"What are we doing here?" Iraq echoes Viet Nam.

Airborne Staff Sergeant David Safstrom is on his third tour as a member of the Airborne in Iraq. It is his first time to question whether there is any value in what he is doing there.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness. (New York Times.)

The quagmire of Iraq is not the same as the one in which we once fought in Viet Nam, but there are echoes. Lots of echoes. Big echoes.

A buddy of mine once commanded a supply company in Long Binh, staffed by a mixture of Americans and South Vietnamese. He said the Vietnamese were generally the better workers, more motivated and more efficient. The senior Vietnamese employee was also a friend of his. My buddy felt that we were making real progress there - until one evening he went to town and stumbled on a Communist rally which his highest ranking Vietnamese worker was leading. Not only could my buddy not trust our allies, he couldn't even trust his friends.

Lyndon Johnson didn't invade South Viet Nam. It was Eisenhower who committed the U.S. to military support of the South Vietnamese government when the French pulled out in 1954. It was a political decision, since leaving Viet Nam would have been described by the conservative right-wingers a "Losing Viet Nam, just as they were still blaming Truman and the Democrats for "losing China" in 1948. Then when it came time in 1956 for the scheduled vote in South Viet Nam on whether South Viet Nam would be reunified with North Viet Nam, Ike could not permit it to take place. It was clear that the South Vietnamese would vote to unify with North Viet Nam, and 1956 was a Presidential election year.

This was high "Joe McCarthy" time. Like now, the radical American right was in the ascendant. At some point during this period of the 1950's the John birch Society even called Ike a Communist. America's radical right had veto power over ending unnecessary wars. (Note the "echo.")

So Viet Nam became a tar-baby. Once America had grabbed hold it became politically impossible to let it go. Ike couldn't ignore the Conservative right-wingers and pull out, so he handed Viet Nam off to his Democratic successor, John Kennedy. Still, it wasn't a major commitment of American troops in 1961. It was more like the current American involvement in Colombia. But it remained unwinnable. Kennedy even sponsored a coup which removed the corrupt South Vietnamese leader and replaced him with a military dictator in hopes that corruption would be reduced and Viet Nam would become more unified fighting the Viet Cong. That didn't work either. (The corruption of the government is another echo.)

Lyndon Johnson was also unable to face up to the American radical right wing. His White House tapes have him recorded as admitting that we could not win there, but he could not politically face the threat of right-wing accusations that he had "lost" Viet Nam to the Communists. So he listened to Gen. Westmoreland and attempted a "surge" in 1965. (Another echo.)

Only he had a draft in place, so his "surge" could get a lot larger than Bush/Cheney's has been. It reached half a million military men. The substitute that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld have used is to have 100,000 contractors substitute for combat soldiers. Still, that places this current "surge" at about 160,000 military and 100,000 contractors (including Blackwater) for a total of 260,000 Americans. The population of South Viet Nam in 1960 was 17,333,000 and of North Viet Nam was 21,154,000. Half a million was not enough to win Viet Nam, and 260,000 are not enough to win in Iraq. (Echo?)

Neither LBJ nor George W. Bush found it politically possible to mobilize America for a real war. For LBJ it was "Guns and Butter." For Bush it has been "Support the troops. Display a ribbon." But at least LBJ passed a 10% surtax to try to pay the costs. Didn't work, as the inflation fought by Nixon, Ford and Carter demonstrated, but at least he had the good sense to try. Bush hasn't even tried, instead leaving the Federal Reserve to manipulate the money supply and depress the economy to prevent inflation. (Echo? We'll see.)

Bush 41 could have invaded Iraq as the tracks of the Persian Gulf War swept across the sands towards Baghdad, but as he explained in his book, the potential cost was not worth what little could be gained. Dick Cheney and the NeoCons obviously disagreed, so the moment they got a pliable and ignorant George W. Bush into office they took the opportunity to continue the Persian Gulf War by invading Iraq. A major part of this appears to have been an effort to erase the stigma of having "Lost" the war in Viet Nam. They were trying to prove that America was no longer bound up in what the conservatives call "The Viet Nam Syndrome." Rather than being an echo of the Viet Nam War, this seems to be the same set of right-wingers attempting to correct what they saw as a mistake when we left Southeast Asia without a clear victory. This has not been an echo of viet Nam so much as refusing to learn from their mistakes and making the same mistake twice.

Whatever the excuse for invading Iraq in the first place, it has clearly not been worth the cost for at a minimum the last three years. But like in Viet Nam, the American right-wingers have defined leaving without victory (which they never define) as losing, so they have to stay. (Yep. Another echo. A real big one this time.)

That kept Americans fighting an unwinnable war in Viet Nam for two decades before we saw that the French had been correct in leaving in 1954. Cheney has already promised the King of Saudi Arabia that America will be in Iraq 18 months from now, and it is clear that Bush intends to pass this abortion of a war off to his Democratic successor when the new President is sworn in January 2009. Then, of course, the "Who lost Iraq" cry will ring from the rafters as the right-wingers blame the person who pulls the troops out of Iraq for losing the damned war we never should have started in the first place. (More echoes. It is domestic politics that keep us there, not the war itself.)

How long - and for how many American lives - do we let these right-wing power fantasies keep us stuck in an unwinnable and unnecessary war in Iraq?

Rudi Guiliani - an example of the "new" GOP.

Does the apparent acceptability of the twice divorced Rudolph Giuliani mean that the Republican Party is moving away from dependence on the social conservative voters? Digby looks at that question. He starts from what Thomas Edsall wrote in TNR as he tries to explain how different Rudi Giuliani is from the recent sex-and-morality oriented Republicans. The difference does not seem to be hurting Rudi's polls as it would have in the 1990's.

...many members of the GOP elite--whose overwhelming concern is cutting taxes, a Giuliani forte--would privately welcome the chance to downplay, if not discard, the party's rearguard war against the sexual and women's rights revolutions. Much of the Republican Party's consulting community and country club elite always viewed abortion and gay rights as distasteful but necessary tools to win elections, easily disposable once they no longer served their purpose. Now, with most of the leading GOP contenders demonstrating at best equivocal support for the sexual status quo ante, that time appears to be drawing near.

So Thomas Edsall suggests that the Republican party is changing. The morality leaders of the last twenty years or so are reactionaries who lived through the sexual revolutions of the 1960's and 70's, but they are now disappearing. The recent death of Jerry Falwell and the obvious decline are examples of this disappearance. No clear leaders have replaced those two.

Digby agrees that this change is occurring. However, he disagrees that that this is a symptom of a basic change in reactionary and Southern nature of the modern conservative Republican Party.

I agree with the fact that the GOP is ready to vote for "a hero," but I don't think it signals any kind of substantive change in the GOP. The "values" obsession was just the code of the times for the standard Southern Strategy of white male prerogatives and macho ass-kicking that the Republicans have been running on for 40 years. They are just once more re-packaging their tired old crap in patriotism instead of the Bible, (which they often cycle with "states rights" and "traditional values" among other things.)

Nothing has changed. The Republicans are actually just being more honest than they've been in recent years when they didn't have a boogeyman to beat liberals over the head with and needed to erase the hideous image of that nasty man Newt Gingrich as the face of the Republican Party. "Values" was always just the girly-man version of "Giuliani Time."

The modern Republican party is all about authoritarianism, militarism and domination over minorities, women and gays. Rudy is a perfect candidate. After all, there is no candidate in the race who has humiliated women more masterfully or condoned official violence against racial minorities with more fervor. Of course the South Carolina Republicans love him.

I think this is a really insightful point made by Digby. The Republican reaction to Rudi is a clear example of a change in the nature of the Republican Party. When the Republicans lost the national security issue as a tool to beat the Liberals over the head with they shifted focus to the issues of sexual morality and dominance over women. These were code for the new version of the Republican "Southern Strategy" in which they win by attracting the white Southern racist and anti-immigrant vote.

But now they have 9/11 as a touchstone for everything they do to win elections, and they are shifting back to the more natural Republican issues of national security. The reactionary core nature of the conservative Republican Party has not changed during the twentieth century. Only the messages they use to attract different reactionary voting groups to support them has changed.