apologises for the mistakes. The source is "www.larepubblica.it (available in italian only, sorry).
Here you are:
Stanley Karnow tells that from a certain point in 1968 "arrived a moment where all of us have been scared to think, because every thought carried our minds towards terrifying conclusions. Perhaps we were not the noble knights riding a white horse, perhaps they did not want us there, perhaps we should never had to go to Vietnam".
36 years after, while bands of irregular troops force an army that was believed to be victorious to fight in eight Iraq cities, another America confronts the same fear to think and to watch ahead.
It answers in the same way, not with more thought, but with more war.
US soldiers are pulled down by the hundred (only 30 from Sunday to date, 636 in 13 months), America immense military force is entangled in the classic city guerrilla who cancels every technological advantage, and one of the main singers of this grim American Iliad, William Safire, admits that "this is the decisive crisis".
The only answer America's civil and military commanders know and offer is new actions, new units, new escalation, new operations of "drive out and destroy" because this, as Rumsfeld adds, "it is the test of our will".
Iraq is not Vietnam, but the reaction of the national leadership and the public opinion is the same one told by the historians of the other conflict. It's that one the psychologists call "denial", the state of negation where the patient rejects the bad diagnosis. When the thought scares, America, or who speaks for it, acts. The action is the substitute, the panacea, the collective tranquillizer in a culture and society that was constructed for acting first, then explaining.
But in this admirable quality, that we European catalogue under the word "pragmatism" and that general Kimmit reassumes "I will find the enemies and destroy them, the rest does not interest to me ", there is the bivalent seed of all disasters and all American triumphs, especially when the succession of actions overlaps in an unreflexing way and it moves not from clear and ideal premises (as it was the war in Europe and the Pacific), but from ideological scenes.
The negation, the "denial", it's the lie that we tell to ourselves, and this "decisive test", provoked by the approach of the arbitrary expiration of the 30th of june, is the product of a series of lies where Washington is spinning itself, hoping like general Kimmit that the next "action" is the resolutive one.
Without drugging up again the falsehoods diffused in the past in order to launch and justify the attack, in this last phase the accumulation of other falsehoods, not to mention the mother of all lies "1st of may, war is over", and empty formulas is the true matrix of the confusion and the anxiety the public opinion experience today.
The facts of Falluja, Ramadi, Nassiriya, Kirkuk, Najaf, appear inexplicable only if they are seen in the light of formulas the American Authorities of Bagdad, crammed with civil employees from the republican party and specialists in public relations just sent there to cover Bush’s shoulders, have told in these months.
Let’s remember the sequence.
The isolate attacks that for eleven months have killed hundreds of coalition troops, hurt 3.000 by now and massacred local inhabitants, have been attributed from Washington first to the “never let go” motivation of Saddam’s forces. Then attributed to hired assassins paid with Saddam’s secret founds, who pulled their strings from his den.
Once Saddam has been captured like a clochard, it was time for the version of the "foreign combatants" filtered from strainer frontiers. Then was the time for "AlQaeda cells", then it was the time of the militants of a new Osama: al-Zarkawi, until now and the "fanatical cleric" Moqtada al-Sadr that hurl his desperate onslaught from his mosque’s hideout.
The more obvious explanation: a minority of iraquis, both shiits and sunnites, not accepting the pax americana and the Bush’s way to get the new Iraq and are disposed to die and to kill, is not acceptable, because it contradicts the base of the entire theoretical castle of the operation Iraqi Freedom.
It takes apart the "rosy scene", the optimistic script that was written for the consumption of the US public opinion, persuaded that the invasion would have freed the silent majority of overwhelmed iraquis, and not freed the aggressive minority.
It is astonishing us outside the United States, the indifference or the stoicism to whom the Americans accept - up to now - the bitter account, as Rumsfeld named it, paid in order to replace the regime of Saddam Hussein with an America’s welcome protectorate.
It has been explained, with good reasons, the public opinion's lack of appetite with the absence of the fear caused by the call up, that therefore circumscribes the damages to the army of willings, to those who are disposed to wear the uniform, and to their families.
The moral steam-roller of 9/11 is evoked to crush many objections under the formula of the answer to the terrorism, and to overtake every critic as the European right did to exorcise the Spanish Socialist Zapatero, who is withdrawing today would "vote for Osama Bin Laden".
It's always true that Americans always grant a wide moral and political credit to their own leaders, before accepting the suspicion of being cheated, differently from the cynical if not skeptical Europeans that consider cheating implied in their governors.
The Vietnam employed nearly 10 years, not 11 months, before becoming the Vietnam, in 1968.
But when the tear between the repressed thought, the "denial", and the truth is increased too much, when more and more massive doses of actions do not succeed in shutting up the doubt that the same actions are wrong or ineffective, the people release and rebelled with a fury that Europeans found incomprehensible, as incoprehensible was the yesterday’s patience.
To this increasing gap is aiming who has decided to launch the iraqui’s "intifada", knowing that the true battlefield is not Falluja and Bagdad: is America.
Anyone shooting the strings of insurgents shiits and Sunnites knows that he will never be able to defeat the troops of generals Abizaid and Kimmit, but he will be able to increase the tear between the lies of this Bush administration and the truth told by the mass media, hoping that a day a new Walter Cronkite raises and say, as he said in 1968: "we are not gaining at all the war in Vietnam".
In 2004 there are no more Cronkite able to address the public from an indisputed mediatic chair.
In the pulverized communication system made of radio, Internet, cable tv and satellite, a center of collective conscience the enemies can hit from far away, and then influence it as Giap and Ho Chi Minh made with the offensive of the Tet in 1968 losing a military battle but gaining a political struggle, does not exist anymore.
In the dispersed informative mediation, the president is more stronger of his critics. His insistent callback to the action and to inflexibility is the only clear message, still comprehensible and acceptable, even if polluted by electoral propaganda, and his refusal to think the thoughts frighteningly remembered by Karnow is the lifejacket to which America cling to.
Iraqui guerrillas's better not deceive that burning corpses and attacking the tanks a new Vietnam is next.
At present, the password behind the country's marching in is the same resounding in Hollywood's studios: "Action!".
