2008 Woodie Awards
Lessons from history unlearned
Forrest Stout
Issue date: 1/25/06 Section: Opinion
Why don't we learn from history? Last week, I mentioned our inability to use our country's terrible history of discrimination as a lesson to prevent future discrimination. Even more extreme and acute American history lessons are also ignored. Look at the Vietnam "police action." Of course, we did learn to treat our honorable soldiers with respect and gratitude, but we learned nothing about how to deal with false and exaggerated threats propagated by corrupt leaders. Now, countless U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians are dying in this generation's Vietnam. Did over a year of the Iraq war teach us our lesson? No. Even after the primary basis for the war, finding weapons of mass destruction, was proved futile, we reelected the architects of this catastrophe. (Keep in mind that the Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to declare war, making Kerry and Edwards, who both voted for the war, just as responsible as Bush.)
What did we learn from the paranoia and McCarthyism of the Cold War? Apparently nothing. The atmosphere of this country after 9/11 was a very scary thing. To fight terrorism, we needed to be intelligent, levelheaded and fierce. Instead, we developed a brainless angry mob attitude. Anyone who did not blindly fall in line behind our President was labeled a terrorist. Then, the likes of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others used ludicrous neoconservative think tank conspiracy theories to puppet the President, and therefore the public at large to do their bidding. Sure, Iraq was acting very suspicious, but rather than remaining levelheaded and better investigating the situation, we decided to invade the country. We learned nothing from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which actually seems to be better war justification than anything leading up to the current war in Iraq. All this hype to attack Iraq was before we had even caught bin Laden or properly disabled Al Qaeda and its ideological fuel. American citizens and leaders should have been asking why we waited over two months after 9/11 before invading Afghanistan with ground troops, and even then, we did so with a relatively small number, nothing compared to the troop numbers we used to invade Iraq. (It's no wonder that we caught Saddam, but bin Laden got away.) These questions were not often asked because any public figure who did was labeled an anti-American terrorist, and that apparently feared most into silence and complacency. Since when did questioning our leaders become anti-American?
What did we learn from the paranoia and McCarthyism of the Cold War? Apparently nothing. The atmosphere of this country after 9/11 was a very scary thing. To fight terrorism, we needed to be intelligent, levelheaded and fierce. Instead, we developed a brainless angry mob attitude. Anyone who did not blindly fall in line behind our President was labeled a terrorist. Then, the likes of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others used ludicrous neoconservative think tank conspiracy theories to puppet the President, and therefore the public at large to do their bidding. Sure, Iraq was acting very suspicious, but rather than remaining levelheaded and better investigating the situation, we decided to invade the country. We learned nothing from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which actually seems to be better war justification than anything leading up to the current war in Iraq. All this hype to attack Iraq was before we had even caught bin Laden or properly disabled Al Qaeda and its ideological fuel. American citizens and leaders should have been asking why we waited over two months after 9/11 before invading Afghanistan with ground troops, and even then, we did so with a relatively small number, nothing compared to the troop numbers we used to invade Iraq. (It's no wonder that we caught Saddam, but bin Laden got away.) These questions were not often asked because any public figure who did was labeled an anti-American terrorist, and that apparently feared most into silence and complacency. Since when did questioning our leaders become anti-American?