Tempting Extensions Unknown

Travis G. made me read Richard Cohen. I may someday forgive him.

Cohen describes a journey he took with John McCain, Hero, to Vietnam, where he visited the Cu Chi tunnels:

Those tunnels explained to me why the United States lost the Vietnam War. We were fighting people who cared deeply enough about their cause to live underground, to live in ways that no American could even imagine. The Vietnamese communists would do for their cause what no American would do for ours. They won because they believed. We lost because we didn't. We didn't have to.

This strikes me as an extraordinarily banal observation, made by an idiot, signifying he knows almost nothing. Cohen clearly does not read, like, books. A bit of Yeats might have been good for him, maybe.  Or if that's too highbrow, maybe he could have watched Godfather II:

Michael: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.

Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?

Michael: It means they could win.

As far as epiphanies go, Cohen could have gotten a Netflix subscription and saved himself airfare. More. Given his further blathering about what his time in the Hobbit-holes taught him about Iraq, some extra time with the bong in front of the tube might have saved all of us a spot of bother:

I keep those tunnels in mind when thinking about Iraq. Just as I could not imagine living in one of them, I could not imagine being a suicide bomber or a member of a death squad -- or killing someone because he was a Shiite or a Sunni. As there was in Vietnam, there is a piece of Iraq -- its culture, it religions, its history -- that we do not understand. This war has lasted longer than we expected not just because we were inept or understaffed or fired the Baathists or discharged the army -- but because we don't understand the country. For instance, an Iraqi government that reacts lethargically to American proposals moved with surprising alacrity to hang Saddam Hussein. Even late in the game, we didn't see it coming.

Similarly, we did not notice that in all the hoopla just before Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdaus Square came down in 2003, the crowd went silent after an American flag was draped over it. The crowd came to life only when the Iraqi flag replaced it. Had we noticed that, we might have learned something about Iraqi nationalism and the fleeting gratitude awarded to liberators. One minute you're a liberator, the next an occupier.

I have some questions. When politicians and commentators detail all that the Bush administration did wrong, I wonder whether any of it really matters. Would things have turned out differently if we had done everything right? Was Iraq so "broken" we never could have fixed it? Was Hussein's despotism an avoidable tragedy, or was it, instead, a tragic necessity? I wonder about all these things. I tend to think now we never could have made it work.

Now, of course, everyone looks like an idiot. Bremer was an idiot and Garner was an idiot and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and all the generals, with the exception of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who called for lots and lots of troops and was sidelined. But these men are not really idiots. They were merely wrong, sometimes on account of arrogance, but they were doing what they thought was the right thing. They simply didn't know what they didn't know. They didn't know a damned thing about Iraq.

Well, *I* knew they didn't know anything about Iraq. Hell, I don't think they knew all that much about the United States, either. I thought they were crazy.

The real question is not why things went wrong, but why on earth anyone thought things would ever go right. Joke: Cohen walks out into the street wearing a paper bag over his head. He gets run over by a bus. When he wakes up in the hospital a month later, he says, "who could ever have seen it coming!" And everyone laughs as the sitcom ends and the credits roll.

Fuck.

Were these people all high, or something? Perhaps not high enough?

(Below: Colonel Cohen comes to an important realization -- "I ate a bug")

Comments

[Eli]

Cohen always seems to forget that he was one of the war cheerleaders. Maybe he's trying to convince himself that his credulous stupidity was normal. Because if *no-one* could have foreseen this disaster, then he's not such a colossal dumbass.

And the dirty fucking hippies don't count - we just opposed the war because we're crazy, not because of any kind of sound, rational arguments.

[iamcoyote]

I vote for 'not high enough.'

Similarly, we did not notice that in all the hoopla just before Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdaus Square came down in 2003, the crowd went silent after an American flag was draped over it.

Uh, I did. So did a lot of other people. I'll bet I could find at least 10 bloggers who pointed it out at the time.

[Snag]

He listened to Bush, to Powell. After that his ideas, methods have become unsound.

[Phila]

Your Cohen story is very instructive stuff, begob.

I think you are a sempiternal man.

[Molly Ivors]

I think you are a sempiternal man.

And largely nocturnal, as well.

As far as what else Cohen could have done to "get" insurgency, he might have tried reading Le Min Khue's "Distant Stars." Or, you know, The Iliad. Or Franz Fanon. Or he could have watched Red Dawn, thus earning some Konservative Kewl Kid Kred.

But then he wouldn't have been travelling with John McCain, Hero.

Isn't his basic point a sort of Sally Fieldian "They believe! They really believe!" a la Althouse?

[ichomobothogogus]

excellent use of animanicas reference. rather spiffing post all round actually. i liked it when cohen stated he couldnt understand the weird cultural intricacies that allowed people to kill for no reason other than sectarian dogma or tribal rivalry. strange that he found it so easy to will others to commit mass murder on similarly flimsy grounds. of course he doesnt "get" the urge to do it himself, but he's posh. he has people to do that for him. he probably can't imagine the mysterious cultural imperatives that cause people to do gardening or drive cabs either.

[dan mcenroe]

i think you have a typo in your first graph - isn't it John McCain (R-Hero)?

i hate it when these people say "they believe, we don't." we're not "strong enough" to live in caves, we "lack the will" to win. that's bullshit and it misses the point. nobody wants to live in a goddamn tunnel. those people were PUSHED to the point where they were willing to do so.

maybe we should take a break from worshipping martial prowess and actually try to figure out what happened to these people to make them willing to live in tunnels and blow themselves up. maybe then we could start actually solving the problem and prevent it from happening in the future.

[Y.G. Brown]

Those tunnels explained to me why the United States lost the Vietnam War. We were fighting people who cared deeply enough about their cause to live underground, to live in ways that no American could even imagine.

Yes... right. No American could imagine living in a fucking tunnel:

"The 'Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Tours' have been taking place in Peekskill, New York since 1998... The tour includes, within a stone wall a hidden 'Tunnel,' which slopes up a hill towards the home of Henry Ward Beecher. From the street because the area is heavily wooded there lies a massive 150 foot stone wall, which is not visible from the street. The entrance to the 'Tunnel' is not visible to an observer until one is immediately in front of it. The 'Tunnel' is spacious, with a circumference of about Five Feet and a length of about Fifty Feet. A individual over Six Feet tall can stand up and walk the Fifty Feet once inside."

And no American could ever possibly imagine living in fucking tunnels during wartime:

"After the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the German army were forced to retreat. They had failed in their objective to compel France into an early surrender.

"Rather than give up the territory which they already held, the Germans dug in to protect themselves from the guns of the advancing Allies. The Allies couldn't break the German trench lines and so followed the German example. The trench lines soon spread from the North Sea to Switzerland. The trenches on both sides were protected by lines of barbed wire with No-Man's Land in-between. The shelling churned the landscape into a sea of mud and craters. As machine guns could bring concentrated fire to bear on any attacking troops, few attacks were successful.

"Most military offensives ended with few gains and enormous casualties. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the British Army lost around 20,000 men. The offensive cost the Allies over half a million casualties but only penetrated 12km at most into German lines."

With the historical memory of a goldfish, Richard Cohen sets us straight on Iraq. His next column will be about how the willingness of the Iraqis to use guns makes them unique in the world.

[captain goto]

the historical memory of a goldfish

Y.G., sometimes I think these guys are so shoulders-deep in their own asses that the concept of memory--as in taking note of reality, and filing away said notations for future reference--is not even in their behavior set.

If you're like W or Cheney, and can depend on one's mansions and Mercedes' to keep you safely away from the madding crowds, and have a horde of sycophants to serenade you with the undeniable facts of your perceived brilliance, then "creating your own reality" is pretty much like ordering breakfast.

Of course, they remain all-too-well insulated from the shrapnel that ensues when their reality collides with the honest-to-God version, thus insuring more of the same for as long as necessary...

[flory]

This war has lasted longer than we expected not just because we were inept or understaffed or fired the Baathists or discharged the army -- but because we don't understand the country.

This war has lasted longer than who expected, moron? Just because you and Rummy and his minions "doubted it will last 6 months" doesn't mean the rest of us were that stoopid.
These people really don't recognize any reality outside their insular little Beltway world, do they?

[flory]

And no American could ever possibly imagine living in fucking tunnels during wartime:

Then there was that little kerfluffle on Corregidor back in the '40s.
I think MacArthur and his boys saw the inside of a tunnel or two....

[Lawnguylander]

I have nothing substantive to add but nice GBV reference.

[American Citizen]

You know, as I walked France's Maginot Line, I thought "any country willing to go through such expense and trouble to defend itself must be unconquerable."

The tunnel remark is inane, they dug tunnels because otherwise F4 Phantoms might have dropped bombs on open-air encampments.

Or you could say:

As I walked through the gigantic US base of Khe San, I thought "no country willing to transport so much material and personnel halfway across the globe can ever be defeated in war."

[captain goto]

AmCit, didn't you hear? We actually won in Vietnam--if it wasn't for dirty fucking hippies like Walter Cronkite, we'd have our own private wogs these days, serving us Mai Tais on the beaches on the South China Sea.

[charley]

ooh, cool pic.

like a diamond bullet..

[Herr Doktor Bimler]

to live underground, to live in ways that no American could even imagine

This guy doesn't know much about homelessness.

[Tehanu]

We did not notice that in all the hoopla just before Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdaus Square came down in 2003, the crowd went silent after an American flag was draped over it. The crowd came to life only when the Iraqi flag replaced it. Had we noticed that, we might have learned something....

What does he mean "we"? "Had we noticed"? What color IS the sky in Cohen's world?