Empire of Stupidity

by Tom Engelhardt

".....Whatever brief respite his August embrace of Vietnam may have given him in the polls, it involved a larger concession on the administration's part. Like its predecessors, the Bush administration and its neocon supporters simply couldn't kick the "Vietnam Syndrome" – much as they struggled to do so – any more than a moth could avoid the flame. Now, they found themselves locked in a desperate, hopeless attempt to use Vietnam to recapture the hearts and minds of the American people.

It's possible to track this losing struggle with the Vietnam analogy over these last years. Take one issue –- the body count – on which we know something about administration Vietnam thinking. For Americans of the Vietnam era, a centuries-old "victory culture" – in which triumph on some distant frontier against evil enemies was considered an American birthright – still held sway. In Vietnam, when it nonetheless became clear that the promised frontier victory was, for the second time in little more than a decade, nowhere in sight, American military and civilian officials tried to compensate.

One problem they faced was that the very definition of victory in war – the taking of terrain, the advance into hostile territory that signaled the crushing of enemy resistance – had ceased to mean anything in Vietnam. In a guerrilla war in which, as American grunts regularly complained, you couldn't tell friends from enemies, no less hold a hostile countryside, something else had to substitute for the landing at D-Day, the advance on Berlin, the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. And so the "whiz kids" of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Pentagon and the military high command developed a substitute numerology of victory.

Everything was to be counted and the copious statistics of success were to flow endlessly up the chain of command and back to Washington, proof positive that "progress" was being made......

Jump almost five years to October 2006 and a president thoroughly frustrated by an inability to show "progress" in his war of choice, despite proclaiming that "major combat operations in Iraq" had "ended" in May 2003 and presenting a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq in November 2005. In an outburst to a group of sympathetic conservative journalists, he revealed just how much he yearned for the return of the body count: "We don't get to say that – a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it," he exclaimed in frustration.

And why exactly couldn't the president reveal that figure – of which he was inordinately proud – to the American people? "We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team," was what Bush told the assembled journalists and pundits, indicating in the process how much conscious planning for Iraq as the not-Vietnam had actually taken place in the White House as well as the Pentagon......."