History, schmistory

Thirty years after the war in Vietnam was over, we knew--definitively, although most of us suspected it at the time--that LBJ's minions fabricated the "attack" by North Vietnamese gunboats on a US destroyer in order to support the "Gulf of Tonkin resolution" under which our government bombed Hanoi and escalated that awful war that lasted ten years and killed 56,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam and Cambodia. We've also learned that the intelligence that Ike, and later John Kennedy, relied on to justify the CIA's support of the Bay of Pigs invasion was fabricated by anti-Castro expatriates. We've since treated Cuba like a hemispheric pariah, boycotting it economically and dooming its poor to poverty, unending poverty. We've also learned that our CIA, at Nixon's instance, intervened in the coup in Chile to place the dictator Pinochet in place of the elected president Allende, with the result that for decades that nation was ruled by the iron hand of military domination, only lately to have recovered, somewhat.

What good has all this history done? Have we learned anything? Apparently not, because it's clear--it could not be clearer--that Bush/Cheney had already determined to invade Iraq well before the charade they orchestrated before the UN and the American public, that they lined up any intelligence they could find to support that invasion--lying, cherrypicking, prevaricating, propagandizing--and yet those monsters still rule over our military and our nation. What good will it do when we finally write history, twenty years from now, that establishes their perfidy?

We may never recover from our loss of lives, treasure and historic posture from this demonic act. Indeed, we've signaled our decline as a civilization. And Bush/Cheney will never know it. They'll be too busy on the lecture circuit and on fishing trips and quail shoots.