Robert Kaiser, WaPo reporter who covered the Vietnam War for 18 months, bemoans that the US has made historical blunders twice, first in Vietnam, now in Iraq. He does lots of hand-wringing about US mistakes, but nowhere does he ask why does the US invade so many countries.
Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders, who did not see their country’s fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.
Drat those confounded ‘local politicians’ who don’t follow orders. Who do they think they are, elected officials from another country or something like that! Implicit in this arrogance is an almost complete unawareness of why the US lost in Vietnam and is losing in Iraq. Insurgencies emerged because the people grew tired of US invasion and then drove the US out. But mainstream media rarely if ever explores that issue or wonders why insurgents fight back. Why? Because, among other reasons, doing so would raise some unpleasant questions about why the US invades countries.
So, it’s better to bash insurgencies as being rag-tag terrorists and scold leaders of occupied nations for not being properly submissive than it is to question the motives of the US ruling class and ask why the US gets itself into so many losing wars and is rapidly becoming a pariah nation in the rest of the world.