… We’ve seen something like this movie before. After the settlement that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War, and after it became plain that the South Vietnamese government was going to fall to the forces of North Vietnam, there was a general frenzy within the Ford Administration, as people tried to save a) the South Vietnamese government, and b) their historical reputations, not necessarily in that order. There was the battle in Southeast Asia, which our side was plainly losing, and then there was the battle for history, which is still ongoing, and in which deceit continued to be one of the primary weapons…

I have a terrible feeling, based on the McClatchy report, and the reports from the field, that many of the members of the national legislature are presently finding themselves on the Kissinger side in the war for national memory, and that Who-Lost-Iraq? sadly will become an issue in the midterm elections that are upcoming in the fall, and that it will do so before the country has been honest with itself in answering the question, “Why Iraq At All?”

It has been almost 40 years since the North Vietnamese Army marched into Saigon, and we haven’t truly coped with that development, even though Vietnam is now open for tourism and its peasantry is now making blue jeans and high-definition television. I can’t imagine how long it will take for this country to be honest with itself about the fall of Tikrit, or Mosul, or Baghdad.