REWRITING HISTORY

Nations have a habit of rewriting history in their favour or ignoring their failures and cruelties.

It would appear that Abu Ghraib is unexceptional and the torture at Abu Ghraib is part of a long standing tradition.

See Cruel Allied Occupiers By Patricia Meehan After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh

It is also the case that old patterns and mistakes are being repeated.

Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007

And in the same edition http://www.nybooks.com review of Less Safe Less Free

And Review Good War Gone Bad By Richard J. Bernstein The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam Hyperion, 719 pp., $35.

There are separate but related military similarities between the two wars as well. What The Best and the Brightest did was introduce the American public to the notion that generals and politicians who ought to know better can deny the simple reality that others, journalists and foot soldiers alike, can see. In showing their mistakes in Vietnam, journalists like Halberstam and others (among them Neil Sheehan, author of A Bright Shining Lie, [2] the best book I've read on Vietnam) created a new type of adversarial military journalism in America. In Vietnam the seemingly willful and, in retrospect, outrageous assurances of figures like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and such field commanders as Paul Harkins and William Westmoreland led much of the public to ignore the corruption, the crackpot authoritarianism, and the unpopularity of the side the United States was supporting in the war, and to think, quite falsely, that it was gaining ground against the enemy. In Korea the US underestimated its opponents, both North Korea and China, seeing them as primitive and weak, when, in fact, they were skilled, tough, and brave. The corresponding fault was to overestimate the impact that the US armed forces would have—to believe in a sort of shock-and-awe effect that, as was to be the case later in Iraq, didn't exist.

Vietnam was also largely a wicked war based on false premises and lies see Seymour Hersh The Dark Side of Camelot. The neocons are now suggesting that the US could have stayed.  The fact is that US was soundly beaten but only after dreadful cruelty and ecocide.  This included the illegal war against Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger, in which 1.2 million Cambodians were murdered and Cambodia bombed into the natavistic convulsions of Pol Pot (William Shawcross Sideshow. The problem is the new generations are ignorant of the past and grow up to be used as a new generation of cannon fodder.

In Korea the US failed to understand sheer weight of the opposition.

In the Vietnam War the US could not withstand the anticolonial manpower of the Vietnamese liberation army.

The Iraq war was based on the lies about WMD and a delusion that the US would be welcomed with open arms.  The neocons undeterred by their failure in Iraq seem to be deluded into believing that the people of Iran will welcome a devastating attack with open arms.