If you are into politics, you already know that it ain’t always easy to say who is a liberal and who is a conservative. I remember a history class back in my college day where the prof asked what makes a liberal and what makes a conservative. He obviously believed that there actually existed such a definition. So did I. I raised my hand and gave my viewpoint. The prof totally nixed my answer, and kindly provided his own. And his explanation made no sense whatsoever to me.

So it didn’t surprise me when I read that President Bush is in trouble with the “true conservatives” over Iraq, who feel that America has no business doing any nation-building beyond its own borders. On the other side of the coin, there are people who consider themselves liberals and yet promote the use of military force to stop injustices (such as ethnic cleansing in Serbia or Kosovo – recall the Clinton years). In other words, being a conservative doesn’t always mean being a hawk, and being a liberal doesn’t always mean being a dove.

I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam War days here in America. By 1968, it seemed quite clear that liberalism meant stopping the war and bringing our boys home. And yet, back in the John F. Kennedy years, liberal idealism could still be reconciled with sending soldiers and guns to help forward the cause of democracy and human liberties in far-off places like Vietnam.

I just read an article that makes me wonder if that earlier version of liberalism was such a horrible thing after all. Recently, the communist government in Vietnam imposed some very heavy restrictions on Internet cafes, where most of those Vietnamese who know how to use the Web gain access to it (remember, Vietnam is still an extremely poor agrarian country; relatively few people can afford a computer, fewer still can get even basic dial-up). Every café now has to cooperate with the government by recording personal identification for every Net user, and by tracking everything they do during their session. Talk about Big Brother! The Vietnamese government is obviously trying to choke off the Internet as a voice of dissent. Visit the wrong sites or use the wrong words in your e-mails, and you will soon be paid a visit by a “party representative”. And his visit ain’t gonna be anything to party over. Maybe he’ll let you off with a warning, and maybe not. There’s always a spot waiting at the local “re-education” camp.

This is the kind of stuff that keeps nations locked in the Stone Age, that strangles the creative spirit that fosters things like economic growth and human respect and government by law (versus poverty and authoritarianism and government by fear — which pretty much sums up Vietnam since the communists took full control in 1974). Kennedy and company arguably saw it coming back in the early 60s, and did what they could to stop it. Lyndon Johnson saw that JFK’s efforts weren’t working, and ratcheted them up to absurd levels, whereby hundreds of young Americans were dying each week (and who knows how many thousand Vietnamese).

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the Vietnamese War seemed like such an evil thing to us young men facing the meatgrinder (read, the draft). But now, looking back 35 years, it seems more like classic tragedy, where the noble intentions of a few unforeseeably beget disastrous results for the many. Those Greeks knew what they were talking about when they wrote tragedy. The themes they espoused in their plays still rang true in Southeast Asia in the late 60s. The idealistic Americans were ironically blind to the fact that the Vietnamese people are a rabidly nationalistic lot, who would much rather embrace a horrible form of home-brewed government than consider an enlightened system defended by tall, white foreigners from afar.

In the end, it was the pragmatic argument against the war in Vietnam that was correct, versus the neo-liberal / semi-pacifist / anti-establishment rhetoric that was so popular back around 1969. The truth was that even if we were fighting for the right thing, there was no way we could have won. We were battling against thousands of years of culture and history in Vietnam that we couldn’t understand, but that our enemies knew as naturally as they knew how to breath.

Is the Iraqi war also going the Greek tragedy route? I’ve already read some interesting quotes from Army generals assigned to Iraq, saying that we really don’t understand what’s going on. I’m totally cynical about the motivations of George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and company in starting this war. But I honestly sympathize with the military brass, who seemed to have embraced the idea that they were part of a crusade – OOPS, bad word! – OK, a campaign to bring liberty and democracy and economic growth to the people of Iraq, while still respecting their Islamic heritage. Unfortunately, the Furies seem to have been released, and the military people are bearing the brunt of their rage – from RPG’s and mortars set off by guerrilla groups, to the spiritual corruption of young American men and women assigned to Abu Ghraib.

It looks to me as though an American “war of choice” has once again brought us past the point where “liberal” and “conservative” viewpoints mean anything. The big question in Iraq has become: Is it realistic? Is it achievable? Or is it just a sad and ironic waste of many lives? Are the stars just not in the right place right now for reform in Iraq – just as they weren’t, and still aren’t, in Vietnam?