How are we supposed to learn from history if we can't even agree what that history taught us? Seal Beach's Doug Korthof pointed us to an LA Times story you can find at this link …
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-haig12mar12,1,2499867.story
… where Gen. Al Haig sees parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. So far, so good, because it's as plain as the nose on your tuba that the main parallel is that Americans were not viewed as liberators in Vietnam, as they are not viewed as liberators in Iraq. In both cases, we're viewed as occupiers, and both relatively small, backward country's have histories of dealing with unwanted occupiers.
But that's not the history lesson Haig learned from Vietnam and sees repeated in Iraq. No, he believes the lesson of Vietnam was we did not apply the “full force of the military,” and we're not applying that full lethal force in Iraq either.
Without bringing up “nukes,” which is what “full force of the military” is generally the buzzword for, what on earth could Haig mean? In Vietnam, as in Iraq, we can't even tell the enemy from the friendlies. How you gonna go all full-force on that?
Full force is what we should apply to our exiting this immoral war we created. That'll shock and awe 'em all right!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.