CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Vietnam War Redux

Image by Annie Spratt.

Honestly, you couldn’t make this world up, could you? Before 2016, in what grim fantasy (or comedy) would Donald Trump ever have appeared as president of the United States? Once upon a time, I couldn’t have imagined such a possibility (and neither, I’m sure, could you!). Once upon a time, it would have been too absurd even to work as a joke.

And if you had told me, at age 24, when I turned in my draft card to protest the then-ongoing war in Vietnam, that, almost 60 years later, my country, led by — yes, indeed! — President Donald J. Trump, would be fighting yet another ludicrous war, thousands of miles away, that no one, not even the president of the United States, could explain, I would have thought you balmy. Honestly, I can’t believe that my country is now making war on and threatening further war against — of all places on Earth — Iran. On this planet at this moment, it just makes no sense. Or perhaps what I really mean is: no more sense than having Donald Trump as president of the United States for a second time.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, we were already experiencing a totally mad and brutal set of conflicts, including, of course — or do I mean, of coarse? — those underway against Vietnam’s neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, in which — can you even believe it today? — hundreds of thousands of people would die. And all of those countries were indeed thousands of miles (and lame-brained justifications) away from the United States. Just try to imagine that this country’s military dropped at least two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos alone in those years, more than all the bombs dropped during World War II combined.

And now, having evidently learned no lessons whatsoever from such disastrous wars, somehow the United States — and yes, it’s too weird not to be put in italics! — under the leadership of Donald J. Trump is at it again.

Of course, even well before that Vietnam moment, my country had already become a distinctly “great” global imperial power — there had never truly been one quite like it — that was garrisoning its military (as it still is) on literally hundreds and hundreds of bases in scores of countries globally and........

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