The crippling effect of chaos. Saigon/Baghdad

The chaos that has crippled the nation of Iraq through the United States' actions over these past four years is a clear and bloody reflection of what occurred for the United States in Vietnam from 1964 until 1975. Those horrific years spent in the jungles of Southeast Asia placed a deadly reality on an entire generation and the repercussions from that nightmare are still felt to this day. After ten years of fighting and dying on a massive scale in Vietnam, the United States lost 58,000 soldiers along with the image of a peaceful nation that is meant to lead the free world. That nightmare of the Vietnam War is reappearing today across the deserts of Iraq and the truth of how this war will end is becoming more obvious as each day passes. Here in the United States we must use our minds and not allow this violent dejavu of Vietnam to continue, or our children will have to experience the madness and brutal effect of desert warfare.

There are many comparisons between these two costly wars and when one looks into those comparisons that person can understand what lies ahead for both the United States and Iraq. One comparison is the issue of civil war and how the people of Vietnam and Iraq have a different vision of the conflicts than the government of the United States. To many Vietnamese people who fought in that war for over twenty years, it was a war between north and south, an internal war which was going to decide the fate of either a unified or divided nation. The western powers were the ones who separated Vietnam into north and south and in so doing formed a cause in many of the Vietnamese people to fight for a unified nation that would free them from western influence. The United States government during the mid 1960s saw the conflict in Vietnam as a communist invasion of Southeast Asia. A domino effect is what they called it, and that is if when one country falls to communism all the surrounding nations will surrender as well. By not understanding the situation on the ground in Vietnam in terms of a civil war and only believing in the spread of communism, the United States government suffered a huge military loss as well as losing the trust of its own people.

In Iraq there is fighting between the Shiite and Sunni people in the ways of militia death squads roaming streets of cities and towns murdering anyone of the opposite faith. There has been a rift in these two tribes for thousands of years and so it shouldn't come as a shock to the world that they are out for each others blood and power in a nation without any real law and order. However even with these facts of tribal violence the government of the United States is still claiming that Iraq is only on the verge of developing into a civil war and that our presence on the ground there is preventing the outbreak. This ignorance of the United States government is causing more bloodshed for our troops as well as Iraqi civilians and if we cannot learn from the mistake of Vietnam than this nation will continue to fall into the depths of a hated world power.

Another parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is the similar thinking and handling of the wars by both the Nixon and Bush Administrations. Neither administration had an exit plan to begin with for the wars and their excuses for this fact sound the same in a very frightening way. When Nixon was running for the presidency in 1968 he claimed he had a solution to bringing the United States out of Vietnam but that he would not share his plan until he was elected. He felt that by stating his plan before the election it would betray the safety of those American troops still on the ground. Through the violence and political upheaval from the youth movement within the United States during 1968 over the war in Vietnam, Nixon won the election and vowed to end the war. The truth was though that he had no plan and as we look back on history, Nixon came into office in 1969 and the United States didn't pull out the majority of its troops until 1973. Also looking back on that part of history, more U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam during the Nixon Administration, which had as I stated before claimed to have discovered the solution to Vietnam.

During Nixon's time in office he kept telling the American people that the United States will pull out its troops when the government of South Vietnam was ready to take over the responsibility of protecting the country and being able to fight off the forces of North Vietnam on its own. The similarity of that failed wisdom by Nixon's Administration to the never ending reasoning by President Bush to "Stay the Course" in Iraq is more than enough evidence to what the future holds for the disaster that is Iraq. Bush continues to say that we must keep our troops out in those deserts of blood until the Iraqi forces are able to quell the whirlwind of violence, which is caused by the insurgency and the presence of American troops. The current government of Iraq has repeatedly shown its inability to secure its country and our actions after the invasion in 2003 did not help their situation either. When the coalition forces took over Baghdad they disbanded the Iraqi army, pushing a large number of those soldiers into the direction of the insurgency which was forming at that time. The United States' actions in 2003 left Iraq without security and four years later it still appears to be without order and leadership from its government. It could take ten more years to get the Iraqi forces and government up to the level where they could govern and secure that war torn country, which in turn requires another ten years of redeployment of our nations youth to a desert welcoming only death and defeat.

These are only a few parallels between Iraq and Vietnam and their message of information should be used as a tool to avoid future devastation. There is no longer any room to ignore the truth of the war in Iraq by my generation or this nation as a whole and by voicing our disgust for our foreign policy maybe a political change could occur in the near future. Everyone must wake up to reality and insure that we handle this desert war with care and efficiency in order to not repeat the destruction of Vietnam. We must learn from our past mistakes and not turn away from the lessons that they can teach this rising generation on the effects of war and the political corruption of common sense.

The media--what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Over these past six years combating the War on Terror and also these past four years fighting within Iraq, the media has crippled the faith of the American people in the process of learning truth. Competing television shows attempting to bring worthy news seem to be only succeeding in gaining ratings and avoiding the facts. The current media has become a circus and there is no clear direction on where that circus will shift to next. When a person turns on Fox News they will be bombarded with a conservative bias containing useless facts about what is happening in the wars as well as a constant praise for this current Administration, which has done everything in its power to fail at its job for the American people. Though on the other hand when a person turns the channel to CNN they will be bombarded with a liberal bias and those facts that we as an audience expect to receive just spill out in a haze of similar confusion. For me, as a member of my generation who is a political junkie, it is becoming harder and harder to take the media seriously anymore and the way they handle coverage now on the wars is a disgrace to those of us who actually care about this nations future.

In the early years when the War on Terror was just evolving the media presented an image that it was doing its job for the people and really making an effort to attain the facts. However one must look back on those years and realize that the majority of the media were avoiding to put pressure on the first Bush Administration and really ask the questions that needed to be asked. In the wake of 911 this nation was devastated and what we needed was a clear position in the media to help ease the pain and shock of those brutal attacks. Fear had taken hold of the American people and everyday when we turned on the news we would always see the words THREAT, TERRORIST ATTACK, and RED ALERT and all that would do is build the fear up inside of us. The world had changed on September 11, 2001 and we had entered into a time of uncertainty of how this nation would survive through the 21st century and its new War on Terror. The media is supposed to be for the people and all that I've witnessed in the past six years is a break of that relationship on their part by putting hacks on the television screen and allowing them to speak their ignorant opinions on things they appear to know nothing about. They went along with the Patriot Act in 2001 and as our rights were beginning to fade all that the media did was put up the illusion of a fight, backing down from Bush and that power his government held.

As 2001 turned into 2002 the United States had invaded Afghanistan, toppled the Taliban government and began conducting its massive man hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his Al Queda organization. The American people along with the media had put their support behind these actions taken by the Administration and everyone truly believed that we were in the right by fighting in Afghanistan. The media were on the ground covering the battles and at least showing a part of what was occurring in the early stages of a long war. Then came the State of the Union address by President Bush in 2002 declaring Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an axis of evil and at the same time telling the world to watch out for the crusading United States as a machine for democracy. The media caught this historic and disastrous moment and all that we could do is wait and see the next move unfold in this bloody game of chess.

After the Union address the Bush Administration began its relentless war mongering campaign against Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime in Iraq. The media was there for all of it, spreading the governments rumors of WMDs and Saddams' ability to attack the United States in a way even worse than 911. The media also tried to sell us the rumor of an alliance between Saddam and Bin Laden, and yet we now know in 2007 that both those rumors were lies. Fox News would try every minute of the day to convince the American people of that horrific danger which Saddam presented by possessing his so called weapons of mass destruction, that have still not been found to this day. War mongering is a very effective tool that the media has developed and perfected over these past years and still the American people continue to eat it up. The evidence of the past shows that most media outlets were key allies of an Administration that was hungry for war and so these outlets went along for the ride in order to gain ratings and money by showing their outrageous stories. We can see these techniques being used today against the second country on that axis list, Iran. If we are not careful a mistake of unimaginable proportions could occur again if for a second time we feed into that cycle of war mongering and ignore using our own minds and listening to common sense.