Call me appallingly jaded if you like, but upon learning that "Rolling Stone has learned ... the U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in 'psychological operations' to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war," I had to check the calendar.
Wait, this comes after Vietnam, does it not?
Yes, I know, what the Army is alleged to have done was illegal(!). So it's nothing to disregard or treat lightly. The story is newsworthy. But is it news?
By that I mean, is this a story whose content could not have been reasonably guessed at by anyone who's ever read the sorry, twisted history of our military involvement in South Vietnam?
Then, Army bullshit had a direct pipeline to Washington -- that is, when it wasn't being consumed "in-country" by congressmen and senators and visiting, high-ranking defense officials. If it hadn't been for the type of "psy-ops" described by Rolling Stone today, there would then have been no ground war extending past 1966 or '67, at the latest.
The Army, the military, the assorted brass dissembled about virtually everything. You name it. Body counts, enemy strength, the enemy's weariness, the enemy's political program, indigenous dispositions, the brilliant expectations of coming U.S. campaigns, the Jeffersonian virtue of South Vietnamese pols and their troops ... on and on.
Listing what the U.S. Army lied about to American pols is a fool's errand; better to simply ask, What did it not lie about?
The Lt. Coloneling whistleblower on the Afghanistan operation told Rolling Stone that his mission, had he chosen to accept it, was: "How do we get these guys to give us more people? What do I have to plant inside their heads?"
Hell, again, nothing new. Just check the military manual: under South Vietnam, see grotesquely bloated funding and personnel requests; also see subsections on endless promises, submerged truths, brazen distortions, and propagandistic mind-games on its own civilian bosses.
Sorry to be so jaded. I know I should be outraged, or at least I'm told I should be. To me, though ... It's what the military does.
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