Thirty Years Later

Gabriel Kolko writes that:

There are so many obvious parallels with their futile projects in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and the lessons are so clear, that we have to conclude that successive administrations in Washington have no capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years ago should have proven that. It did not.

But the historical blindness, and mind-boggling hypocrisy, extends beyond Presidential Administrations, verily permeating the entire culture. Consider:

• Results 1 - 10 of about 121,000 for "liberation of iraq" (0.22 seconds).

• Results 1 - 10 of about 2,140 for "liberation of vietnam" (0.51 seconds).

And it's not just that the Iraq war, being more current, is simply a much bigger story than is Vietnam: a search for "fall of baghdad" yields 114,000 pages. So, logically, a search for "fall of saigon" should yield about 2,000 results if that were the case, but instead turns up 71,500 pages.

Even more telling, perhaps, is the following:

Battlefield Vietnam is a very popular, very well-reviewed videogame, which has even spawned a loyal "community".

While the blowhards in the FCC are going apeshit over Janet Jackson's nipple, war games are all the rage. But, can you imagine the apoplexy that would result in a "Battlefield America" game in which the player takes on the role of an Islamic Jihadist, and whose objective is to successfully carry out suicide bombings throughout the United States? Or a "Battlefield Europe" game in which the player takes on the role of a grunt in the Nazi army, and whose objective is to finally be able to conquer England and Russia, and to be able to complete the "final solution"?

(In fact, if anybody reading this has any graphics and/or web-design skillz, get in touch. It would be interesting to create a mock advertisment and companion website for the aforementioned "Battlefield America" game and watch the reactions as we tried to get it placed into gaming and computer mags -- or the talk-radio shit-storm if the ad were actually accepted by some publications.)

So atrophied is our historical memory, in fact, that Creedence Clearwater and the Jefferson Airplane are now to be used to "drown out enemy gunfire":

But wait, it gets worse:

That's right. Napalm "can't do it all". But it certainly did plenty (so much so that it's been brought back for use in Iraq, alongside god-knows-what-else in Fallujah).

Back to our previous example, what would be the reaction to an ad for the "Battlefield Europe" game exhorting prospective players that the "ovens can't kill everybody"?

Well, we kinda already know how dastardly chemical weapons are considered to be when there's a chance that they might be used against us. But when we're the ones unleashing the WMD (as we almost always are), it's as a-okay now as it was thirty years ago.

Can hardly wait for the "Battlefield Iraq" game, in which we're duly warned that "Depleted Uranium and Cluster Bombs can't do it all", and whose soundtrack is supplied by Rage Against The Machine and the Dixie Chicks.

What you can do: Seriously, please do get in touch if you've web-design and/or graphical/photo-manipulation abilities, and we'll see what we can do. Otherwise, e-mail Electronic Arts and tell them that war isn't a fucking game, while requesting that all profits made from their war games are donated to victim-relief funds. Yours truly did so a while back, and did not receive a response. But, who knows what might happen if enough people register their opinions?

Posted by Eddie Tews at April 30, 2005 12:43 PM