Almost 50 years ago during and after the turmoil of the Vietnam debacle, a most popular TV show featured two hip Army surgeons wise-cracking about the lunacy of war while working wrist-deep in its horrors. A Saturday Night Live skit from the same era mocked TV commercials aimed at recruiting soldiers.
As a nation riven by government-sanctioned killing and its exorbitant cost, we had gone soft on war.
But Rambo and Ronald Reagan came along and we forgot all that. America was standing tall again, invading Grenada and Panama and discussing the merits of waging a “limited nuclear war.” Our return to war footing was falsely credited with toppling the long-rotten Soviet Union.
Less than eight years after the final episode of MASH, we were at war again, “protecting” the oil sheikdom of Kuwait, lobbing bombs in the Mideast and generally stirring the pot until the Mideast fired back on Sept. 11.
You can call the attacks on that day terrorism if you want to, but in the U.S. War of Independence, the minutemen didn’t meet the British army on the field of battle, either. They hid in the trees and fought a guerilla war, like Castro fought against U.S.-backed Batista. History teaches that a small army can rout an empire, but not on the open plain.
So now the Afghanis are getting in their last licks, taking pot-shots at Yankees getting the hell out after yet another war of lunacy launched by the U.S. empire. We are leaving with our tail between our legs, like we left Vietnam. What drives the Fox News commentators mad is that you can see that clearly on TV.
The shills in the media like to see America “standing tall” because their masters are boys who play Army with men’s lives. The masters don’t like to see U.S. deaths on TV, even when they cause them because that’s not the kind of advertising that sells war.
The shooting match in Afghanistan followed much of the Vietnam script, including U.S. military officials lying to us about our progress winning hearts and minds. Like in Vietnam, like in China under Chiang, like in Batista’s Cuba, like in so many other nations we injected ourselves into since World War II, the Afghan government that we supported was both corrupt and antagonistic toward its own people.
So the Afghans were left to choose between fanatics they know and who pay them lip service and a local puppet government, propped up by foreigners, hostile to their interests. Those are bad options, but the decision isn’t difficult. When choosing between two evils, people pick the one they know.
Many Chinese understood Mao was a tyrant, but they supported him because he was at least from the neighborhood and Chiang – supported by foreigners – treated them like serfs. How many times must we watch this same drama play out before we learn from it?
Our nation is not a benevolent marshal, protecting the good townspeople from marauding desperadoes. More often we are a meddling empire, poking ourselves into business of others for dubious reasons with tragic results. Like every other empire through history, we are bleeding our treasury and corrupting ourselves with lies.
Are you angry at the deaths of U.S. Marines in the closing days of the Afghanistan debacle? Do the sensible thing. Call up your favorite cable network and demand they start playing MASH reruns. The shows are a truer portrayal of the reality of a war of invasion than you’ve been getting from your nightly news.