Working for the VA, as with any job I suppose, has its benefits as well as its drawbacks. On the one hand, helping combat veterans recover from the mental wounds of war, as we do at the facility I work at, is genuinely gratifying. It certainly beats the alienated labor of your run-of-the-mill corporate service sector job. On the other hand, I’m often reminded and confronted with the full barrage of myths surrounding the US’s violent and aggressive involvement with the rest of the world, both contemporary and historical.

Just the other week I was treated to a loud waiting room conversation between two Vietnam vets, both of whom have been receiving counseling for PTSD from my facility for several years. Their scars are lifelong, and so too it seems, are the myths they learned and were told to fight for four decades ago. The conversation, as it often does, veered from a discussion of the value the gook places on life (none, in case you were wondering), to the victory stolen from the Army and its corresponding State by the treasonous media and those damned anti-war activists, to the need to teach those red bastards a lesson by “taking no prisoners of war,” just razing villages and exterminating defenseless peasants, because after all, “that’s how they treated us,” as a walk through Topeka, KS or Billings, MT in 1968 would amply demonstrate. The conversation, as it usually does among the more reactionary sectors of our population, naturally shifted to a quaint conversation on the “invasion from the south” of illegal brown people. It seems where ever we turn, whether it be Vietnam, Iraq, or Mexico, brown people are ruining it for everyone. I was reminded of Noam Chomsky’s quote of whether “what is needed in the United States is dissent–or denazification.”

I have little doubt that the myths surrounding our current imperial ventures in the Middle East will be given similar treatment to those of Vietnam. After the US is forced to depart, the sanitizing of history will begin. We can already see the process at work today with debates over whether the war is too costly to ourselves, whether Bush lied or was misled by intelligence (like we all were, we’re told), how the Iraqis just couldn’t live up to the glorious freedoms we handed them, and on and on.

Several months ago I had a short discussion with an ardent war-supporter. The ex-soldier had spent only a few weeks in Iraq before returning home due to a non-combat related injury. He insisted that nobody back home understands what’s going on over there. The media and anti-war activists are only focusing on the bad news. We just need to let the soldiers complete the mission (which is just by assumption), he insisted. Although I’m often fuming on the inside during these conversations, I find it more helpful instead to ask a few rhetorical questions instead of tearing into the guy. I asked him, hypothetically, if China invaded the US, resulting in the deaths of millions of Americans and the fleeing of several million more, whether he thought we would be focused on the great things the Chinese were doing, like maybe building a hospital or two as the Chinese press would likely focus on, or would we instead focus on the massive slaughter that was happening right in front of our eyes? When the topic of oil came up, borrowing from Robert Fisk, I asked whether he really thought the US would have invaded Iraq had Iraq’s number one export been asparagus instead of oil? The questions fazed him. He stared at me blankly for several seconds. He then abruptly changed the subject to discuss the need to not abandon the mission of helping the Iraqis. I imagine that several decades from now, the myths this guy holds so dearly will, in retrospect, be the official, objective version of events, taught to our children in school and assumed without question by responsible historians.

This conversation and prediction in mind, I was surprised the other day to come across a reprinting of a guide book issued by the War and Navy departments in 1942 to US forces deploying to Iraq in 1943. The version I had was a reprinted edition, reissued just this year with a new preface. Perhaps the most striking and interesting thing I found in the book was that new preface, mostly for how blatantly and honestly it explains the roots of Western interest in Iraq:

The story of Britain’s and American’s involvement in Iraq grows out of the shift from formal to informal (economic) empire, the decline of coal and the rise of oil as the primary fuel, and the widespread adoption of the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine.

There it is. The first sentence of the first page tells us more about our current war than any of our dutiful pundits or intellectuals could ever. No myths needed. It would seem under the veneer of the “good war,” we can get away with a little more historical honesty than we might have otherwise.