Afghanistan or President Obama can’t wash away Vietnam War

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Afghanistan or President Obama can’t wash away Vietnam War
By Andrew Lam, New America Media

Trying to Google news of my homeland, Vietnam, over the last few weeks has not been easy. The headlines that showed were anything but Vietnam. Leading up to President Obama’s speech on why we need to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Vietnam has been once again reduced to America’s boogeyman.

Here are a few headlines from major news organizations: “Afghanistan haunted by ghost of Vietnam,” “Will Obama’s War Become his Vietnam?” “Afghanistan is Obama’s Vietnam,” “Vietnam’s lesson for Afghanistan,” “Vietnam myths haunt Afghanistan.”

Often times, indeed, when we mention the word Vietnam in the United States, we don’t mean Vietnam as a country. Vietnam is unfortunately not like Thailand or Malaysia or Singapore to America’s collective imagination. Its relationship to us is special: It is a vault filled with tragic metaphors for every pundit to use.

After the Vietnam War, Americans were caught in the past, haunted by unanswerable questions, confronted with an unhappy ending. So much so that my uncle who fought in the Vietnam War as a pilot for the South Vietnamese army, once observed that, “When Americans talk about Vietnam they really are talking about America.” “Americans don’t take defeat and bad memories very well. They try to escape them,” he said in his funny but bitter way. “They make a habit of blaming small countries for things that happen to the United States. AIDS from Haiti, flu from Hong Kong or Mexico, drugs from Columbia, hurricanes from the Caribbean.”

Read more: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-12-02/blog/a-more-perfect-union/afghanistan-or-president-obama-cant-wash-away-vietnam-war#ixzz0YYvheDYO

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[Aragorn]

2. it's all about

the pipeline deal