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A lot of anti-war Democrats have been insisting the war in Iraq is Vietnam all over again. And as if to validate that point, we find this bit of news in The Syracuse Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York:
"A Syracuse woman is accused of spitting in a Fort Drum soldier's face at Hancock Airport. Lauren Maggi, 35, was charged with second-degree harassment after the Nov. 22 incident, according to a police report."
So it is Vietnam all over again, now that the Democrats have won. Now we have anti-war protesters living again the darkest days of the Vietnam War, when American soldiers got off the plane and anti-war types spit on them.
I was around for the Vietnam protest days. I wasn't for the Vietnam War, but I was horrified people who opposed it would blame the soldiers themselves. The soldiers were doing their duty. They didn't order themselves into that war, and they are not ordering themselves into this war either.
But here we go again. That grotesque sense of self-righteousness has evidently overtaken the anti-war types again, and it is to the great shame of the anti-Iraq war movement that this is happening again.
Did this soldier get spit on because he or she fought in the war, or because re-enlistment rates are running at record levels, or because somebody who is against the war is so frustrated with Bush and Cheney and Rummy that everybody in uniform is the same as the commander in chief? Who knows.
This is wrong, it is out of line, it is shameful, it is borderline psychotic. I can hardly wait to hear what the defense is when the spitter turns up in court. According to the report, she walked up to two soldiers who were out of uniform, asked them if they were in the military, and when they said yes she spit in their face.
It is the opening of a terrible episode in the Iraq war, a moment when the blame for the war is misplaced onto the shoulders of the men and women who are doing their duty and fighting a war whatever their personal feelings about the war are.
I don't know what the court is going to do to the spitter. The law probably doesn't allow much. But whatever the law allows, the judge should take it to the max.
We don't need to relive this part of Vietnam, even if calling the Iraq war another Vietnam is a convenient weapon for those who oppose it.
This is a moment of shame, pure and simple.
That's My Word.
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