There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate -- the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: They have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic -- transforming human blood into gold.

By all historical standards for an incumbent president, Bush merely (and barely) retained his job in 2004. He certainly did not receive the mandate some of his supporters have claimed for him. To the contrary, as many of them realize, Bush has almost no mandate whatsoever. Talk of political capital, then, is pure political posturing -- just as it was in 2000, and after the 2002 mid-term elections (where the GOP recaptured the Senate).

As Shakespeare once wrote, they have their exits and their entries. Between about 1975 and 1990, following the US defeat in Vietnam, military history was extremely popular among the US Armed Forces. After 1991, largely as a result of what many people considered the “stellar” performance of those Forces against Saddam Hussein, it went out of fashion; after all, if we were able to do that well there was not much point in studying the mistakes our predecessors made. Now that comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq have suddenly become very fashionable indeed, history is rushing right back at us. Here, I wish to address the differences and the similarities between the two wars by describing Vietnam as it was experienced by one man, Moshe Dayan.