Nick Coleman is…well, it.

He’s trotting out the “V”-word:

Ford was premature: Our national nightmare isn’t over. It’s baaack. And so is the V-word.

Vietnam.

Well, to be fair, Coleman’s people were calling the war on terrorism “another Vietnam” since before the dust settled in lower Manhattan.  They said Afghanistan would be a quagmire before the first Green Beret jumped into Afghanistan.  They said the battle for Bagdad would be another Stalingrad. 

And always, always, the “V” word.  Said with a smug, knowing smirk that was usually followed by a titter (audible or not). 

U.S. forces were in Vietnam for 15 years and 2 million people died, including 58,000 Americans (1,100 from Minnesota), all to keep Asian countries from falling into Communist hands (like falling dominoes) and to keep the bad guys over there, instead of over here. It was a bloody waste that divided Americans for years until most grew sick of paying lives for an unnecessary war.

I could go on fisking Coleman – but he’s already said everything I need to hear to show my point.  I wrote about this over the last few weeks – in my Small War series.  Coleman is proving my point.

The Pentagon’s biggest problem is that it spent the first three years in Iraq re-fighting the Cold War.  The first three weeks – the part that ended with President Bush correctly declaring “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln – were the war that the military spent fifty years practicing for; high-tech, fast, armored, aerial, with a small group of elite troops crushing a much larger force of ill-trained but heavily-armed enemies. 

I listened to the vacuous Mark Heaney “Minnesota Matters” show on the local FrankenNet Air America affiliate the other day.  Heaney’s guest – the director of some astroturf “Peace” group – was kvetching about how Americans weren’t being asked to “sacrifice” for this war, “like we did in World War II”, with a draft and a massive home-front effort.  Leave aside the fact that the military doesn’t want a draft, and that a mass, draftee military is historically utterly counterproductive for fighting the kind of war we face in Iraq; it’s a sign that the left is stuck between it’s only templates for “Successful” war, with “success” meaning “whatever delivers it to power”.  World War II – with its immense, statist effort and total societal immersion in the war effort – was, for all that it did say about America, a monument to socialism.  And that’s not even a bad thing; it’s also a historical anomaly; the vast majority of wars throughout history have pitted professional warriors against other professional warriors, or similar fighters (like, say, jihadis).  Historically, indeed, the era of mass, professional armies meeting in armageddon-like struggles on immense battlefields shooting at other guys in uniforms started under Napoleon and ended, for all real intents and purposes, on the deck of the USS Missouri, allowing for a forty-year tete-a-tete in Western Europe, a “Cold War” where all the real fighting took place…in small countries, between professional soldiers, proxies and guerrillas. 

But whatever – as I noted the other day, World War II and Vietnam were the “successful” wars for the American left; they put the left in power in this country, and returned it there, respectively. 

Oh, yeah.  Coleman – a member of a left-of-center media establishment that has been in the bag for the Democrats for two generations – is angry about “big money conservatives” – dare we say, “big cheeses” – who are paying money to get the President’s message out:

Yep. Looks like the Big Muddy once again. With a modern update: Battling TV ad blitzes…The ads deliberately link the war in Iraq to images of the terror attacks of 9/11, although the 9/11 Commission found no evidence of a connection. Like linking Iraq to Vietnam, the ads show desperation, and are aimed at keeping nervous Republicans in Congress from abandoning the farm.

Gosh, go figure – using the media to fight the impression created largely by…the media.

Go figure.

And about the ads, Coleman says…:

They are abuse.

Word fail. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Media, War On Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.