It's Morphing In America...

I was listening to Franken (this morning), and his guest, Norm Ornstein from the AEI, was describing the scope of the threat that Hezbollah posed to the Israelis in terms of its tactics, infrastructure, and objectives. The Hezbollah that Ornstein described was a formidable force: well-armed, disciplined, able to hide in the community and sally forth to whack intruders and then melt back into the populace...

Except, of course, Ornstein didn't say 'intruders'. He said "Israeli soldiers." Which substitution, of course, removes the onus for their being there from the Israelis' responsibility, and makes, thereby, any Hezbollah activity 'aggressive.' But then we've always been at war with EastAsia...

The historical and global implications of his observations notwithstanding, Ornstein described, especially, and in a kind of wistful detail, the 'network of tunnels and underground bunkers' where the wily Hezbollians hid from Israeli air attacks, and stored their weapons, and conducted their resistance. And I was darkly reminded of the horrific descriptions of the Vietnamese tunnel networks, and the harrowing descriptions of the combats fought in them. Because, of course, we've always been at war with WestAsia.

And it struck me that--the obloquy of the conventional wisdom for even drawing the comparison notwithstanding- in some important, revealing, and perversely retro way, the Busheviki has constructed the Israelis in Southwest Asia the (more effective) replica of what the US imperium wanted, supported, and tried (in vain, ultimately) to train the puppet Vietnamese to have become in SE Asia. The IDF is a (so far, at least more) successful version of the ARVN. If things had gone as 'planned' in Vietnam in the '60s, the ARVN would have become the USer proxy force, keeping discipline and promoting commerce in the Southeast Asian region, keeping tabs on and occasionally slapping around the Burmese/Myanmarese, the Tamil Tigers, and other unruly elements in the area.

And I remember when somebody--mebbe Prof. Wombat--on a thread at Eschaton the other night asking if the top of the new, enormous embassy/armory in Bagdhad would accomodate helicopters; and i had replied (ironically, I judged) that I thought it was gonna be big enough to land a C-130.

Because you know we've ALWAYS been at war with Oceania...