A tale of two countries.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER - Iraq and the United States

"WE HAD TO DESTROY the village to save it" is a phrase attributed widely in the middle of the Vietnam War, including to war correspondent Peter Arnett who, in turn, referenced an unidentified Army officer that he had interviewed. The common assumption now is that the event took place in 1968 and the town was Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta. The implication was that the only way the town, a provincial capital, and its residents, could be kept out of Communist control was to wipe it out. The phrase amounted to an oxymoron then, and now, to those outside of the tight circle of constricted tactical thinking that saw only the destruction of the enemy as being within their range of objectives and concern. The larger picture escaped them.

More recently, the phrase was applied to the robotic Israeli response in the attack against Hezbollah into southern Lebanon, ostensibly to free a captured Israeli soldier, but turning into aimless destruction and killing. Mindless military might was applied to a region, not just a village. Then there is, of course, Iraq. With the daily body count still rising well into the "surge" or escalation of the war intended to calm it, the Iraqi cure seems to have overwhelmed the Saddam disease that infected not the Iraqis, but the Bush Administration. The number of deaths--600,000 by one count--has been greater under American tutelage than it was under Saddam Hussein. "Low" daily body counts from the streets of Baghdad are in the 30s and the suicide bomb pestilence continues. Water, electricity, roads, transportation, and standard of living all are below what Saddam allowed with his tightfisted tribal and dictatorial regime.

Iraq, however, is not the only nation being destroyed in order to save it. The country more thoroughly being undermined is the U.S. The Bush-Cheney attack on America takes place in three dimensions: the loss of constitutional rights and freedoms; destruction, by neglect, of the economy; and elimination of the American role of being the embodiment of democracy and freedom for other nations. Yes, the U.S.'s gas-guzzling and entertainment-absorbed society plugs on. Military dead and wounded are in numbers far lower than in World War II or Vietnam. At a superficial level, we all go on. Yet, the Patriot Act and all its implications for intrusion into private lives, expansion of secrecy, and growth of intelligence and police operations within our borders reflect a dissipation of central tenets in the American...