security. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has never made that case convincingly. Discounting the exploitation of 9/11 by the Administration, there is insufficient evidence that Iraq was or is now a sponsor of the terrorism that justified unilateral U.S. action. No one doubts that the fanatical, frustrated, angry young men who carried out the 9/11 horror were filled with rage and hatred for Americans and the United States as well as their own governments. That fury could be traced to the Cold War when our fear of communism prompted Washington to support, arm and enrich corrupt, authoritarian governments in the Middle East that repressed the kind of people who eventually shocked the world at Ground Zero. However,not one Iraqi was among the 9/11 hijackers. Now, so many years after the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, the politicians and the experts who never really understood what we were up against in Vietnam have found a new ism to scare us half to death, substituting one devil for another, i.e. terrorism for communism.