Baghdad follows Saigon’s fall

There is a certain eerie historical resonance to be noted between today’s desperate breakdown inside Iraq and the collapse four decades ago of our surrogates in Saigon.

We are witnesses to the same sort of desperate diplomatic rushing around and urgent attempts to plug the gaping leaks in a failed policy stance. U.S. officials find themselves besieged on every side by the virtually inevitable consequences of having backed the wrong horse.

John Kerry denies very strenuously that America shares any sort of blame for the immense pickle in which our Baghdad neo-colony finds itself, but the plain facts argue for exactly the opposite conclusion. Until IISIS launched its recent offensive, our own high and mighty functionaries were perfectly happy to let Al-Maliki and Co. do whatever they pleased in the way of wrongheaded sectarian rule. Kerry and his boss are desperate and discouraged. They have every right to be.

Forty years ago our Saigon handmaidens and well-paid geo-political tools collapsed like a house of cards under the dead weight of their own corruption and incompetence. Today’s Baghdad seems set to repeat that particular performance.

– Frank Goheen