A fun game to play with literate friends is making up words for things that need to be named. Once on a long car trip some friends and I came up with one that we’ve held on to: “mistalgia” — the longing for a past you never had.

I was born in 1974 and have developed a serious case of mistalgia for the early ’70s. Mistalgia is often barely distinguishable from retro — in my case, I’ve grown shaggy hair and am even attempting a beard, I feel at my best wearing corduroy or jeans and western shirts, and I’ve been listening to a lot of Kris Kristofferson, although I admit most of what I know about the period comes from Robert Altman (R.I.P.).

Gyres being what they are, though, we can from time to time relive our mistalgic pasts as more than fashion statements and movies. And 2007 is shaping up to be a serious early ’70s thing, man.

By the early 1970s, both elite opinion and the general public had turned against the war in Vietnam. In fact, in 1967, only three years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that allowed Lyndon Johnson to seriously escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that no amount of escalation of the strategic bombing that was then the mainstay of U.S. strategy in the war would reduce North Vietnamese or Viet Cong effectiveness. James Carroll quotes the remarkable testimony of the man whose entire military career, beginning in World War II, had been premised on the scientific application of strategic bombing:

I submit to you, I am secretary of defense and I am responsible for lives and I am not about to recommend the loss of American lives in relation to those targets. . . The destruction of all of them would not make any material difference in the war, and that is my only point.

Carroll continues his description of the scene:

It was [hawkish Senator W. Stuart] Symington who cut to the quick of McNamara’s testimony. During the lunch break of the hearing, the senator went right to the reporters in the corridor. He said that if the secretary of defense was right in contradicting the Joint Chiefs [who had said that more bombing would bring victory], then the war was lost, and the United States should get out of Vietnam “at the earliest possible time.” This meant defeat and disgrace. In fact, it was a fair characterization of McNamara’s true position, but it was not one to which the secretary was remotely ready to admit.

When the hearing reconvened, McNamara retracted his statement. The damage was done to McNamara’s career — he left his post a couple of months later to run the World Bank (hello, Wolfowitz!), having lost faith in the war and let that slip in public. But Symington and the hawks — and the bloody war itself — had won a victory in discrediting McNamara, and the war continued for another six years.

It took more than the quickly retracted testimony of the Secretary of Defense to turn general opinion against the war. The Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite, the names of the dead on the evening news, the draft and the demonstrations, all combined to bring Americans around to the possibility of ending the war without a victory. But there was strong enough resistance to the idea of “defeat and disgrace” to whet appetites for Nixon’s proffered patent medicine, “peace with honor.”

Richard Nixon did end the Vietnam War, of course, though without honor, and five years after taking office with a “plan” to end the war that never materialized. Instead, Nixon adopted a policy of “Vietnamization,” trying to get the South Vietnamese government and military to take over responsibility for the regime’s own security as U.S. forces were drawn down. The wonderful thing about Vietnamization was that it freed the U.S. from responsibility when things went badly. Setbacks could be blamed on the feckless, corrupt, factionalized, cowardly Vietnamese, while the gradual U.S. withdrawal nobly sought to uphold the sovereignty and democratic wishes of the South Vietnamese people. Nixon played a wink-wink game with the American public, who, weary of the war, were willing to abandon an ally as long as it wasn’t called abandonment.

Our current situation is in many ways quite unlike Vietnam, and the early ’70s period of the Vietnam War in particular. Iraq has moved much more rapidly into the fiasco stage; Bush, unlike Nixon, is both the originator of the fiasco and its inheritor; Bush has less integrity than Johnson, the flawed man who escalated Vietnam, and probably less than Nixon; there is no draft in the United States, and the size and tenor of protests against the war are different. History never really repeats itself; only its tellers do.

But it feels familiar in at least one key respect: the war marches grimly forward, corpses in its wake, even though more and more people at all levels of society and power realize it must end, that victory is impossible. Its advance is freakish, like the Terminator’s: Why won’t the damn thing die? War may have its own unique horror among human pursuits, but it is all the more terrifying for also displaying the same dynamics as any other bureaucratically directed policy initiative. The same inertias, the same surprising turns, but most of all the same relentless drive to self-continuation, even expansion.

Plans are offered, sounding suspiciously like plans that have been offered before. “We shall have benchmarks!” although the benchmarks sound suspiciously like benchmarks we’ve previously set. In a replay of the rhetorical logic of Vietnamization, the administration speaks as if the Iraqi government could possibly meet these benchmarks even if it wanted to; when it doesn’t, it will be the fault of those feckless Iraqis, who can’t even be bothered to save their own country.

Worst of all, more troops are to be sent, although nobody but the lunatics who pushed the war in the first place believes they will “make any material difference in the war.” The hawks (Fred Kagan, John McCain) now argue that an escalation of 20,000 isn’t enough, that we need 40,000 more, or 300,000. Their asses are covered for the future, when this escalation is seen as a mistake.

Despite some noises from Congressional Democrats recently about accountability, to which insider Washington journalists give too much credibility, it doesn’t seem that Bush — and thus the war — can really be stopped. “War Could Last Years, New Commander Says,” read yesterday’s headline. Joe Biden, who probably (tragically) represents the leftmost limit of what the Democrats are willing to do on foreign policy, told Tim Russert on Sunday that there’s little to nothing Congress can actually do to change Bush’s conduct of the war: “He’ll be able to keep those troops there forever constitutionally if he wants to.” You and I might disagree, but we’re not senators with fancy hair and presidential aspirations now, are we?

There remains, finally, the question of moral seriousness. The “surge” that will be proposed this week is a response to domestic political realities, a desperate attempt by a failed president to avoid responsibility for his fuckups, aided and abetted by other politicians, pundits, and bureaucrats, civilian and military, who care about nothing other than smelling like roses when the shitstorm finally ends. To all of them, one question: Since you don’t believe, when you stop spinning, that your new plan or any other plan can bring victory, since you hesitate to even define victory because any definition at all sets the bar unachievably high, how dare you ask another soldier or another innocent Iraqi to die for a mistake?

Kind of takes the fun out of that early ’70s mistalgia, doesn’t it?

A US soldier stands guard at a rubbish dump where the bodies of four Iraqi males were discovered. The men were members of the Iraqi National Guard and had been kidnapped and assassinated by insurgents. Ramadi, 2005. Photo by Jason P. Howe.