Neocons Lash Out at Europe

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and there was some coverage of the Vietnam war and Vietnam today. Very few journalists were willing to point out some of the parallels between Vietnam and the war in Iraq, even though Iraq exploded with new violence these last few days.  One exception was Harald Neuber, writing in Telepolis about the Vietnam-Phantom:

Die amtierende US-Regierung will von etwaigen Parallelen zwischen dem aktuellen Feldzug und dem Vietnam-Krieg verständlicherweise nichts wissen. Tatsache aber ist, dass der Widerstand im eigenen Land langsam zunimmt. Jüngst erst wies Frank Newport, der Chef des US-Umfrageinstitutes Gallup Poll, auf die ablehnende Haltung gegen beide Kriege hin. Seit Sommer 1968, so Newport, habe sich die Meinung in der US-Bevölkerung immer deutlicher durchgesetzt, der Vietnam-Krieg sei ein Fehler gewesen. Seit damals hätten dies zwölf Umfragen bestätigt. Beim letzten Meinungsbild im November 2000 haben 68 Prozent der befragten US-Bürger den damaligen Krieg als falsch verurteilt.

Support for the US occupation of Iraq is eroding within the US even though, as Neuber points out, the mainstream media have failed to report accurately on what is going on there. 

Während Redaktionen aus aller Welt in Vietnam ein dichtes Korrespondentennetz unterhielten, weist die Irak-Karte heute, journalistisch betrachtet, zahlreiche weiße Flecken auf. Aus Falludscha etwa sind auch fast sechs Monate nach der US-Offensive kaum Bilder zu sehen. Und schließlich geht es um die eigenen Todesopfer: Erst unter massivem Druck der Öffentlichkeit musste das Pentagon aufgrund des Informationsfreiheitsgesetzes, Hunderte von Bilder von Soldatensärgen zu veröffentlichen – zum ersten Mal seit dem Vietnam-Krieg.

So it is only a matter of time before the political and human costs of the insurgency in Iraq become too great for Americans to endure and they turn against continued US involvement there. 

The neocons in the Bush administration and in the press can sense that the tide of public opinion is turning against them, and are already casting about for scapegoats. In their worldview, the US military was "stabbed in the back"  in Vietnam by the liberal media and left-wing antiwar movement who prevented an American victory there, and now they are preparing for a new Dolchstosslegende for Iraq.  This time, Old Europe appears to be a convenient target for their attacks.

The EU is well past being merely silly, as its vast complex of bureaucrats tries to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think. Its biggest concerns are three: figuring out how its nations are to keep paying billions of euros to retirees, unemployed, and assorted other entitlement recipients; how to continue to ankle-bite the United States without antagonizing it to the degree that these utopians might have to pay for their own security; and how not to depopulate itself out of existence. Europeans sold Saddam terrible arms for oil well after the first Gulf War. Democratic Israel or Taiwan means nothing to them; indeed, democracy is increasingly becoming the barometer by which to judge European hostility. Cuba, China, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah — not all that bad; the United States, Taiwan, and Israel, not all that good. Personally, I’d rather live in a country that goes into an anguished national debate over pulling the plug on a lone woman than one that blissfully vacations on the beach oblivious to 15,000 elderly cooked to well done back in Paris.

As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, we can expect more anti-European rhetoric coming from the conservative press in the US.