Another Iraq?

For years, no, decades following the disaster that was the Viet Nam war, it was ingrained in the American psyche that we would not repeat that mistake. Each time some political hawk decided that a war was the answer to some world problem, we would automatically ask, ‘Is this going to be another Viet Nam?” It was one of the few good things to come from that fiasco: a healthy skepticism about our government and our leaders. A healthy, robust democracy requires from us a constant attention and monitoring to assure that our leaders are doing the job we hired them for. Without that attention, it will go astray very quickly.
However, time erases all things. As the decades passed, the pain began to ebb and with it our skepticism. On 9/11, the remnants of this distrust was swept away in the time it took three jets to take down the World Trade Center and a portion of the Pentagon. It was gone as if it never happened. We rallied behind our President without a pause or a doubt. It wouldn’t have mattered what his party was or what we previously thought of his character. Our government could do no wrong.
This path is so familiar to me now: the excuses, the lies, the finger pointing, the polarity, the split between us all. And in the end I suspect it will end up in the same place. We will have an angry distrust and pessimism with our whole system and a nationwide pain that will take years to heal. Inevitably some leaders will want us to approve of various military adventures in order to “project American Democracy into the world” and will once again use every PR technique and scheme to talk us into it. I can only hope that we will continue to ask them, “Will this be another Iraq?”