Victor Davis Hanson on Haditha: Vietnam, After All?

As with the formulaic type scenes of Homeric epic, there now arises a sense of familiarity with the current outcries over Haditha.

We do not really know yet what happened in that terrorist-infected hellhole, but it seems not to matter. Those who customarily decry the supposed loss of civil liberties are now the first to rush to judgment — reminding us that it is not always principle per se that they embrace, but a partisanship to be advanced at all costs.

Like Abu Ghraib, the killings will be used to vilify the military, and, ultimately, to curtail the American effort in Iraq — despite the good news of the recent appointment of the remaining three Iraqi cabinet officials and the demise of the mass-murdering Zarqawi. Just as the public was bombarded with scenes of a few dozen naked Iraqis and dog leashes in 2004, or cries of mythical flushed Korans in 2005 — never the mass graves of Saddam — so too we now hear only of a new My Lai.

Vietnam, My Lai, pullout, deadline, cutoff — all the old remembrances are returning, as the graying antiwar generation of the 1960s will not go quietly into the night. Abu Ghraib and Haditha are the new Tiger Cages and napalm; George Bush is the Johnson or Nixon of our age; and “no blood for oil” is similar to the old mythical conspiracies of why we were in Vietnam.

Yes, we know the wished-for script. As the drumbeat of hysterical criticism continues, domestic support erodes to almost nothing. The enemy becomes emboldened, taking much of its triumphant rhetoric right from the antiwar Western left. Funds will be cut-off and deadlines for withdrawal imposed.

But wait, stop! Do we really wish to continue the tired formula, since we know what follows and where it ends?

Once we leave, the killing starts in earnest, not 20 or 30 per day, but wholesale slaughter of any Iraqis who taught school, or were clean shaven and wore Western dress, or fought to save Iraq. Millions of refugees flee to the West. Those who stay are killed or “reeducated.” Islamism, like Communism, is empowered with the American defeat. We can expect, as in the past, new aggression in peripheral theaters like Afghanistan or Israel. Twenty years from now expect revisionist books reminding us that the battles for Iraq, like Tet, were American victories and the enemy was almost beaten when we quit. Envision one of the late al-Zarqawi’s henchmen, like General Giap, in his dotage thanking the antiwar movement.

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