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Over the past few weeks I’ve heard a disturbing
remark repeated on cable news, that is, when Muslim
militants are held up in mosques, like the famous
one in Najaf, our forces should just send in the tanks,
blow it to bits; because look what political correctness
got us in Vietnam. This advice was not offered by
commentators but viewers. Sadly, the program hosts
were either incapable of giving their audience a brief
history primer, or simply didn’t care to. But
just such a lesson is essential if we want to fully
understand how the United States government is viewed
by terrorists and much of the world.
Cultural sensitivity was the farthest thing from
Uncle Sam’s mind when he dropped seven million
tons of bombs on Vietnam (vastly more than what was
let loose on Japan and Germany in World War II); or
when he scattered 20 million gallons of chemical defoliants/weapons
throughout her countryside, leaving (according to
a 1997 Wall Street Journal report) an estimated 500,000
children with serious birth defects and hundreds of
thousand more with Cancer; or when he launched the
CIA’s “Phoenix Program” which tortured
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to death; or when
he killed and maimed more than 3 million of her citizens,
many of them innocent civilians, women, and children.
To speak bluntly, we inflicted 9/11 scale terror attacks
on the Vietnamese people 100s of times during the
1960s and early ‘70s.
The recent debate over what John Kerry said about
a few fellow Vietnam vets and what the Massachusetts
senator did or didn’t do in Southeast Asia pales
in comparison to what actually did happen. And only
takes us further away from the discussion our country
should be having about the Vietnam conflict and American
foreign policy in general. That is, the United States
lost forever the moral high ground through its genocidal
behavior in Vietnam; and that gruesome foreign policy
decisions like its military venture into Indochina
helped plant the seeds for terror attacks on American
soil. Or in the words of Ramsey Clark, the former
Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, “The
greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign
policy.”
This is a sensitive and prickly reality to confront.
It is much easier and “patriotic” to tow
the administration’s line that terrorists hate
us for what we stand for and for our freedoms. To
hold an opposing view means to be attacked with the
absurd accusation that you believe the 9/11 casualties
deserved to be murdered. Of course, they didn’t.
No innocent American civilian deserves to die so horribly;
just as no Vietnamese, Iraqi, or any civilian does.
Slowly a few bold commentators are beginning to show
the pluck of MIT’s Noam Chomsky and at last
broach the issue. In Pat Buchanan’s upcoming
book Where the Right Went Wrong the conservative pundit
doesn’t sugarcoat the matter when he writes:
“We are not hated for who we are. We are hated
for what we do. It is not our principles that have
spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic
world. It is our policies… U.S. dominance of
the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It
is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the
9/11 terrorists would not have been over here.”
That ol’ pitchfork Pat has become the sage face
of the Republican Party just gives further evidence
to how far the Grand Old Party has fallen.
So, why are we over in Iraq, if pundits like Buchanan
are right and it has just served to spawn more terrorists?
Again we can turn to Vietnam for answers. The reason
behind the holocaust inflicted on Vietnam was not
imminent threat but a theory. The domino theory claimed
that if Vietnam fell to communism all of Asia would,
thus our government was compelled to stop this from
happening. Today, neo-conservatives like Wolfowitz
and Cheney have re-invented this Cold War theory to
justify intervention in the Middle East, believing
that if Democracy can be force-fed to Iraq, all the
surrounding Arab countries will eventually follow
suit.
The problem with the domino theory is that it is
just that. A theory. And one that historically has
held little water; Asia didn’t completely fall
to Communism after we left Vietnam, neither did South
and Central America after Castro seized power in Cuba,
and few experts outside neo-conservative circles seriously
see the Middle East tumbling like dominoes toward
Democracy. Instead, as history has shown us, rabid
attention to such theories leaves only death and destruction
in its wake, followed by a chain reaction of unintended
consequences.
In 1973 the acclaimed author and journalist William
Shirer wrote these eerily prescient words:
“Until we go through it ourselves, until our
people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington…while
the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames,
and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over
for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to
find some of their dear ones mangled… only after
that gruesome experience will we realize what we are
inflicting on the people of Indochina...”
But Shirer was mistaken. Even after the horror was
visited upon us, we still refuse to realize what our
government did (and continues to do) in our name.
| D.A. Blyler is the author of
the novel Steffi’s Club. His essays have
appeared at Salon.com, The Korean Herald, Bangkok’s
The Nation, and other international and online
publications. A lecturer at Rajabhat University
Rajanagarindra, he makes his home in Thailand.
His latest novel can be purchased at Amazon.com. |
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