Vietraq

A poll by the Research Opinion Corporation and broadcast by CNN shows that 58 percent of Americans now believe the Iraq War is turning out like Vietnam.

Gee, d'ya think?

Now that a majority of our citzens are belatedly willing to face facts, I suppose it would be rude to say that some of us could have told them that three and a half years ago, when a concerted effort to head off this disaster might have had some effect.

Sometimes I'm angry and frustrated with my fellow Americans because of their dim and persistent cluelessness. Other times I see them as victims of the blanket of propaganda relentlessly laid on by the corporate news media, who set nonsensical, government-approved parameters on any public debate.

In this case, as with Vietnam, the debate, besides being idiotic, is always about them: was Saddam planning to wipe us out? Did he have those weapons? Is "Islamofascism" a threat to what some jocularly refer to as "American civilization?"

It should be about us instead. Why do we want to turn other countries into clones of ourselves, sort of like mini-me's? I recall that before South Vietnam dissolved into a puddle, it had a President, a Congress, and a cute little Supreme Court -- institutions as relevant to that culture as balls on a duck.

It's time we came to terms with the real problem, which has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or Islamofascism or Communist aggression from Hanoi. The real problem is this: the 400-plus billions we spend each year on "defense." And it's my understanding that this doesn't even include the 94 billion or so we've been spending each year since 2003 on the two wars we have going at the moment.

The war machine is Godzilla in the living room. Our continuing to think of it as normal, despite the prevalence of that opinion, is mass insanity. It's taken us into two idiotic, hubris-generated orgies of destruction in a generation. With over a million Vietnamese dead and now two-thirds of a million Iraqis, isn't it time we took a serious look at ourselves?

"And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, 'Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'

"And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower...And said, 'Now nothing will be withheld from them which they have imagined to do.'" (Genesis 11)

We need a permanent anti-war movement in this country powerful enough to neutralize the corporate media, and to let people know that in maintaining this tower of destruction and carnage, we're not only destroying other parts of the world, we're destroying ourselves.