Death, Taxes, and the Repetition of History

"Our Constitution is in actual operation. Everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."

- Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean Baptiste Leroy, 1789

It's a great, wry sentence but I always thought it would have been a more accurate one had Benjamin Franklin appended it to include "and the repetition of history."

And so it's a bit amusing to me that Bush, who previously went ballistic over comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq by way of the term "quagmire," has now chosen to draw a radically different comparison to Vietnam while on a recent visit to Hanoi: "We'll succeed unless we quit."

Fascinating idea, that our inability to "win" in Vietnam was merely a matter of will (or lackthereof) and nothing at all to do with the blundering strategic mistakes of our leadership or the inherent tactical problems we faced there. Funny how this happens, when leaders back themselves stupidly into an unwinnable situation and then pronounce that it's everyone else's fault that we're not winning because we don't want it bad enough and if we lose it will be a disaster of epic proportion that could have been turned around with our happy thoughts and pixie dust. As if wanting to win can somehow be translated into an ability to win. As if it's our duty to follow our leaders unquestioningly down the holes they dig for us, like cattle lining up for the slaughter. Fascinating indeed.

And oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the Kremlin on the day the Soviets finally decided that their position on the Afghani war was untenable after they'd stayed the course for 10 years, refusing to concede defeat in war that they wouldn't win if they had stayed for 100. It almost hurts to read these words now, in the context of our own situation in Iraq:

Early military reports revealed the difficulty which the Soviet forces encountered in fighting in mountainous terrain. The Soviet Army was unfamiliar with such fighting, had no counter-insurgency training, and their weaponry and military equipment, particularly armored cars and tanks, were sometimes ineffective or vulnerable in the mountainous environment. Heavy artillery was extensively used when fighting rebel forces.

The Soviets used helicopters (including Mil Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships) as their primary air attack force, which was regarded as the most formidable helicopter in the world, supported with fighter-bombers and bombers, ground troops and special forces. In some areas just as Americans did in Vietnam, they conducted a scorched earth campaign destroying villages, houses, crops, and livestock.

International condemnation arose due to the alleged killings of civilians in any areas where Mujahideen were suspected of operating. The inability of the Soviet Union to break the military stalemate, gain a significant number of Afghan supporters and affiliates, or to rebuild the Afghan Army, required the increasing direct use of its own forces to fight the rebels. Soviet soldiers often found themselves fighting against civilians due to the elusive tactics of the rebels. They did repeat many of the American Vietnam mistakes, winning almost all of the conventional battles, but failing to control the countryside.

And so it goes, and so it goes.