The ghost of the war in Viet Nam appears

BY JIM CASON AND DAVID BROOKS, Correspondents for La Jornada

WASHINGTON AND NEW YORK, May 26.— "The answer is blowing in the wind" sang Bob Dylan – 63 years old this week – in the 1960s. That memory of the past is beginning to invade the present with inevitable comparisons to the days of Viet Nam and Watergate, political polarization, dead soldiers, demands for the political trial of the president, and even nostalgia for the 1960s in advertising campaigns by transnational firms.

Perhaps the only difference is the official enemy.

Before it was communism, today it is "terrorism."

In the last few days, with certain radio programs celebrating Dylan’s music as a backdrop, a wide range of events and news mark the return of those days of Viet Nam and Watergate.

Firstly, the ghost of the war in Viet Nam is beginning to do the rounds of the country. The almost 800 U.S.-flag covered coffins arriving from a country that the vast majority of U.S. people probably could not locate on a map of the world are beginning to cause doubts over a military conflict that is out of control. Another intervention or invasion to "defend freedom" and, once again in the name of "human dignity," come revelations of atrocities committed by U.S. forces.

Seymour Hersh, the same reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre to the world, is now revealing U.S. atrocities in Iraq. Surveys are starting to show a turnaround in the public’s opinion, formerly steadfast in their support for official propaganda but now doubting its veracity, the same thing that happened more than three decades ago.

And just like the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, a series of lies and deception, both in terms of the war and national politics and the concealment of these acts, has provoked an open debate on the need to remove the president from office.

Journalist Carl Bernstein – who together with Bob Woodward revealed the events that would finally lead to Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal – wrote this week that 30 years ago a president was forced to resign for unprecedented crimes that he and his assistants committed in violation of the constitution and against the people of the United States. The famous question at that time is once again relevant, stated Bernstein. What did the president know and when did he know it?

In an article published this week in the USA Today national newspaper, Bernstein wrote that today the United States is facing another ill-considered war, conceived with ideological fervor and developed with disdain for the truth, ignoring history and possessing the arrogant assertion of U.S. might that has shocked and alienated a large part of the world, including its traditional allies. At a moment in history when the United States needed a president to lead an international campaign against terrorism and its causes in an intelligent and firm manner, Bush decided to unilaterally declare war on a totalitarian state that never represented a terrorist threat; declaring exemption from international law over the treatment of prisoners; and the suspension of constitutional guarantees for non-combatants at home and abroad, he added.

In this case, says Bernstein, the subject could not be "the serious crimes and minor infractions" – the constitutional term that refers to the facility to remove the president as employed in the case of Nixon – but better still Bush’s failure, or his inability to be a competent and honest leader.

Ralph Nader, leading defender of citizens’ and consumers’ rights and now an independent presidential candidate, described Bush this week as a "Messianic militarist" who should be removed for taking the country to a war against Iraq on false pretences. In a speech to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Nader – another veteran of the 1960s wars – said that Bush had exceeded his authority by ordering the invasion in the face of widespread opposition both inside and outside the country, a fact he believe is at the level of "serious crimes and minor infractions" as laid down in the constitution.

Meanwhile, the war continues to generate anxiety and concern just like the last years of Viet Nam. On May 30, well-known cartoonist Garry Trudeau – author of the Doonesbury comic strip that appears in thousands of newspapers in the United States and worldwide, and who has been censored for his open criticism of the war –published all the names of the U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq, reported the British daily The Guardian. The paper commented that he did so just one month after the ABC Nightline news program dedicated its transmission to reading out the names of the U.S. casualties of this conflict.

The wars, far away from this country, from where only selected images arrive and almost always conceal the worst, the unbearable – thanks to the cooperation of the mainstream media – have the effect of imposing limits on traditional political debate in the United States.

Just like during the long years of Viet Nam, every day more evidence is disclosed of lies and official cover ups of abuse and justifications for the war. That is, there are likewise elements present from a time when one word was born to sum up violations of the law, official lies and cover-ups: Watergate.

The political implications of the ghosts of Viet Nam and Watergate in this climate will be seen over the next five months, culminating in the presidential election. And perhaps they won’t stop there. A veteran reporter in Washington recalls that although Nixon committed a series of crimes and deceptions before the election, he succeeded in being overwhelmingly reelected. However, he was forced to abandon the presidency in the midst of his second term when his destiny caught up with him.

Meanwhile, with such nostalgia for the 1960s, the transnational companies have decided to employ certain aspects of the opposition of that era to sell their products. The energy firm Shell has a commercial in which a mother recalls her "hippie" days, saying something like in that summer we thought that all we needed was love, "that a flower could stop a bullet" and that solar power could resolve all our problems. The former hippie is now a Shell engineer and affirms that one out of three isn’t bad and that Shell is the principal generator of solar energy.

The KIA automobile firm invites us to a "summer festival of peace, love and savings" in its new campaign. Others are using 1960s rock music to promote their products. They obviously understand that one sector of consumers they want to attract is the "Viet Nam generation".

But as national columnist and Jornada contributor Molly Ivins warns, the scandal of U.S. abuse in Iraq, the revelations of secret orders in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the attempt to cover up all of this offers proof that the highest levels of government are concealing from and deceiving the public over what is actually occurring in this war. "One can read all the memos and documents that one likes," she wrote this week in reference to the revelations of the last few weeks. "It is important to know how fascism begins."