Peter Bills: All change, all the same in America's battles

Around the time President Barack Obama was putting the finishing touches to his increasingly frantic electioneering on behalf of Democrat contenders for this week's mid-term elections, I was turning the final pages of a long book relating to one of America's darkest hours.

John Laurence was a 25-year-old ambitious television news reporter when he first went to cover the Vietnam War back in 1965. Well before he returned to Vietnam in 1982, Laurence had given up any beliefs about America's right to be in South-East Asia and its methods of trying to stop the march of communism in Vietnam.

Laurence's book, entitled The Cat From Hue, is a brilliant, harrowing, tragic account of America's brutal war in that country. It takes you on a journey - from a young reporter's absolute belief in the rights of his country to wage war through increasing questioning and scepticism about its morality and effectiveness. It is clear that not just Laurence, but a lot of the American soldiers doing the fighting had lost faith in the cause.

When I started reading the book, it seemed to me that these two events, studying history from a reflective viewpoint and modern day America, had little in common. Yet the more I read, the clearer it became that not only did the two have more and more in common but lessons had not been learned from the many tragic mistakes made in Vietnam by the United States.

Obama's Democrats went to the polls with the country once more engaged - enmeshed would be a better word - in a violent overseas conflict which, to the outsider, seems as unwinnable as the Vietnam War. Reading certain passages of Laurence's book, you can close your eyes and think: "He must be writing about Afghanistan." The correspondence between the two is haunting.

Laurence wrote of one trip to Vietnam: "Nowadays in the streets, when a Vietnamese looked at you directly and stayed with your eyes long enough to react, what you often saw there was contempt, as if you personally were responsible for the whole ugly mix of their misfortunes, the maker of the misery at hand. They had a point, of course - we Americans were responsible for much of it - but the unrelenting volume of uncensored belligerence made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I resented them in return, just for looking so angry. Few Vietnamese had genuinely liked us when we arrived in large numbers in 1965; fewer liked us now that the war was going badly. I had the feeling it would not have made much difference if we were winning. We came to save the Vietnamese from their enemies and we had become the enemy ourselves."

This could have been written in Iraq just a few years ago or Afghanistan.

But there are other, equally disturbing passages in this book which leave the reader with one damning indictment of America and Americans. They simply do not learn.

Laurence writes in a later section about Richard Nixon's ascendancy to the presidency at a time when interest in Vietnam seemed to be on the wane across America.

"Some troops were being withdrawn but many more remained. Peace talks, fruitless so far, were taking place in Paris (for the French capital in 1968, insert Kabul in 2010). In the United States, life went on normally. The economy was struggling through a recession (yes, this is 1968 he is describing, not 2010).

"Other than the families of the troops, the antiwar activists, the military and the press, not many Americans seemed to worry much about what happened in Vietnam. The television networks, the press, the government and the general public had become so accustomed to the weekly toll of dead and wounded that violence no longer surprised them. The war was like a chronic long-term illness; people wanted to forget about it, wished it would go away."

Finally, Laurence revealed his complete disbelief in America's objectives in Vietnam.

"We've been killing people for five years for no reason other than to prop up a bunch of thieving Vietnamese generals who've made themselves rich on our money ... the whole system is rotten."

All of which seems to me, after two journeys to the United States in the past six months and numerous conversations with Americans on this topic, is a pretty accurate summary of America circa 2010.

Does anyone still believe that America's Afghan puppet, Harmid Karzai, is anything other than corrupt? He and his (increasingly) wealthy top military men and backers. But does anyone care enough?

Young Americans paid with their lives in Vietnam, they paid similarly in Iraq and are now paying the same price in Afghanistan. All because America won't learn from its grotesque blunders and madcap military adventures.

You could excuse a lot of Americans for deserting Obama this week.