A debate now taking place in Israel is about whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a mistake in dispatching warplanes, tanks, and troops into Lebanon to hunt down Hezbollah militias operating across the border in that country. There are three “we made a mistake” arguments: one says it was a mistake to launch any kind of significant action in Lebanon; another says it was a mistake to think Hezbollah would be so easily defeated; and a third says it was a mistake to not come into Lebanon a lot harder, and even into Syria.

A fourth, and probably most accurate of all “we made a mistake” arguments, should be added to the list: it was a mistake for Israelis to believe their own myths. Not that the practice is unfashionable. In adoring the flourish of their own press releases, Israelis had only been following American examples of self-love.

Israel was able to get back out of Lebanon quickly and relatively unscathed, but America, equally caught up in their own expanding tome of mistakes in Iraq, went in a lot further, deeper and harder there, and so cannot get out so quickly or easily.

The scale is radically different, but what sent America into Iraq is the very same thing that sent Israel into Lebanon: a myth of national martial invincibility. In both nations, the myth was held so unquestioningly close to each of their hearts, it seemed to both national leaderships that exposing these myths to the crucible of reality was a largely risk-free proposition that could only further burnish the myth for the continuing adulation of yet another generation.

Careful observers of America’s first Gulf War in 1991 would have detected a strong subtext in the propaganda meant to rally public support behind George Bush Sr’s White House plans. In taking on Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, America would, the subtext breathed hotly into the national forum, finally exorcise the demons of Vietnam.

And so the campaign did. Like so many celebratory fireworks, commentators throughout the press after the Iraq War had reduced the meaning of the Vietnam War to a few tactical lessons about not restraining one’s soldiers, not letting the reporters and cameras go everywhere, and always beginning (instead of ending) with massive aerial bombardment. Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran who had risen in the meantime to become a General was feted for designing the triumphant doctrine of never again going into a war without massively overwhelming superiority—as though that rather obvious notion lay at the centre of the whole problem that led to the debacle known as Vietnam.

There was nothing more said about the real problems: the secret parallel government that had grown like a fungus in the White House, the tendency of America to play out its internal domestic squablings across the world at large, the uniquely American idea, a wrong one, that technological prowess could be relied upon to trump all other elements in military planning.

Vietnam brought all these problems to the fore and exposed them as mistakes to the world, and more significantly, to Americans. But rather than correct those mistakes, a new national mythology was applied like a salve over the gaping wound. Hadn’t America only gone to war in 1941 for good reasons, the myth asked. Hadn’t America triumphed then because of the core goodness in its heart? Hadn’t America therefore swept the world because all good Americans back then believed in the goodness of that national cause? Yes, of course it did, the new myth began.

So now Vietnam, the new mythology had held forth, was no longer a lesson about what happens when a nation wages an unjust war on a smaller victim, or fights a phantom war with itself over the land of a foreign people devastating it and the people. It instead had become a lesson about what happens when good Americans stop believing in the goodness of the national cause as annunciated by the White House.

Everything else about the Vietnam War was now fine, the new myth said. Militarily, America would have defeated the enemy in Vietnam; morally, it would have successfully convinced the world of the rightness of its cause; and politically, it would never have had to admit to mistakes—or apologize, to the Vietnamese or to anyone else—if only good Americans had kept the faith.

When Bush Sr exorcised the demons of Vietnam in his execution of overwhelmingly triumphant war against Iraq in 1991, he buried the real lessons of the Vietnam War and allowed the new mythology to take their place. Twelve years on, this new myth had settled comfortably in to the point where Bush Jr was able to launch America on yet another unjust and unprovoked war on yet another foreign victim: yet another phantom war with itself played out over the land of another people that would lead to the destruction of them and their land and the ripping apart of American society and the destruction of America’s standing in the world.

Everything that had made the Vietnam War such a catastrophe for America (and for Vietnam) was left uncorrected. The war in Iraq is laying bare once again for the whole world, and for Americans, to see all the core mistakes in American beliefs. Everything that had happened to America because of the Vietnam War is happening again, because this new national mythology had been constructed over American eyes blinding them to the core errors in their beliefs, and therefore dooming Americans to repeat them.

It turns out that highly advanced military technology does not necessarily bring victory. It turns out that the rest of the world does not buy into the idea that America is predisposed to doing good in a way that all other nations are not. It turns out that America’s air superiority might not remove all obstacles to its army on the ground. It turns out that its army is not necessarily composed entirely of John Wayne-style commanders who are always brave, sure, and right. It turns out that American soldiers are not all good men, but are just as susceptible to perpetrating massacres, to conducting torture, and to killing purely for vengeance as any other invading nation’s soldiers ever are. And it turns out that America is not guaranteed to always win. It seems that even if enough Americans believe in the inherent goodness of American national causes, it is still possible that American military forays can be defeated. It seems that even if the whole media is on side, still victory is not assured. It seems that even if the soldiers are well-equipped and given free rein to do what is necessary to get the job done, still, they might get beat.

America, it turns out, is not always good, and does not always win. The rest of the world knew this already. But with the war in Iraq, now Americans are coming to know it too, in what is sure to become the most ugly of processes. The myth built up over their eyes in the 30 years since the end of Vietnam is now being stripped away, just as myths of military, moral, and lucky superiority had been stripped away from Israeli eyes in the Israeli Defence Force’s plea for peace and its retreat from Lebanon this past summer.

What will happen this time is hard to say. Reality for America, hopelessly dependent on oil resources buried under others’ sand, is too harsh even for its most biting critics to look at with both eyes open. But the alternative, the ability of America to invent yet another myth to cover up yet another disaster, seems surely drained by now.