Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Wow, Deja Vu All Over again

If you are interested in Iraq/Vietnam comparisons, NightLight has a good one in rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens misbegotten attempt to dissociate the two.
In closing, Chris, even the "dead parrot" quotes don’t excuse this vituperative, illogical chicanery. A better Python analogue for this piece would be the “how to defend yourself against fresh fruit” routine. Remember? “But we’re not being attacked by fresh fruit,” the baffled students would reply when John Cleese brought out the banana, or apple, or orange. They would try to make him understand what the real dangers were, but he wouldn’t listen. Instead he’d attack them with increasing shrillness for their simple and reasonable act of objection. He kept getting more and more vicious, until in the end he was left alone in a room full of corpses.

But, Chris, that was just a comedy routine.

There's nothing funny about either Iraq or Vietnam. One possible future parallel I would draw is that Vietnam prospered as a nation, although not necessarily economically, after we quit trying to wreck the joint and left.

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