Monday, May 17, 2004
(8:18 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Vietnam and Iraq
I don't have any links to back this up necessarily, but does it seem to you that the Vietnam War has become much more popular among certain circles in the last couple years? To take just one example, John Kerry gets beaten up for "flip-flopping" on the war by protesting it after he gets home -- yet I thought there was a general concensus that those who protested were right, that it was a terrible and unjust war we never should have gotten into.
Is it just that the parallel between Iraq and Vietnam is so obvious (unnecessary war halfway around the world entered into for false pretenses; the native population turns out to be more stubborn than we thought; etc.), that we need to rehabilitate Vietnam in order to obscure the fact that sometimes the United States is unequivocally and totally wrong? Was all this sentiment about the glories of the Vietnam War just simmering below the surface, and a certain segment of the population was waiting for it to become acceptable to say it?
