Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Colonel W. Patrick Lang (US Army, Retired) is no pushover of a commentator on matters related to the Middle East. He's certainly no foreign-policy liberal (as that much-abused noun is widely bandied about by the right): He served in the Army's Special Forces and in military intelligence, eventually becoming, in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the "Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism." (Those are his quotation marks; I don't know what their significance is, but I do know how significant everything between the quotation marks is.) He's been around, in short, and he knows how the game is played -- whatever the game of the moment might be, including the game of politics.

So when Col. Lang says something military- or foreign-policy or intelligence-related stinks, it behooves the conscientious reader to consider, at least, what he is saying. Here's the opening of a recent post from his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, entitled The Switfboating of Senator "Grunt":

I am not a big fan of Senator John Kerry. His behavior in the US after his return from duty in VN eliminated any possibility that I would ever support him for anything.

Nevertheless, the process of relentless, remorseless, cruel denigration of his character, military record and general "style" which was carried on by the friends of the president was despicable. They attacked his wife for her "foreignness." They attacked him for being able to speak French and being comfortable with his French relatives. They seem not to have known of Mr. Jefferson's opinion that "every civilized man speaks two languages, his own, and French." The assault on Kerry was reminiscent of the kind of fascist manipulation of the opinion of the masses that George Orwell warned us of in "1984." Now it comes again.

The "now" and the "it" to which the Colonel refers is the reaction of the right wing to the apostasy of Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), on the failure of The Weasel's Iraq "policy." Hagel, you will recall, is a decorated Vietnam veteran who, like Lang, pulls no punches on his favorite subjects. In the last week, in a speech to the National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and in interviews with CNN and on ABC's "This Week," Hagel insisted that Iraq is looking more and more like Vietnam:

Iraq and Vietnam still have more differences than similarities, he said, but "there is a parallel emerging."

"The longer we stay in Iraq, the more similarities will start to develop, meaning essentially that we are getting more and more bogged down, taking more and more casualties, more and more heated dissension and debate in the United States," Hagel said.

[...]

He said the U.S. death toll has continued to rise "at a very significant rate -- more dead, more wounded, less electricity in Iraq, less oil being pumped in Iraq, more insurgent attacks, more insurgents coming across the border, more corruption in the government." (CNN, August 18, 2005)

Hagel, who was among those who advocated sending two to three times as many troops to Iraq when the war began in March 2003, said a stronger military presence by the U.S. is not the solution today.

[...]

"We're past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," Hagel said. "The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

[Virginia Republican Senator George ] Allen [who was also appearing on "This Week"] said that unlike the communist-guided North Vietnamese who fought the U.S., the insurgents in Iraq have no guiding political philosophy or organization. Still, Hagel argued, the similarities are growing.

"What I think the White House does not yet understand and some of my colleagues the dam has broke on this policy," Hagel said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities (to Vietnam) are going to come together." (Associated Press story on Hagel's "This Week" appearance, August 21, 2005)

It's an understatement to say that a Republican making such claims can expect the attacks from the right to be particularly vicious -- and, where Hagel's concerned, that has certainly been the case. Says Colonel Lang:

Senator Hagel was once Sergeant (E-5) Hagel of the First Battalion, Forty Seventh Infantry Regiment, Ninth Infantry Division. He was a "grunt," i.e., a Rifleman and a leader of Riflemen in a war in which Riflemen spent an average of 240 days in actual combat out of a year's tour of duty.

[...]

Senator Hagel has made it clear that he questions the wisdom of the strategic conception of the Iraq intervention, the decision to intervene and the execution of the war. It would seem to me that he has earned the right to have an opinion in this or any other matter.

What has been the reaction from the Republican Party and its "flacks?" The Kerry character assasination machine has evidently been re-activated. Yesterday I watched as a pretty boy 35ish yuppy political hack from the crowd of sycophants with whom the president has surrounded himself described Hagel (with a sneer) as "someone who has lost his way." He (the yup) went on to say that Hagel has no ideas worth listening to in the matter of the possible resemblance of the Vietnam War to the mess in Iraq. Actually, he said, Hagel no longer knows what the war in Vietnam was about.

Now, consider that. This kid was still crapping in his pants and crying for the pacifier when Hagel and his brother and Hagel's "boys" were fighting to defeat the VC/NVA in the outskirts of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) but he, from the depths of his marvelous intellect knows better what VN was "about." You can see where this is going. Are these swine going to spread the rumor that Senator Hagel was an agent and informer for the communist enemy in VN? That's what they did to McCain in South Carolina.

The Yups should be careful. Senator "Grunt" has friends.

And, increasingly, The Weasel has fewer. He can shrug off the losses from almost any bloc of voters or supporters; but once those who might be expected to support him unquestionably -- just because he's Commander-in-Chief -- once they start running in the other direction, he's right where he deserves to be: up shit creek, without a paddle -- and preferably in a Swift Boat of his own making, being fired upon (metaphorically of course, no Pat Robertson I) by veterans and all the rest of us.