Sleepycatz

Rambo: “Sir, do we get to win this time?”

In the 1980s Hollywood produced a number of films that allowed America to re-fight the Vietnam war — only this time we would win. Almost all of these films shared the same generally outlandish premise: the weak American politicians had abandoned American soldiers in Vietnam to such a degree that 10 years later serviceman were still being held as prisoners. This trope was the general premise for such fine films as Missing in Action, Behind Enemy Lines, Uncommon Valor, and, of course, Rambo. The cultural-political idea presented in these films was that America lost Vietnam because it lacked the courage and honor to support both its soldiers and its Vietnamese allies. This idea is, today, regularly invoked by neo-conservatives as prima fascia evidence of the failure of American liberalism, if not liberal democracy in general.

Last week, Fouad Ajami invoked the specter of this trope in his epistolary plea to President Bush on behalf of Scooter Libby:

In “The Soldier’s Creed,” there is a particularly compelling principle: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

Ajami does not need to directly invoke the memory of Vietnam in order to engender the feeling of the myth. But by raising the very notion of captured soldiers — or a country — ‘left behind’ he has alluded to the cultural memories of Vietnam. Ajami is arguing for Libby by appealing to historical revisionism within the conservative movement. As David Gelernter, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in The Weekly Standard:

Damned right this [Iraq] is Vietnam all over again. Only this time we will not get scared and walk out in the middle. This time we will stand fast, and repair a piece of the American psyche that has been damaged and hurting ever since we ran from Vietnam in disgrace way back in April 1975.

Libby is more then a White House official caught lying under oath, he is one of the soldiers of the new Vietnam, or as Ajami notes:

To Scooter’s detractors, and yours, it was the “sin” of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn’t duck when the war lost its luster.

To let Libby serve his jail term is to betray the entire Iraq effort — it is the equivalence of walking out in the middle of a winnable war, of kowtowing to politics over battlefield honor.

For Ajami, and many other conservatives, Libby is the poster-child of the good soldier left behind enemy lines to suffer the horrors of the federal Hanoi Hilton while the country looks the other way because of political fear and lack of resolve.

The fact that so many conservatives have come to the defense of Libby only suggests that they now perceive the rule of law as the true enemy of their policies. The enemy holding Libby is federal law, and to suggest that he must be retrieved from a battlefield is to state that this administration is at war with far more then with Islamic extremists or terrorists.

This entry was posted by steve on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.