McCain on Vietnam (but not Iraq)

In his 2001 foreword to the late David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, John McCain wrote the following about the war in Vietnam:

"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone...

"For anyone who aspires to a position of national leadership, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, this book should be mandatory reading. And anyone who feels a need, as a confused former prisoner of war once felt the need, for insights into how a great and good nation can lose a war and see its worthy purposes and principles destroyed by self-delusion can do no better than to read and reread David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest."

Yet this is the same candidate who has declared victory in Iraq, some five years (or 10.0 Friedman Units) in advance. And if that doesn't work, he'd embrace a whole century of U.S. occupation. Go figure.

But there's a deeper consistency here. McCain, after all, has complained that the U.S. didn't "fight to win" in Vietnam due to a lack of political will. This lack of "unshakable resolve," in turn, resulted from the failure of the civilian political leadership to rally support on the home front. Responsibility falls most heavily on liberal politicians in Washington, notably LBJ and Robert McNamara, and the antiwar movement.

McCain invokes the central tenet of right-wing mythologies about the Vietnam war: The troops were defeated at home, not on the battlefield. The various military outcomes over a dozen years may be debatable, but in this view the blame falls squarely on the civilian leadership and lack of popular support at home. Never mind that military successes are meaningless unless they achieve the political goals that are used to justify a war.*

The lack of "unshakable resolve" is McCain's variant on the infamous Dolchstoßlegende, or "stabbed in the back legend," from World War I. By that account, Germany lost the war due to the lack of will and duplicity of its politicians rather than any failures on the battlefield. Hitler later blamed the "November criminals" of 1918 — including German Jews and the socialists who agitated against the war — for Germany's betrayal. The Rambo series is a Hollywood version of the same mythology, which will certainly be resurrected by the right to account for failure in Iraq.

The fundamental problem, in this right-wing fantasy, is sheer lack of will — as if "will" is a pure abstraction, a unique virtue unrelated to the actual political motives that caused the U.S. to wage war in Vietnam and Iraq. It seems this flawed ideology of "will," the legacy of two world wars and Vietnam, is very resilient.

For McCain, "unshakable resolve" magically assures success in war. But the deeper issue is always: resolve to do what, exactly? If the end is morally flawed or morally ambiguous, the war is unlikely to generate "unshakable resolve" on the home front and within the military itself. Tactical successes in combat become irrelevant or even, as in Iraq, counterproductive. High casualties, for no defensible purpose, combine with the slaughter of civilians to undermine any initial "resolve" that an invasion may have generated.

Colonel Kurtz aptly describes McCain's version of "will" in Apocalypse Now:

"You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

If there's anything that describes McCain's policies on Iraq and the Middle East, it's that one simple phrase: "without judgment..."

NOTES

* The far right likes to think that the U.S. was never "defeated" militarily in Vietnam (or in Iraq for that matter). The Tet offensive of 1968 is often invoked as proof of that claim. While it's true that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were unable to hold many of their initial objectives, it can't be denied that Tet was an enormous political victory for their forces. Contrary to the Johnson administration's specious claims, Tet demonstrated that the insurgency, and not the U.S., held the strategic initiative in the war.

[H/T tip to The Cunning Realist and Digby]

Spitting on familiar ground

"They use thought only to reinforce their prejudices, and speech only to disguise their thoughts."

—Voltaire (1694-1778), Dialogue XIV

More than three decades after the end of the war in Vietnam, the far right has launched another savage and dishonest campaign against the antiwar movement for its alleged disrespect of U.S. soldiers and veterans, including this week's shrill denunciations of a small group of anarchists who burned a U.S. soldier in effigy during a massive antiwar demonstration here in Portland. The focus, not surprisingly, is on the thirty anarchists rather than the 15,000 people who demonstrated peacefully. Only 14 arrests, on relatively minor charges, were made.

Now there are reports, since discredited, of incidents involving demonstrators who alleged spat on, or near, veterans in New York and Washington, D.C.

This loathsome strategy is already too familiar from the Vietnam years and their aftermath, as discussed on the very first post to appear on Runes in December, 2006. In each case, the reported incidents were either grossly exaggerated or didn't occur at all. As Jack Shafer writes at Slate, in reference to a Newsweek article that perpetuated this pseudohistory:

"Like other urban myths, the spit story gains power every time it's repeated and nobody challenges it. Repeated often enough, it finally sears itself into the minds of the writers and editors at Newsweek as fact."

Shafer continues:

"The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn't go to Vietnam -- that being most of us -- don't dare contradict the "experience" of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety."

An anonymous comment on my earlier posting added:

"What I find particularly troubling about seeing headlines and articles like this is that I don't think the journalists involved even realize they're saying something that anyone would disagree with or take issue with in any way. The propaganda here is so thick and constant it's become unconscious. Only through decades of repetition can something so utterly false become this assimilated into our everyday discourse."

Meanwhile, right-wing hysteria—and the resort to such desperate tactics—seems to increase in direct proportion to public opposition to Bush's illegal war in Iraq.


PHOTO: Part of a large antiwar demonstration in Portland, Oregon, in March, 2006. (Photo by author.)

Return of an urban legend

On September 10th, The Oregonian published a story by reporter Seth Prince under the headline "Once a protester, now a supporter of troops." The story itself was an account of the purported transformation of a former protester against the Vietnam and Iraq wars into a "supporter of the troops," as if those were mutually exclusive positions.

It's unlikely that Mr. Prince wrote the headline, and there was little hint that he considered any of the implications of his story. But the headline and his story combined to offer yet another variation on a nauseatingly familiar theme: war protesters don't support the troops in Iraq, encourage their enemies and undermine morale.

This is a classic straw-man argument: those who oppose the war necessarily, and even deliberately, undermine our troops. Fortunately, a majority of American voters have now rejected George Bush's manipulative suggestion that questioning the war endangers the troops in Iraq.

Over the last forty years, I've attended numerous demonstrations against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and at each one the overwhelming majority of protesters expressed unequivocal support for American troops while challenging the flawed policies and assumptions that placed them in harm's way. In my experience, admittedly a long series of anecdotes, nearly all antiwar marches were led by protesters holding a large banner that read "Support Our Troops - Bring Them Home Now" (or some variation of that sentiment).

This is not to deny that some U.S. troops have demonstrably participated in atrocities, both in Vietnam and Iraq. Still, I have yet to hear an opponent of either war express anything short of full support for American troops and a strong desire to bring them home quickly and safely. The real lack of support has come from the Bush Administration, which has provided nothing to the troops but flawed assumptions, inept leadership and inadequate forces and equipment.

We can only hope that returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts will receive better treatment from politicians, the Veteran's Administration and their fellow citizens than their predecessors in Vietnam, who faced widespread indifference.

Yet the myth persists that the worst abuses of Vietnam veterans came from war protesters, who purportedly spat on them and called them "baby killers" at airports when they returned home. In Rambo: First Blood (1982), the title character states at one point that he returned home from the war and saw "all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby killer..."

Even if such incidents occurred, I'm convinced that they were extremely rare. Bob Greene, a veteran, claims to have documented 63 spitting incidents in The Homecoming, his 1989 book. But the underground newspapers of that period are full of articles and letters expressing unqualified sympathy and support, to the extent of providing assistance to AWOL soldiers and deserters (like at Portland's Shelter Half).

Other journalists have taken a close look at this question and concluded that the "trashing" of the troops never happened at all. Chris Clarke, in an angry article for Counterpunch in 2003, called the myth a "damned lie." In his 1998 book, The Spitting Image, Vietnam Veteran Jerry Lembcke confronted the myth directly and found no evidence whatsoever to support it, concluding that it's an urban legend.

Perhaps researchers will eventually determine whether Vietnam veterans were, in fact, confronted or abused by antiwar activists--and if so, on what scale. Popular films like Rambo, The Deer Hunter and Forrest Gump seemed to help create a false historical memory that has evolved into a common assumption, perpetuated primarily by the right, that is intended to drive a permanent wedge between the antiwar movement and the rest of the country. The result is a myth that has little or no factual basis and is, to many of us who challenged the war, deeply offensive.

Meanwhile, such tired arguments from four decades ago continue to be thrown in the face of those who oppose the Iraq war while supporting the U.S. troops who wage it. George W. Bush partied through the Vietnam war—at least when he wasn't campaigning for Republicans—and Dick Cheney had "other priorities," as he admitted. So the rest of us, especially our troops in Iraq and their families, have to pay the price while they relearn the lessons—and repeat the mistakes--of forty years ago.