The Fall of Saigon, year 30: Or, "A Canticle For Terrorism"

The Vietnam War was a seminal point in US history. It showed us that, maybe, just maybe, we could be wrong. Maybe hitting $2,000 houses with $20,000 bombs wasn't the right way to win a war. Maybe if the South wouldn't fight the North by itself, it wouldn't fight them any harder with our bayonets at their backs. And maybe, just maybe... communism could win a battle or two.



And every single one of these lessons, every single American and Asian during that decade-long slaughter, died in vain, thanks to our current President.



There IS no distinction between a Vietnam-style war and an Iraq-style war. Except now our bombs cost more, and their houses are worth less. The $20,000,000 daisy-cutter that could've been sold to feed a Jamaican shanty-town has instead wiped out fifty innocent people and maybe, just maybe, a resistance fighter. Or two. If we're lucky.



They didn't fight the Ba'athists in the decade after the Gulf War, and they won't fight them now: instead, they're joining them. Consider this:



In 2003, on the eve of the invasion, a scant 19% of Iraqis supported a Jihadist, right-wing fundamentalist Muslim government in Iraq.

Jump forward to January of 2005: 71% of Iraqis now support such a government.



We have sewn the seeds of our own downfall. We sold bin Laden the guns and training he's using against us. We sold Hussein weapons to fight Iran with, and now BOTH of those nations are turning those weapons westward, to us.



These "terrorists" that are fighting us were the "freedom fighters" of twenty years ago. The Jihad today was yesterday's Struggle for Freedom to our eyes. They trusted us, and we betrayed them, and now they've realized that the only thing they can trust is their homeland, their families, their religion. All because we forgot that you cannot win a Total War, that the determination of a close-knit population cannot be overcome, whether or not you're paying $20,000 or $20,000,000.



Mark my words, the sun will never rise over a "liberated" world until we realize that we've become what we pretend to hate.