From the Google cache.
From a time when George W Bush himself did not yet compare the Iraq war to the Vietnam war, as he does now.
Bush on Iraq war echoes LBJ on Vietnam, 1967
Linking: 12
Date: 9/21/05 at 7:18PM
Mood: Thinking Playing: War, by Edwin Starr
From Associated Press:
WASHINGTON Sep 21, 2005 — Bush officials bristle at the suggestion the war in Iraq might look anything like Vietnam.
Yet just as today’s anti-war protests recall memories of yesteryear, President Bush’s own words echo those of President Johnson in 1967, a pivotal year for the U.S. in Vietnam.
“America is committed to the defense of South Vietnam until an honorable peace can be negotiated,” Johnson told the Tennessee Legislature on March 15, 1967.
Despite the obstacles to victory, the president said, “We shall stay the course.”
After 14 Marines died in a roadside bombing on Aug. 3, Bush declared: “We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq.
And the job is this: We’ll help the Iraqis develop a democracy.”
According to the BBC:
Former foreign secretary [Conservative] Sir Malcolm Rifkind has meanwhile called Iraq a bigger “disaster” than Vietnam.
Sir Malcolm said Tony Blair should resign as prime minister over the issue of Iraq as it was “widely recognised” he went to war “on a false prospectus“.
There is a parallel with not just 40 years, but also with 64 years ago.
The “doth protest too much”, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, style denials of any parallel between the Iraq and Vietnam wars remind me somewhat of November 1943 in the nazi occupied Netherlands.
Then, nazis put up posters everywhere with the slogan “1943 is not 1918”.
Indeed, in 1943 the German army did not yet suffer a final defeat like in 1918.
However, in 1945 the defeat would be much more devastating than in 1918.
Iraqi refugees today, January 2007: here.
How the Bush administration sold the war – and we bought it. We knew WMD intelligence was flawed, but there was a larger failure of officials, media and public to halt the neocon juggernaut: here.
This 1967 music video is the song ‘Superbird’ against Johnson’s Vietnam war, by Country Joe and the Fish.
Related articles
- Ursula Rozum: Why we interrupted President Obama’s speech (syracuse.com)
- War Against Syria Would Be The Least Popular War In American History (washingtonsblog.com)
- WATCH: Colin Powell Calls Out Cheney For Iraq Mistake (huffingtonpost.com)
- Nathan Gardels: Hans Blix: Whether Obama in Syria or Bush in Iraq, The US Is Not the World Police (huffingtonpost.com)
- DOJ Pursues Immunity for Bush and Six Others for Iraq War Crimes (thestateweekly.com)
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
It Takes a Potemkin Village*
by FRANK RICH
The New York Times
Dec. 11, 2005
WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin
village is all. Since we don’t get honest information from this White
House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers’
fictions to discern what’s really happening. What we’re seeing now is
the wheels coming off: As the administration’s stagecraft becomes more
baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The
propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come
off as pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as
much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32
months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end
of “major combat operations” in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need
for only a single elegant banner declaring “Mission
Accomplished.” Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper
sticker, “Plan for Victory,” multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly
every square inch of the rather “Queer Eye” stage set from which Mr.
Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics – and
despite the repetition of the word “victory” 15 times in the speech
itself – Americans believed “Plan for Victory” far less than they once
did “Mission Accomplished.” The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since
the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25
percent of Americans say the president has “a clear plan for victory in
Iraq.” Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger
constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush’s “Plan for Victory” speech was, of course, the usual
unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme – “We will never accept
anything less than complete victory” – was being contradicted even as he
spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop
withdrawals between next week’s Iraqi elections and the more important
(for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The
specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi
troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar “was
primarily led by Iraqi security forces” – a fairy tale immediately
unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle’s
front lines, as “completely wrong.” No less an authority than the office
of Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a
59-page report documenting his own military’s inadequate leadership,
equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone
except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely
assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual
errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more
revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the “Plan for Victory”
show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that
the administration’s main stated motive for the address – the release of
a 35-page document laying out a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”
– was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed
with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was
“an unclassified version” of the strategy in place since the war’s
inception in “early 2003.” But Scott Shane of The New York Times told
another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the
document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text “usually
hidden from public view.” What turned up was the name of the document’s
originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started
advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an
expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know
that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory
is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That
solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in
charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen
this “National Strategy” before its public release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the “Plan for Victory” speech fell on
the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another
front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department
contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists
to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel
and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm’s way
are desperate for Arabic translators of their
own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad
daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that at least
one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent since
early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam’s
W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help
disseminate happy talk to his own country’s press to further the
illusion that the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group’s articles (e.g., “The Sands Are Blowing Toward a
Democratic Iraq”) are not without their laughs – for us, if not for the
Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations
are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of
Mr. Bush’s speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the
Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at
once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon
spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the
identical answer to the many press queries. We don’t have the facts,
they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles
themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers’ money for
various Lincoln Group operations, and it can’t get any facts? Though the
30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey,
fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in
Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at
least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived
and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered
that Mr. Bailey “was a founder and active participant in Lead21,” a
Republican “fund-raising and networking operation” – which has since
scrubbed his name from its Web site – and that he and a partner in his
ventures once listed a business address identical to their Washington
residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in
commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative
U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from “Syriana” or
“Glengarry Glen Ross.” While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly
continue their search for “the facts,” what we
know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of “Lay, DeLay
and Abramoff.”
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we
see it’s failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much
as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad
decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives
(among them Ari Fleischer’s brother), so the White House doesn’t exactly
get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake
news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was
less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy
sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had
troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers
throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost
instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch
and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as
did last weekend’s Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja
on a “routine foot patrol.” As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski
told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the
fallen’s loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after
being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn’t know that its jig is up, everyone else
does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it
was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners
confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice’s daily
clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are
contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions
leave her mouth. And the president’s latest Iraq speeches – most
recently about the “success” stories of Najaf and Mosul – still don’t
stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey
released last week was Mr. Bush’s approval rating for the one area where
things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points
higher than his rating on Iraq. It’s a measure of the national cynicism
bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices
at the pump, is no longer believing.
LikeLike
RE: USA: war in Iraq supporter becomes opponent
Posted by:
armonia
ModBlogs
armonia’s ModBlog
Date: 06/07/05 at 5:44 PM
i have a friend hes also my ex bf, he was in iraq, and i told him that he could come to here and have a new life, and he did it, he saw a lot of his friends dyin, i know hes a deserter now, but hes alive and even if i dont talk anymore with him im just glad for him because his living his life now, hes on my city and living a new life, theres a lot of ppl dyin and thats not fair.
RE: USA: war in Iraq supporter becomes opponent
Posted by:
dearkitty
Date: 06/07/05 at 6:02 PM
Thanks for your contribution, armonia! Many people like your friend die or get crippled for life; while on the other hand the chickenhawks are extremely “courageous” behind their laptops and on fat cat salaries.
LikeLike
When Johnny Came Marching Home
David Rovics
He got off the plane and looked at no one
He walked down the tarmac in the direction of nowhere
He followed the sun as it was setting
Glad to be done with all the bloodletting
There were no banners for the proud and the few
Just workers in airports that do what they do
Fuel up the planes, unload the bags
Along with the coffins all covered in flags
When Johnny came marching home
The town he was from was a dead little place
So he looked for a job somewhere off-base
In this city of pawn shops and hotels and bars
Gas stations, strip clubs, highways and cars
He went to a dive, ordered a beer
Said turn the music up loud so it’s all that I hear
Try to rewind, turn back the years
Stop the explosions between my ears
When Johnny came marching home
The jobs were all shit and the beer it was cheap
And besides there was no other way he could sleep
Still the screams and the guns would wake him at night
And he was always on edge and ready to fight
And when he closed his eyes he would just see the face
Of a woman he killed in a far-away place
Over and over, the white of her eye
And her final and terrible terrified cry
When Johnny came marching home
After just a short time his health fell apart
With an ache in the joints and such a thump in the heart
And the doctor just told him it’s all in his head
But he couldn’t stop drinking or get out of bed
And with no place to go but the wrong way
It was a shock to his ears when he heard himself say
Over and over to anyone within range
Hey mister, can you spare some change
When Johnny came marching home
How far is it from here to Nuremberg?
David Rovics
Is there a flag upon your house
And a flag upon your car
And a ribbon on your mailbox
With the stars and bars
Do you support the president
And the war for oil
Do you think your sons belong
There on someone else’s soil
How far is it from here to Nuremberg?
Did you hear about Falluja
And the hundred thousand dead
Did you hear about the torture
In the newspapers you read
Did you pretend it didn’t matter
Did you blame a few bad men
Did you think your leaders
Wouldn’t just do it all again
How far is it from here to Nuremberg?
Did you design the software
That ran the engine in the tank
Or were you pushing papers
At City Bank
Were you in Seattle
Turning bombers into gold
Or did you pull the trigger
‘Cause you did what you were told
How far is it from here to Nuremberg?
Or did you take your kids to school
Go off to your job
Send your taxes off in April
To help support the mob
Did you vote the lesser evil
And think it’s all a shame
Did you think that this alone
Could take away the blame
How far is it from here to Nuremberg?
[To be removed from my email list just reply to this message and tell me to unsubscribe you.]
David Rovics
http://www.davidrovics.com
http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics
DRovics@aol.com
(617) 872-5124
P.O. Box 995
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
U$A
LikeLike
I get where your coming from but I think we all need to remmber we were attacked. And Bush made what he and his advisers condseder a wise destion. Mybe not right but how would you like if some one come in your home and shot up or blew up your famly. Dont try and tell me you would not go out and hurt/kill that person…..
LikeLike
Hi Doom, number of Iraqis among the 9/11 attackers: zero. Number of Afghans: zero.
LikeLike
Pingback: From Vietnam to Obama’s Afghanistan | Dear Kitty. Some blog
Pingback: McGovern warns Obama, don’t make Afghanistan your Vietnam | Dear Kitty. Some blog
Pingback: NSA spied on Martin Luther King | Dear Kitty. Some blog
Pingback: United States civil rights movement, Selma film review | Dear Kitty. Some blog
Pingback: Johnson & Johnson Big Pharma corporation loses cancer lawsuit | Dear Kitty. Some blog