Vietnam redux

Digby has a great post up called "Get It Right This Time" wherein he analyzes the "Shakespearean dimensions of this bizarre presidency" and the extent to which the Iraq fiasco was their attempt to "do Vietnam right" without having really learned anything from the Vietnam episode. We learn that BushCo was even heavily influenced by Henry "victory is the only exit strategy" Kissinger! Digby starts off with revelations from Woodward's book and then develops his thesis. Mind boggling...!

The extent of Rumsfeld's screw-ups is well known by now, but this book seems to be asserting something about the war that is quite startling at this late date --- the real reason they were so anxious to go into Iraq come hell or high water. Yes, we know it was about oil and it was about Israel and it was about PNAC wet dreams and seven thousand other things. But I'm talking about the Big Reason, the one that united all these people: Iraq is their long awaited chance to do Vietnam right.

[...]

Dick Cheney's single-minded insistence on reconstituting Nixon's doctrine of the extremely powerful executive branch has long been seen in that light. But I have to admit that even though I knew all this, I failed to see that Iraq was consciously and literally motivated by the Vietnam experience among many of those who had been associated with the "defeat" in ways they psychologically couldn't reconcile. It rings true. It simply didn't occur to me that anyone would knowingly go down that road again so soon. Indeed, I thought it was impossible that the post-Vietnam military would ever let it happen. (That's where Rummy came in...)

[...]

Believing themselves to be victimized (as always) by the hoary myth of the liberal elites, the conservatives just keep doing the same thing over and over again, running like frantic little rodents on the same hamster wheel, the goal as elusive as it ever was.

[...]

When conservatives achieved power, their 35-year-old willful blindness led the country right back into a quagmire, this time in a desert.

Republicans did worse than that. They nursed their grudges against the counter culture and turned them into an opportunistic partisan culture war. And the real pieces of work, the neocons and the partisan veterans like Cheney and Rumsfeld waited patiently until they got their chance to "do it right." Never having honestly assessed what went wrong the first time but merely laying facile blame on liberals and the anti-war movement, they have willfully made the same mistakes all over again and seem to have no more sense of their own responsibility than they did three decades ago.

[...]

But all their dirty linen is now being exposed. The macho GOP they've been selling for 30 years turns out to be a bunch of whiny cranks who are so obsessive about their youthful "failures" that they have spent their entire lives getting into a position that they could prove they were right after all. But it's clear that the modern Republican party is incapable of governing a superpower. They have no capacity for self-analysis or learning from their mistakes so they cannot be trusted to learn from this two term debacle of terrorist attacks, unnecessary wars, economic insecurity, corruption and now even covering up for known sexual predators rather than risk their hold on power.