Worse than Vietnam, part II

On television tonight I saw a story about a young GI in Iraq who had lost both his hands when a grenade landed in his humvee. I couldn’t stand watching it and turned the tv off. I thought of how in Vietnam, our soldiers were at least killed in search and destroy missions which, while strategically useless and insane from the point of view of defeating the enemy, were at least aimed at killing the enemy, whereas in Iraq, apart from narrowly targeted operations like the Fallujah campaign, so many of our soldiers are being maimed and killed, not in military missions aimed at killing the enemy, but in the prosaic act of riding along highways on various support missions, like sitting ducks in their unarmored humvees. It’s an Eloi war. We turn our young men into Eloi, passive sacrificial victims of a brutal enemy we have no will and perhaps no capacity to defeat. It’s beyond nightmarish. And yet, as always, there’s no debate about the fundamental logic of what we’re doing over there, just mindless blather about democracy and elections, with the “conservative” commentariat emitting their endless stream of mass produced pep talks that have replaced conservative opinion writing in this country, and the Democrats, as usual, having nothing to say at all about any matter connected with national defense. I thought of writing a blog entry called “Worse then Vietnam,” but the phrase sounded familiar to me. So I went to VFR’s archives page and, sure enough, from last June, found this article.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 30, 2004 03:06 AM | Send