One, two, three, what are we fightin' for?

If you're old enough to have ever seen even a video of the movie Woodstock, you can't help but remember the curious figure of "Country Joe" McDonald kicking things off with "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die." But just in case that little gem is not stashed as securely in you memory bank as other more recent lyrical gems by important figures such as, say, Seal or Christina Aguilera, here's a sample of three of the verses and, of course, that infectious chorus:

Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

Well, come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and get those reds —
The only good commie is the one who's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.

Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

By 1969, when the Woodstock festival took place, the war was still building in intensity, but the country--at least its draft-age youth--had already wised up and knew that the whole enterprise was more than just a failure, but a national catastrophe in the making. Yet it took us another five years to face that fact, a time during which we reaped tens of thousands more body bags from the jungles and rice fields of Vietnam.

Last spring the news from Iraq led to common discussion of whether the progress of the war there wasn't starting to resemble our misguided pursuits in Southeast Asia, and whether it was too early to haul out that Vietnam-era epithet "quagmire." Can anyone doubt that now? If anything, Vietnam was rather more rational, more "winnable" an enterprise, where the enemy was more discernable and our goals more clear-cut: South Vietnam had established leaders, had experienced generals and thousands upon thousands of troops willing to fight for their country. We were, at least at first, fighting alongside, providing support and matériel. We at least knew what victory would look like. The vicious invaders from the North would cease their efforts to unify the nation under Communist rule and retreat beyond a specific, traditional line on the map.

Despite the black pajamas, the jungle trip wires and the hit and run tactics, compared to Iraq, Vietnam was textbook warfare. Iraq as a nation has existed only since the British drew its arbitrary boundaries on a map of the region, and it has never found a way to hold its disparate religious factions together peacefully. For us to blunder in there and think we can make them into a Western-style democratic society is the height of folly, and it's absolutely predictable that our occupying force would now be literally taking fire from every direction at once. Trying to do it on the cheap just makes our folly more pathetic, but we have thrust ourselves into a position that makes the term "exit strategy" meaningless.

We can't win this war, because we refused to think through what could ever be a realistic goal there. We claim concern about terrorism, but every day we make the area more amenable to terrorists and provide greater and greater motivation to average citizens to resist our presence. George W. Bush has clearly become the number one recruiting officer for Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. When things get that screwed up, you just know it's going to get a lot worse before it gets just miserable. We're committed to staying at least four more years. That means that we're about where we were in 1969--at best. Troop commitment will have to rise--as we're already hearing--and even if we can keep deaths to the current level of a mere 100 or so per month, that's another 5,000 young American men and women sacrificed for this war of vanity and delusion. And when do we even START counting Iraqi lives lost?

It's collective madness, and the American public is hardly making a peep. Middle-aged newspaper columnists are churning out modestly impassioned analyses, but our college students are still sitting in their dorm rooms downloading music onto their iPods instead of raising hell in the streets. That will no doubt be true as long as military conscription stays in the closet, but why is there no Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, or Stephen Stills to sway the generation that is doing the fighting and the dying on a volunteer basis? Hell, there isn't even a Country Joe ready with a little Fish Cheer and a jolt of grim irony.