Iraq as Vietnam
What did you learn from that war, Grandpa? Like most Americans, I never saw the battlefield in Indochina, but I did learn painful, indelible lessons as a citizen. My grandchildren are watching this war on television, so I will tell them: I learned that the government sometimes lies to the people--big lies with awful consequences--and sometimes government begins to believe its own lies. As a reporter, I learned with embarrassment to listen to the people in the street, because sometimes they tell you things the government is concealing. Again and again, antiwar dissenters and civil-rights activists told me the FBI and CIA were spying on them, tapping their phones, infiltrating their ranks and disrupting their organizations. The stories I dismissed as paranoia all turned out to be true. I also learned that military conquest, regardless of the stated intentions, seldom succeeds in creating democracy.
The war in Iraq is different from Vietnam in one fundamental respect: A substantial portion of Americans (and others around the world) were in the streets protesting this venture before the shooting started. The media generally dismissed them and often caricatured the protesters as aging hippies on a sixties nostalgia trip. It's a pity reporters didn't listen more respectfully. Virtually every element of what has gone wrong in Iraq was cited by those demonstrators as among the reasons they opposed the march to war.
