Sims

I re-read Jean Baudrillard's Precession of Simulacra the other day. An elegant little book, particularly interesting, right now, for Baudrillard's analysis of the Vietnam war.

Why did that war end so anticlimactically? And why, given the widespread belief that the United States was defeated in Vietnam, were there no repercussions of any significance in this country?

Because, Baudrillard says, America's objective in Vietnam was not the defeat of North Vietnam. Rather, it was to bring China among the powerful:

"Ultimately, this war . . . marked the advent of China to peaceful coexistence. The long sought-after securing and concretising of China's non-intervention, China's apprenticeship in a global modus vivendi, the passing from a strategy of world revolution to one of a sharing of forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to a now almost settled system . . . all this was the stake of the Vietnam war . . ."

That, and to ensure that the Viet Cong - the terror-bent insurgents of their day - were absorbed into a predictable and trustworthy system of power:

"The war lasted as long as there remained unliquidated elements irreducible to a healthy politics and a discipline of power, even a communist one. When finally the war passed from the resistance to the hands of regular Northern troops, it could stop: it had obtained its objective."

This would be intriguing, in the context of Iraq, even without the recent invocation of Vietnam by both Bush and bin Laden. What, after all, is the purpose of the Iraq war? No one seems to know. Perhaps it is simply Vietnam in a different theater. Perhaps our objective in Iraq is to demonstrate to ourselves, and the rest of the world, that Russia will not intervene even that close to home, that Russia is as complicit in the needs and designs of capital as any Western state.

Or perhaps what we really want is to make that same demonstration as to Iran. And, like Vietnam, perhaps this war will end only when the unpredictable and dangerous Iraqi insurgents - the Viet Cong of today - are brought within the relatively stable and disciplined orbits of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, maybe that's not it either. Maybe it's all just exactly as it appears, and we really have no fucking idea what we're doing.