Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq … Iran War is Deja Vu All Over Again

If you’ve been around long enough to remember any of the wars in the last 60 years, the latest “excursion” in Iran by a demented old president will bring back many memories — and none of them good.

You likely have silver in what’s left of your hair if you recall the early days of Vietnam, when we were told the war was necessary to prevent the “Domino Theory” — a fiction in which all of Southeast Asia would fall “like dominoes” to the communists.

Not a word about how the French, who had colonized Vietnam and plundered its resources, had been ignominiously defeated and kicked out by the Viet Cong guerrillas in black pajamas, sandals, and AK-47s.

So in we came, carpet bombing from B-52s, dropping massive amounts of deadly Agent Orange defoliant on the jungles, gardens, and villages of the Vietnamese, raking them mercilessly from helicopter gunships, while infamously claiming we had to “destroy villages to save them.”

We lost 58,220 service men and women in the prolonged “conflict” that ran from our early involvement in 1956 to the day the final helicopters plucked the last Americans off the roof of the US Embassy in 1975 when North Vietnamese took over Saigon.  The suffering of those with physical and mental afflictions from Agent Orange and PTSD, goes on to this day.

Americans were lied to and intentionally deceived by our own government — and a complicit media that told us how we were winning the war, until it became so obvious we weren’t. Finally, even the “trustworthy” news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley had to admit they were being fed false propaganda from the government — and passing it on to American citizens as truth.

Fast forward to 9-11, when we actually were attacked.  Ignoring the fact that 15 of the 19 attackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Towers and Pentagon were Saudis, we attacked Afghanistan. We didn’t hold Saudi Arabia accountable because they had the oil and gas on which the “industrialized” economies relied.  So we destroyed Afghanistan, left it in shambles, and were finally, like the French in Vietnam, kicked out.

Then there was Iraq…where we were facetiously told they had WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction!  Mobile biological weapons labs! At our throats any minute!

All lies.  But once again lies propagated by our own government.  And once again, the media was complicit and those who opposed yet another war of choice, were derided for not being “patriotic.”

And now, here we are again — leaping into another war under the false pretense that Iran is a huge threat to us.  All lies — and worse, we have allied with the Israelis and are complicit in their genocide in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and now Iran as our delusional president declares “we won!”

We are again being told how well it’s going and how all this death and destruction is critical to our future.  Yet, with global oil and gas prices skyrocketing, struggling American families and businesses are paying the price.  As Montana’s MAGA sock-puppet congressional delegation cheers on the war our very democracy is at stake as researchers say freedom of expression in the US “is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.”

Make no mistake, nothing is more patriotic than holding your own government accountable for its actions.  Our choice is to remain silent and complicit or do what we did to end the Vietnam War: protest like hell, call out the lies, and bring this ugly, unnecessary war to yet another ignominious end — and that’s true patriotism.

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