GMLc Blog has been neglected and lonely. I have no excuse ... but Spoleto is over and I am bronchitis-free and thought anybody who might be reading this should read the fascinating piece about John McCain in Sunday's New York Times if they haven't already:
Reading it brought was a freaky and scary deja vu of the those war years. It's confusing as hell, much as those years were and much as I misunderstood them ... being only 3 years old. Kidding. Being only in my teens. My brother was in Vietnam in 1967-1968. I was paying attention. I remember the sense of outrage in the country that Jane Fonda went to Hanoi and was photographed with the enemy.
But did American really blame those POWs who took "amnesty" from their North Vietnamese and were released in return for saying "This war is wrong."? McCain is furious (still) that few people did blame them, and that some of them were promoted within the armed services on their return from Hanoi. No one in the American public nobody believed that they were not coerced into these "confessions" -- same as no one failed to understand that hostages held recently by hooded Islamist terrorist holding a machete to their throats were reading from a statement prepared for them by the terrorists.
I fail to see how that undermined the Vietnam war effort ... at home or abroad. I do see that for an angry resister captive like John McCain, those soldiers who cooperated created more difficult conditions for him. Under torture, John McCain cooperated, too, eventually. I did not know that he was offered amnesty and release by the North Vietnamese because of the extent of his injuries and his medical condition. He refused it, and stayed in captivity for five years.
McCain's thesis in 1974 at the War College was that victory itself in Vietnam was thwarted by lack of political will ... i.e. war protesters ... at home and by those POWs who caved. And further that if American government would just do a better job of explaining its foreign policy to Americans, this sort of protest could be avoided. I don't buy it, and I don't know of anybody who does, including McCain's fellow prisoners, soldiers still on the ground in Vietnam, veterans today. Taking into account the whole complicated history of American involvement in Vietnam ... it seems the government explained the foreign policy pretty well -- deny and prevent Communist incursion into and takeover of South Vietnam. Why? Fear of Chinese communism and The Domino Theory. Vietnam would fall to communism and other countries would follow, in a domino like collapse around South Asia. The government explained it. Then Lyndon Johnson ordered bombing of North Vietnam. The American public began to doubt that a) any of this action was working b) it was worth the massive loss of American lives.
McCain seems to be applying WWII-type clarity to a war that was undeclared and anything but clear. Reading this article is like traveling to another time, if not another planet. I get the impression that McCain not only thinks the Vietnam carnage was worth the fight, but that had the fight continued, America could have won. I don't know any soldiers who were there who believe that ... including a friend who piloted a Huey and whose helmet is in a war museum. Is McCain also saying that citizens of a democracy have no right to question their government in a time of war? I don't read the Constitution that way. To me, knowing that McCain's foreign policy is informed by a failed foreign policy and huge waste of life in Vietnam is a scary thought. He seems to have many axes to grind, some of them stemming from deep psychological scars and resentments, even though he has made a show of forgiveness through the years. I don't question Sen. McCain's patriotism or sacrifice or public service. I question that is head is still in 1974 ... and 1968. It seems so ... old, and it seems the lessons most of us took from that time are not the ones he's holding onto. If anything seems clear from the last 30 years, it's that this, 2008, is a very different world, and planet. This is not 1974. It's not 1968, either.
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