Making America’s Wars Great Again
Here’s a paradox of
the last few decades: as American military power has been less and less
effective in achieving Washington’s goals, the rhetoric surrounding that power
has grown more and more boastful.
The cliché that our
armed forces are the best and mightiest in
the world -- even if the U.S. military hasn’t won any of its significant wars
in the last 50 years -- resonates in President Trump's promise to make America
great again. Many Americans, clearly including him, associate that slogan with
military power. And we don't just want to be greater again in the future; we
also want to have been greater in the past than we really were. To that end, we
regularly forget some facts and invent others that will make our history more
comfortable to remember.
The Vietnam War was
obviously one of the most disastrous of this country’s past mistakes -- and the
Pentagon's "50th Vietnam War commemoration" is a near-perfect example
of how both national and military leaders and a willing public have avoided
facing important truths about Vietnam and American wars ever since. That’s not
just a matter of inaccurate storytelling. It’s dangerous because refusing to
recognize past mistakes makes it easier to commit future ones. For that reason,
the selective history the Pentagon has been putting out on Vietnam for more
than six years, and what that story tells us about the military leadership's
institutional memory, is worth a critical look.
The commemoration website's historical
material -- principally a set of fact sheets and an extensive "interactive
timeline" -- is laced with factual mistakes, errors of both omission and
commission. Its history drastically minimizes or more often completely ignores
facts that reveal America's policy and moral failures, its missteps on the
ground, and its complicity (along with the enemy's) in massive civilian
suffering not just in Vietnam but in Laos and Cambodia, too. Opposition to the
war at home is largely scrubbed out of the record as well.
Perhaps more telling
than the misstatements has been the prolonged failure to correct faulty entries
that have remained unchanged for years even though the site's administrators
were well aware of them.
Back in 2014,
following a critical TomDispatch article by Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,
and pressure from other critics, officials
did revise a few items. Those included the My Lai massacre
(though the site still does not use the word “massacre” for the murder by U.S.
troops of more than 500 civilians, including women and children) and the naval
clashes in the Tonkin Gulf that
led to the first U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam. But no more corrections
followed, leaving a startling range of wrong or misleading statements
untouched.
In its most noticeable
distortion, the site virtually ignores the domestic debate on the war and the
divisions it caused in American society. As of this writing, the 30-year
(1945-1975) timeline still includes only terse one-line entries for each of the massive national
antiwar protests of October and November 1969. The wave of demonstrations
in May 1970 following
the U.S. "incursion" in Cambodia gets a
somewhat more detailed entry, mentioning the
deaths of protesters killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University
in Ohio and by police gunfire at Jackson State College in Mississippi.
Aside from those,
though, most other important moments in the peace movement are missing from the
timeline altogether. The massive 1965 and 1967 protest marches outside
the Pentagon are nowhere mentioned. Nor are the chaotic protests the following year
outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Although the Vietnam
veterans' experience is billed as the central theme of the commemoration,
veterans who came to oppose the war were also blanked out of its story until
just days ago, when officials at the commemoration’s History and Legacy branch
learned that I was working on the present article. Only then did the site
managers insert a new entry on the
dramatic week-long protest in
April 1971, when hundreds of disillusioned vets threw away their decorations in
front of the U.S. Capitol -- an event previously not mentioned in the timeline
at all.
The new entry, along
with briefly describing the veterans' protests, refers to future secretary of
state and presidential candidate John Kerry's televised testimony that week
before a Senate committee. However, it does not mention the moment that most
historians would describe as the most memorable in that hearing, when Kerry,
wearing Navy fatigues with his Vietnam ribbons pinned above his shirt
pocket, asked the committee
members, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?"
Even if the veterans'
demonstration and some other notable gaps have been belatedly corrected, they
are still worth noting because they illustrate the nature of the message the
site has been putting out for the last five or six years, and the underlying
attitude that has let acknowledged mistakes go uncorrected for half or more of
that time.
Errors of
Commission...
Along with misleading
omissions, the commemoration site also contains direct misstatements of
historical fact that have not been corrected even though site officials have
been aware of them for at least a year, or possibly longer.
Examples include a
pair of falsehoods that, with symbolic symmetry, distort historical reality at
opposite ends of America's Vietnam involvement. One falsifies a key issue at an
early turn on the U.S. path toward involvement in that war, while the other misrepresents
an important turning point in its very last stage.
The first false
statement is in the U.S. Army fact sheet -- there
is one for each military service -- which says in its opening paragraph,
"The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam into a Communist state in
the North and an anti-Communist state in the South."
That is wrong. On the
contrary, rather than creating two states, the Geneva agreements, which
ended hostilities in France's failed effort to maintain colonial rule in
Indochina, definitively recognized Vietnam as a single nation. The line it
established between South and North was defined as a "provisional military
demarcation line" temporarily separating the opposing French and Viet Minh
armed forces, pending national elections for a unified government. The Geneva
Conference's final declaration explicitly stated that the ceasefire line
"should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or
territorial boundary."
That is not a minor
technicality. It misleads on a fundamental question: What was the war about?
Was it illegal foreign aggression by North Vietnam against the South, as the
United States and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon -- neither of which
signed the Geneva treaty -- insisted? Or was it a war to reunify an illegally
divided country, as the Communist side proclaimed? There are arguments to be
made on both sides of that question, but the Geneva accords did not support
Washington's legal and political justification for intervening -- and wrongly
indicating that it did gives the U.S. claim an uncontested legitimacy it simply
did not have.
The second example
comes from a passage in the Air Force fact sheet on the
December 1972 U.S. air offensive commonly
remembered as the "Christmas bombing."
Using its codename,
Linebacker, the fact sheet describes events this way: "As [peace] talks
dragged on, President Nixon ordered a second Linebacker operation and in late
December 1972, B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong at night and A-7s and F-4s
struck during the day... The North Vietnamese, now defenseless, returned to
negotiations and quickly concluded a settlement. American airpower therefore
played a decisive role in ending the long conflict."
Like the Army's statement on Geneva, that is false. The
December bombing brought no significant new concessions from North Vietnam. The
peace agreement signed by Hanoi's representatives in January 1973 was, in every
meaningful respect, identical to the draft treaty they had already accepted in
October 1972, months before the bombing.
That earlier text, which differed
from the January agreement only on a few minor procedural points, was not a
negotiating proposal or a loose agreement in principle. It was a definitive
final draft approved down to the last detail by both sides and was not carried out only
because the United States withdrew its commitment after South Vietnam's
President Nguyen Van Thieu, whose government had not participated in the
negotiations, rejected its terms. Under strong U.S. pressure, Thieu accepted
essentially the same agreement in January. So it was Saigon, not Hanoi, that
changed its position after the bombing.
That's a meaningful
mistake, too. It mischaracterizes a critical event in the negotiations that
ended the U.S. war, and then cites that erroneous history to falsely claim that
air power played a decisive role.
...and of Omission
Until the most recent
changes spurred by my inquiry, some crucial historical events were missing from
the timeline. Although a few of those blank spots have now been nominally
filled, several of the revised entries still lack meaningful details.
One notable omission
was the March 1970 coup in Cambodia
that overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk, toppled Cambodia into full-scale war,
and set the stage for U.S. troops to enter the country just six weeks later.
Another was South Vietnam’s only authentic national election in
September 1967, when General Nguyen Van Thieu became president with slightly
more than one-third of the votes. An entry on that election was inserted in one
of those late amendments to the timeline, but it still says nothing about the
surprise second-place candidate, Truong Dinh Dzu, who ran on a peace platform,
was arrested soon after
the election and imprisoned for the next five years -- tarnishing claims that
the United States was supporting a legitimate democracy in South Vietnam.
Another gap only
partially filled after all these years by the newly amended timeline has to do
with the intensive and highly controversial U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1973,
conducted for nearly six months after the Paris peace
agreement ended U.S. combat in Vietnam.
Replacing a single
oblique reference in the earlier entry, which had merely
noted that the U.S. Congress ended funding in August 1973 for "air action
in Cambodia and Laos" but said nothing else about that campaign, the
timeline now specifies where and
when the bombing took place. However, it still gives no details about the scale
and severity of those air strikes. (Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of U.S.
bombs fell on Cambodia in
1973, more than were dropped on Japan in all of World War II.) Nor does
it offer any hint that the bombing did not end Cambodia's agony. The timeline
mentions Cambodia just once more, in a one-sentence entry on its final
page saying only, "On April 16 and 17 [1975], Phnom Penh falls to the
communist forces, the Khmer Rouge."
Omissions extend even
to the dates that were chosen for the 50th "anniversary" (if that
word can be used to designate a span of more than 13 years). Rather than
marking any events in the actual Vietnam War, the commemoration officially runs
between two U.S. holidays -- from Memorial Day in 2012 until Veterans Day in
2025.
A beginning date for
the Vietnam War is indeed hard to pin down, but there were perfectly clear
choices for its end: January 27, 1973, when U.S. combat ended under the Paris
peace agreement; March 29, 1973, when the last American war prisoners were
released and the last U.S. combat troops departed; or April 30, 1975, when
Saigon surrendered to the Communists. By not choosing any of those, the
Pentagon spared veterans and the rest of us from the possible discomfort of
noticing the real dates and remembering the great national failure they
represent.
Changes Promised, But
Unmade
Pentagon commemoration
officials have long acknowledged serious shortcomings in the timeline. As far
back as March 2015, administrators informed a group of the site's critics that
sooner or later they planned to replace it with a
brand-new timeline giving a more accurate and balanced version of events in
Vietnam.
The following January,
retired Army Colonel Mark Franklin, chief of the commemoration's History and
Legacy Branch, told historians at
the American Historical Association's annual meeting that the updated timeline
would be posted "soon." He even showed slides from what was to be the
new version. But nothing on the site had changed in the fall of 2017, many
months later, when I contacted his office before writing an earlier article on
the commemoration. I was told then that a completely revised website, including
a brand-new timeline, was expected to be posted by the end of that year. If
that didn't happen, the plan was to go ahead with corrections in the existing
timeline.
Almost exactly a year
later, the site has still not been replaced and the revised timeline, prepared
several years ago, remains in limbo. The official explanation for the delay is
that unresolved contracting issues have kept work on the new site from
starting. Franklin has emphatically denied that there has been a deliberate
attempt to cling to faulty history or any intent to "portray one
particular narrative about the war." But keeping drastically whitewashed
history on the site for so many years after promising to change it does not
exactly suggest a strong commitment to provide "historically accuratematerials,"
as promised on the History and Legacy section's home page, to help Americans understand their
country's experience in Vietnam.
Mythologizing Our Wars
and Ourselves
The commemoration not
only tells us something about the Pentagon's custodians of our Vietnam War
memories, it also reveals something much broader and deeper in American
political and popular culture: a powerful need to think of ourselves as a
righteous, just, and successful country that fights only righteous, just, and
successful wars.
This is, of course,
hardly a new phenomenon. As far back as 1899, in a speech defending
the military campaign that would make the Philippines a U.S. colony, President
William McKinley assured his audience that it was not a war for treasure or
conquest because such wars were foreign to the American character. "No
imperial designs lurk in the American mind," McKinley declared. "They
are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose." The "sole
purpose" of sending U.S. troops to the Philippines, he went on, was
"the welfare and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants of the
Philippine Islands." As chronicled in Stephen Kinzer's fascinating 2017
book, The True Flag, that
same note was struck in many orations at the time -- speeches that perfectly
expressed what more than a century later would be called "American
exceptionalism."
Along with nurturing a
broad national assumption of moral superiority, for a generation American
political leaders have shored up U.S. military ventures with rhetoric that
conflates "support the troops" with "support the policy." A
variant of that formula that has been retroactively applied to Vietnam equates
"honor the veterans" with "honor the war," the clear
implication being that criticizing the war is indeed disrespecting those
veterans. It's false logic, but looking at the Pentagon commemoration site,
it's impossible not to see its influence there.
The commemoration's
most recent corrections are a welcome but small step toward greater accuracy.
But the site is still far from showing the true nature of what this country
really did to itself and to many millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and
Cambodians in the tragic mistake we call the Vietnam War. For that, far greater
changes will be needed than have been made so far.
Arnold R. Isaacs,
a TomDispatch regular,
covered the Vietnam War for the Baltimore Sun between June
1972 and the final defeat in April 1975 and is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam
and Cambodia. He also wrote Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its
Ghosts, and Its Legacy and an online report, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan
Americans in post-9/11 America. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Storyand
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War and
Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian
novel Splinterlands.
Copyright 2018 Arnold
R. Isaacs
Posted by Arnold Isaacs at 7:44am, November 8, 2018.