Apparently for naught

As I read and hear about the chaos in Iraq I am taken back to April 30, 1975, the day that Saigon fell to the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Viet Cong). Those of us who protested against the Vietnam War knew that day would eventually come; we may not have known which side would win, but we knew that Vietnam's troubles were internal and that the mighty US of A had no business meddling in them.

Our government learned next to nothing from that debacle. Twenty-eight years later we invaded Iraq, toppled the government and tried to install our version of order on a country that was torn apart by sectarian divisions. Just as we failed in Vietnam, so it is now clear we have failed in Iraq.

And for the slow learners in Washington, it will soon be clear how terribly we have failed in Afghanistan.

When will we learn that we have no right to attack other countries because we don't like the way they do things?

Answer: probably never. I think it is in our psyche to believe that we have all the answers and all the power. The nineteenth century doctrine of Manifest Destiny proclaimed we were special and we had the right, and the duty, to rule over half of the North American continent. We've never renounced that idea but have in fact amplified it. With the end of the Cold War we stood proudly as the one superpower on earth and reacted with indignation to the idea that we could possibly be wrong in any of our actions.

This attitude dovetails perfectly with the frontiersman attitude that gun owners exhibit and goes a long way toward explaining why even the deaths of twenty six-year olds in Newtown, CT, did not force a change in our idiotic and unique attitude towards guns. We are the world's cowboys and we will do whatever the fuck we want, children and innocent victims be damned.

The title of this post comes from a sentence in today's New York Times editorial, Iraq in Peril. "After disbanding Saddam Hussein's army in 2003 after the invasion by coalition forces and dismantling the government, the United States spent years and many billions of dollars building a new Iraqi Army, apparently for naught."

Apparently?

Predictably!