By Tom Engelhardt
Asia Times
"Some day, we will undoubtedly discover that, in the term "surge" - as in US President George W Bush's "surge" plan (or "new way forward") announced to his nation in January - was the urge to avoid the language (and experience) of the Vietnam War era. As there were to be no "body bags" (or cameras to film them as the dead came home), as there were to be no "body counts" ("We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team" was the way Bush put it), as there were to be no "quagmires", nor the need to search for that "light at the end of the tunnel", so, surely, there were to be no "escalations".
The escalations of the Vietnam War era, which left more than 500,000 American soldiers and vast bases and massive air and naval power in and around Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia), had been thoroughly discredited. Each intensification in the delivery of troops, or simply in ever widening bombing campaigns, led only to more misery and death for the Vietnamese and disaster for the United States. And yet, not surprisingly, the US experience in Iraq - another attempted occupation of a foreign country and culture - has been like a heat-seeking missile heading for the still-burning US memories of Vietnam......."
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