Tet for Tet

  I took a break from watching the NBA playoffs the other night to watch a little of Platoon on the Spike channel. I had forgotten what a well-rounded cast that movie had, and what a great training ground it was for future stars, like Johnny Depp, John C. McGinley and Forest Whitaker.

Oliver Stone is heavy-handed as always with his symbolism and with his politics — not even George Lucas is a match for him in this — but the movie is still a powerfully made indictment of the Vietnam War.

Early in the movie there’s a sudden scene shift, with an accompanying subtitle indicating that the scene was taking place near the Cambodian border in 1967.

It struck me that the Vietnam War was roughly two years old at that point (it’s hard to figure an exact starting point because of that conflict’s gradual escalation, but the consensus seems to be that 1965 was the point of no return for us).

And it struck me that the Iraq War is a little over two years old now as well.

In 1967, the generals and politicians all said the light was at the end of the tunnel. The Tet offensive was still a year away. Of course the war only dragged on for several more years, becoming ever more horrific in scale and in human suffering.

The Iraq war generals have delivered their share of similarly rose-colored assessments, mostly along the lines of “all these car bombs indicate that we’re actually winning because the enemy’s getting desperate” and “But, but, what about all the schools we put fresh coats of paint on?”

But today the big generals held a press conference in Baghdad with a rare note of realism.

They didn’t say anything people like me haven’t been warning about for several years now: That the insurgency is nowhere near defeated, that the Iraqi government is nowhere near able to stand on its own, that U.S. troops are nowhere near a point where a drawdown and a return home is possible.

But nonetheless, it seems that the worm has turned. It seems that Iraq’s version of a Tet offensive has taken place, with similar results.

It seems that an almost unbelievably complacent American public is beginning at long last to sober up — ever so slightly — and realize what a colossal mistake we made in getting involved in Iraq to begin with and, as in Vietnam, how badly we’ve underestimated the enemy.

But of course, as in Vietnam, the thing has taken on a life of its own. The Iraq war has built a critical mass that no one can stop now until the war’s own internal dynamics are played out.

We are now being prepared — and none too subtly — for an open-ended troop commitment in Iraq, while North Korea boasts about the nukes it has and Iran threatens with nukes it is about to have.

It seems that a future director will have to make another version of Platoon about the Iraq war. We know the ending already.

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