Peacesource

MYTH AS A CHARTER FOR ACTION A FORM OF LYING

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.
This seems to me to certifiably out of touch with reality. The most dangerous of all is: Norman Podhoretz
 
Podhoretz gained a reputation while at Commentary for overusing Holocaust imagery to describe contemporary events. Remarking on Podhoretz's work, Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, writes: "Once one starts using imagery from that most extreme of events, it becomes impossible to say anything moderate, balanced, or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole ... Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society had not learned 'the lessons of the Holocaust.'" This preoccupation also found expression in neoconservatives' views on Israel. As Decter once wrote while criticizing politicians whom she felt were not sufficiently supportive of Israel: "In a world full of ambiguities and puzzlements, one thing is absolutely easy both to define and locate: that is the Jewish interest. The continued security—and in those happy places where the term applies, well-being—of the Jews, worldwide, rests with a strong, vital, prosperous, self-confident United States" (cited in Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, p. 165).
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1320
Podhoretz, called the “creepiest” man in DC, and now a chief advisor to Rudy Giuliani, advocates WW IV (on the Middle East) in his new book.  Which has no footnotes or sources because those are irrelevant and ‘faux authority’.
 "World War IV," Norman Podhoretz argues that the "war against Islamofascism" currently being waged by the Bush administration is as important for our country to engage in as World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.  He defends the Bush administration's dual policies of preemption and democratization and says that past presidents of both parties have failed to recognize the importance of going on the offensive in the battle against Islamic extremism.  Mr. Podhoretz discusses his book with Charles Peña, senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism."  “
Watch this interview on Cspan:

http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ID=8679&SN=After Words

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This links with Iran and the rewriting of history. 

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