Of course, off the top, I’m thinking Norman Mailer’s book “Why are we in Vietnam?”
Back then, from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, it was the question of the hour, every hour, every day.
The nation was divided between hawks and doves. Riots everywhere, most fervently, in 1968 Chicago, the Democrat National Convention.
People were being beaten in the streets and inside the convention, so-called “peaceniks” versus so-called “hardhats.”
Chicago wasn’t the first of it or the last of it, but the worst of it was televised.
Mom and Dad America got to see its sons and daughters taking part in bloody clashes.
The doves cited Eisenhower’s “Beware the military Industrial complex,” chanted “hell no we won’t go,” and with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, sang, “Give peace a chance.”
The hawks, beginning with LBJ, cited the domino effect. If Vietnam falls to the Communists, the rest of Asia is sure to follow.
Meantime, Walter Cronkite kept tabs on the men returning home in “body bags.” In the end, the number reached 58,220.
How did it all begin? Routinely enough when JFK dispatched a number of “advisers” to help the South against the North.
JFK assured the American people that these advisers would take no part in any action militarily…and then he was gone, assassinated.
His replacement, LBJ, made the same promise, but then, August, 1964, US warships were allegedly being attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats, in the Gulf of Tonkin, an incident that gave rise to the Congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave LBJ the authority to conduct conventional warfare…and he did.
This he did…even if, debatably, the Incident was a ruse, a pretext to get America into the fight.
Americans, so far, have not been sent in to fight for Ukraine against Russia.
Routinely, however, Joe Biden has us in the quagmire by reason of supplying Zelenskyy with massive amounts of weapons.
It began as a trickle…with the expectation that the conflict would last a few months, and then be over, one way or another.
But the war drags on, with no end in sight, and no end to Zelenskyy’s demand for more and more weapons, Biden happy to comply.
As meantime, our own assets are being depleted.
Biden is all in for Ukraine.
Some wonder why. Is it personal…a debt he owes for past favors between himself and Ukraine over shady business?
What do they have on him?
Would he ever be all in for Israel? He won’t meet with Netanyahu, but Zelenskyy? Any time.
This is not America’s war. This is Biden’s War. This is not Russia’s war. This is Putin’s War. It is all about the leaders who play with our world, the people be damned.
Now, we arrive at a potential Gulf of Tonkin moment…the kind that can drag us fully, militarily, into the war, for poking the Russian Bear once too often.
Place your bets on this happening.
Biden, word has it, is prepared to ship Zelenskyy cluster bombs, munitions so deadly that they are considered taboo, and designated worldwide as war crimes.
Does Biden know what he’s doing?
That’s the scariest question of all.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” A free sample chapter of his gambling thriller, “Compulsive,” is available on his website. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact. Website here