Back in 1967, I remember the poet John Ciardi (at that time a columnist for the Saturday Review and responsible for one of the first modern translations of Dante) responding to a reader who inquired why he hadnt written anything about Vietnam. He answered by saying that he remembered all too well the literary response to the Spanish Civil War, the elegy for each fallen town, for each fallen comrade, and then the gradual revelation that the moral positions were not nearly as straightforward as it seemed, that the Revolution was fully capable of its own modern excesses. Ciardi, in short, had seen too much to take an easy position.
For me and my generation, Vietnam has roughly the same position. I can remember reading literally dozens of pieces of the same type as Ms. Wildings, and being shocked and horrified because it is indeed horrifying. What did not come to light until years afterward when there was no political axe to grind was that everything reported in the Western press was tame stuff indeed to what the Viet Cong did routinely to friend and foe alike. By that time, the tyranny of North Vietnam and the truly sickening atrocities of the Khmer Rouge had come to light. It is absolutely true that the US military in Vietnam was involved in incidents that fall on the wrong side of the bell-shaped curve even of combat morality, as perceived in the West. But it is also the case that the bell-shaped curve of the Cong and Khmer Rouge was far, far beyond anything we think of as moral. My own second thoughts about the Vietnam opposition began with acquainting myself with these realities. The one outstanding failure of my generation, particularly the liberals, is the refusal to come to terms to what the opposition to the Vietnamese war ultimately led.
There were no convoys of humanitarian aid to the million or so murdered by the Khmer Rouge. There were no journalists, peace witnesses, Western observers. In the same manner, there were no witnesses to Husseins tyranny or the Talibans excesses in Afghanistan. Ms. Wilding in her report overlooks the most banal and obvious truth of all that any power that permits observations of its military practice is by definition not the most odious. . . .[t]he worst is not/ So long as we can say, 'This is the worst. By the same token, she will never be witness to the real horrors that go on in this world, which are done without witnesses for good, practical reasons.
Had the four contractors not been murdered and their bodies desecrated in Falluja, had Sadr not put his teen-age thugs on the street, in about 75 days, a shaky, but genuine Iraqi government would have taken preliminary control of that sad nations governmental infrastructure. Anyone who doubts this can look to the examples of Kuwait, and more far off Japan and Germany, as well as the reality of US presidential politics. The `insurgency (already a misnomer) is thus not directed against the US, but against the possibility of a pluralistic, secular nation coming into being. It is the traditional first stage of a fascist seizure of power, creating a crisis in which moderate voices can not be heard. Both the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli territorial fundamentalists (may they both rot in hell) have been playing this cynical game for a generation now.
Which is why invoking the specter of the Khmer Rouge and all the others who seek as a first step to purify a corrupt nation is not untoward. I am not going to use bromidic diction such as tragic and deplorable because Ms. Wildings description truly is dreadful. But, as with so many correspondents of this type she poses no alternative, other than (I would infer) acquiescence ? But that way lies madness. There is worse than that, there is much worse and it begins with permitting those who would seize power by force of arms to do so.
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My mother used to tell me, "Elwood, in this world, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so nice." For years I was smart. I recommend nice. You may quote me. - Elwood P. Dowd
fdbjr:
This is a really good post. Thanks for taking the time to express these balanced and objective views.
You said, "The `insurgency’ (already a misnomer) is thus not directed against the US, but against the possibility of a pluralistic, secular nation coming into being. It is the traditional first stage of a fascist seizure of power, creating a crisis in which moderate voices can not be heard."
I think this in particular is paramount, and the meat of the situation. I doubt, if the truth were known, that the men behind this situation are even Iraqi. One of Al Queda's methods is to enter nations in mayhem where they might gain a toe hold and add to the destructive forces at work. They or others like them saw an opportunity in an Iraq on it's knees, and seized it. They are grown men exploiting the youth of beleaguered nations; like vultures they pounce upon the weak.
Actually, I disagree with fdbjr’s notion of taking an “easy position.” I take that the phrase, “had seen too much,” actually must be referring to Ciardi’s combat experience in World War II. Perhaps by 1967 Mr. Ciardi was finished writing poems about that experience, but here is his poem, “[]A Box Comes Home]:”
“I remember the United States of America
As a flag-draped box with Arthur in it
And six marines to bear it on their shoulders.
I wonder how someone once came to remember
The Empire of the East and the Empire of the West
As an urn maybe delivered by chariot.
You could bring Germany back on a shield once
And France in a plume. England, I suppose
Kept coming back a long time as a letter.
Once I saw Arthur dressed as the United States
Of America. Now I see the United States
Of America as Arthur in a flag-sealed domino.
And I would pray more good of Arthur
Than I can wholly believe. I would pray
An agreement with the United States of America
To equal Arthur’s living as it equals his dying
At the red-taped grave in Woodmere
By the rain and oak leaves on the domino.”
I tried to find another poem of his titled, “Elegy for a Cove Full of Bones,” but wasn’t successful. All I could find was this excerpt used in an essay:
“Death is lastly a debris
Folding on the folding sea:
Blanket, boxes, belts, and bones,
And a jelly on the stones.
Mr. Ciardi flew B-29 bombers in the Pacific Theater and this poem speaks about the caves the Japanese used to hide in on the islands. When I was a little kid and living on the island of Okinawa while my dad flew bombing missions in Vietnam, I use to search out these caves because they were still full of “Blanket, boxes, and bones…” though not so much in the bone department, nothing like when my husband was a little kid and lived on this same island just a few years after the Battle of Okinawa. In this battle, one-third of the Okinawan civilian population lost their lives. I can remember clearly watching the hands of a young woman folding paper to make me a bird [origami] while she was telling the story of witnessing her mother’s death of being shot by a marine who mistakenly thought she was pulling out a grenade from her shirtsleeve. She didn’t blame anyone for the death; neither could speak the other’s language to understand what exactly was happening in the terror of that moment.
I know more than my share of what direct combat is like and believe Ms. Wilding’s piece at the core is just that—sharing that madness. Telling the truth about the horror happening at the moment. Whatever “light” may be shed about the situation in the future will not ease what Ms. Wilding has witnessed.
The personal déjà vu of all this does have a hold over me too. Both conflicts were sparked and based on lies. I would be curious as to what fbdr means as “no political axe to grind” in both the future and past. Much of the political rhetoric of “freedom and democracy” is familiar to my ear. Being a little girl in 1967 I wasn’t aware of the press, though I would come to hear particular combat stories firsthand in not ideal circumstances, including those of bombing Laos and Cambodia. Would there have been those Khmer Rouge atrocities had we [the US] handled ourselves differently? I don’t believe so.
Blaming those who opposed the Vietnam War with the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge just doesn’t cut it. The peace movement did not bring the war to Cambodia in 1969. The peace movement did not back a regime change that indeed would prove to be the event needed for the Khmer Rouge to gain a foothold. One administration’s Lon Nol is another’s Saddam Hussein is another’s Ahmed Chabli. What we don’t seem to grasp in all this deja-vu going around is the importance to accountability to the actual truth of why the intentional killing of other human beings is happening. We instead seem to prefer making excuses on why the lies and deceit are necessary. Is it to keep our conscious clear? Our hands washed clean of blood already our responsibility?
Talk about missing the point, which was about greater and lesser evils. I am fully aware that some apologists for the Camboidan atrocities blame the US for that. (By the way, it was the Viet Cong who took the war there, not the United States). But I will take what I think is the majority position, which is the excesses of the Khmer Rouge were a natural extension of an element of Asian Communism as practiced forty years ago. It was the same motivation as the Great Leap Forward and the absurdities of the Red Guard. (By the way, the pronouncements of the Wahabi fundamentalists on the need for social purification are uncomfortably reminiscent of that.) I also believe the Khmer Rouge slaughters were only possible because of the poweer vacuum the US left behind.
For that matter, similar brutalities of the Hanoi regime had already been reported internationally, by the American missionary doctor Tom Dooley, among others, before the conflict expanded.
You are also a little behind the times on the 'lies' of that era. Most of the justifications for US participation in the conflict turned out to be correct, particularly the characterization of the war as an attempt to impose a regime on an unwilling people by force of arms. Most notably, the US claims that the Tet offensive was a last ditch effort of a militarily dsefeated foe turned out to be correct. The offensive was a brilliant political success for the North Vietnamese because of the credibility gap that the Johnson administration had created by premature claims of victory. It is interesting to me that the Bush adminsitration has not repeated that error.
As to lies in the present situation, I hate to remind a true believer of actual facts, but the uncertainty as to WMD was created by the Hussein government by a systematic refusal to cooperate with UN inspections, ending with the their ordered exit in 1998.
It might appear that I have moved from Left to Right during my lifetime, but I don't think that's the case. (I have a lot of complaints about Bush, particularly concerning the increasingly disturbing division of wealth int he US. Not that Clinton did much better.) It is that too many cherished beliefs of the Left turn out to be shibboleths. There was a duality between the US and the USSR; they did not have the same moral stature. The justifications for the US involvement in Vietnam turn out to have far more cogency than anyone would credit at the time; etc.
Foing forward, I am going to post a topic with the URL of the interim Iraqi constitution. You might ask yourself (as does the writer) why any Iraqi in good raith would oppose it and what the motivation of those who take arms against it is. I'll call 'em fascists, because I think the word fairly applies.
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My mother used to tell me, "Elwood, in this world, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so nice." For years I was smart. I recommend nice. You may quote me. - Elwood P. Dowd
Fbdr,
I don’t think I missed your point, I choose not to accept you point. I don’t think it is a choice about the lesser of two evils, I believe it more about accepting responsibility for that which we created. The instability in Iraq was created by our U.S. actions that were based on lies, which reminded me a whole lot of how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam. This morning I see that a see a NY Times columnist, Paul Krugman, agrees:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/16/opinion/16KRUG.html?th
“The Vietnam Analogy”
“…Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army.
Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government — as opposed to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge.
If we aren't promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war have already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they no longer have high hopes for what we may accomplish, but they fear the consequences if we leave. The irony is painful. One of the real motives for the invasion of Iraq was to give the world a demonstration of American power. It's a measure of how badly things have gone that now we're told we can't leave because that would be a demonstration of American weakness.”
Your statement: “I also believe the Khmer Rouge slaughters were only possible because of the poweer vacuum the US left behind.” I agree with. But I also choose to remember how the Khmer Rouge came into power to begin with. Your choice of juxtaposition of Wahabi fundamentalist intent and Khmer Rouge social purification thought is an interesting one. If you think that influence exists in Iraq how close do you think that lid is to popping of the pot? Who is responsible for not just bringing the water to a boil, lighting the fire, but providing the damn stove?!
I don’t think I’m behind the times on the “lies” of that era, I lived through the times. My dad was considered an old dude in that conflict. He already served in N. Africa and Korea. For Vietnam he served on the Advisory, the Defense, the Air, and the Air Defense, Campaigns. He was up in the air and on the ground. There is never any shortage of atrocities during war, the madness of direct combat sees sure to that—I could tell you stories about the South executing prisoners because it was too much trouble to process them back to Saigon. If there were ever a literal demonstration to define evil, direct combat would be it.
My mother used to tell me, "Elwood, in this world, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so nice." For years I was smart. I recommend nice. You may quote me. - Elwood P. Dowd