Everyone should read this powerful article by author Kevin Baker at Harper's Magazine:
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism.
Go read it. He compellingly demonstrates how this guilt-relieving myth originated with German excuses for their defeat in WWI and was eagerly adopted by the American right-wing to avoid responsibility for its own worst blunders. The current wingnut screeching about "Defeatocrats" echoes exactly the same excuses they used to explain away the failure of Vietnam.
When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination—no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.
Sound familiar?
It's really shocking to me how nothing has changed in the right-wing mind. There is always someone else to blame. They must always have a scapegoat for failure, and they can never, NEVER accept responsibility for their own failures.
Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a “secret plan” to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate the fighting or risk a wider conflict.
Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire‒authored speeches, railed against the “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Of course, Nixon ended up having a little problem of his own.
So guess who shows up as an early adopter of this right-wing myth? That's right, none other than St. Ronnie Reagan:
And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests “lent comfort and aid” to the North Vietnamese, and that “some American will die tonight because of the activity in our streets.”
In 2005, Rush Limbaugh echoed these words exactly: Democrats "give aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Absolutely nothing has changed in the right-wing mind. No failure or defeat teaches them anything, because they always have someone else to blame.
As pressure grows to end the Iraq occupation, Kevin Baker's Harper's article helps us understand our history and fight back against the right-wing myths that have enabled this ill-conceived and incompetantly-planned invasion and occupation to drag on so long.
At least he offers some hope that this myth may soon die a well-deserved death.