An exploration of America’s involvement in foreign wars, examined through the light provided by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s brilliant documentary “The Vietnam War,” finishing its run on PBS, is timely and should inform the debate on the Global War on Terror. The series is the height of the art of documentary filmmaking, as great as his treatment of the Civil War and of jazz, and I can recommend nothing more.
The series should reopen long-standing questions of America’s uniquely (by the standards of the modern “West”) warlike foreign policy of the past half century, as we find ourselves, incredibly, involved in another Asian land war, this time in Afghanistan, now in its sixteenth foggy year of whatever can be defined as progress. And there, even more than in Vietnam, we attempt to transform with force a culture we barely understand, pursuing goals we’ve not defined by any standard of realpolitik (when Vietnam “fell” what was it to us? If Afghanistan falls what’s it to us? It’s fallen to no harm but to Afghans many times before). And again, we are backing an ally with no prospect of translating our efforts into attainable facts of good governance for their people. Again, we back a kleptocratic government we’d ourselves make war on if forced on us by some remote foreigner. Again, our war is against an enemy that seems to have all of the advantages of motivation: maybe we will know we have committed allies when our government forces volunteer as Shahid, or to haul a heavy machine gun up a mountain by hand. I could have written that same sentence fifty years ago about our ARVN proxies – just substitute the Viet Cong sapper. Part of the re-examination should be: a common denominator in our foreign adventures always seems to pit us against dedicated, selfless enemies such as these. Was there any foreign war of the last half century we’ve been involved in where the forces of corruption eroded our enemy instead of us?
Consider what American war memorial parks (not to mention our checkbook) would look like without our tilting at the windmill of Islamic assholery. There is not a home grown, organic, political trend in sight in the whole Islamic world that our founding fathers would not have warned them against nigh three centuries ago. Consider the wrecked landscape of our repeated (from Vietnam) errors in the Middle East: of how we spent a quarter of our deficit and played the leading role in creating the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. Just as in Vietnam, for that sum, in blood and treasure, a simple gain should be able to be claimed, but what? And we, again, sleepwalk in war, driven by the war’s own inertia, to some can-kicked-down-the-road endgame, pretty much sure to not involve a victory for us, or for human rights.
Like the Vietnam war, and the Iraq war, and the Afghan war, and the drug war for that matter, Americans are beguiled by what should be considered modern America’s Oedipal fatal flaw: our ease in destroying people for their own good and betterment (for historical America our fatal flaw was race).
Think on all the slogans in then last half century, in all the elections of “doing something about drug addiction,” and “doing something about terrorism,” and “doing something about Communism.” But see that communism died naturally of its own murderous contradictions, when the commissars decided to stop killing for it, and it’s only a matter of an internet search to see the key to victory in the drug war lies in Portugal’s example in not fighting it. A War on the proper noun of terrorism can only be perpetual, and can only be won by the undertaker.
The last example of a concept Vietnam insufficiently drove into our murderously romantic wooden heads should be: We can blow up our enemies, but we cannot blow up our friends, the same way people can’t logically be destroyed for their own good, nor for not being strong enough. The compromises to our Democratic values were stark in Vietnam, but we certainly did not stop there: for this half century we have been supporting human rights abusers the world over: do you know who else beheads infidels besides the Islamic State? Our client Saudi Arabia! The cherry on this particular sundae was when they beheaded a man for witchcraft, thereby forgoing the Nobel prize in physics that would have been theirs in proving the existence of witchcraft. Know who else perpetrated an ethnic cleansing genocide? Our ally Pakistan. Know what other American client state overthrew the people’s democratic will and became a military dictatorship? Egypt!
In the Vietnam documentary it is painful to see the anti-colonial bastion that was once traditional America, remembering our anti-colonial revolution, still fresh with our application of the finest philosophy of the enlightenment, treat with scant regard the Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh, no less) plea for support against its colonizers, with Ho citing Wilson’s own fourteen points back to him. Worse was our support of the French attempt at re-colonization, and it seems as if our compromise of principals for the benefit of our allies has been a defining feature of our foreign policy incoherence ever since (and with enough compromises, what principles can be claimed?). And what profit from our Faustian bargains? Our support of Pakistan bought us no support from them in our Afghan misadventure, our support of the French in Vietnam was just as ethereal in lasting benefits (they urged us to stay out of it when our turn came grinding around). Our support of Saudi Arabia was of no avail to us when the 9/11 atrocity was committed by their citizens (fifteen of the nineteen terrorists). Saudi Arabia remained somehow unexamined when we invaded Afghanistan to pursue the perpetrators, and then invaded Iraq for completely mythical perpetrators. We went to total war with the predominant feature of Islam; rejection of modernity and hatred of foreigners, but this is the school of thought our client Saudi Arabia was founded on when the house of Saud made common cause with the school Wahhabism.
The quandary of how we might support democracy in cultures where the popular will will be expressed in values antithetical to human rights, such as communism or genocidal tribalism, is another theory we have never sufficiently grappled with, and Vietnam is where the lesson should have taken, we paid the price but rejected the education.
All that said, there is still some philosophical honor for Americans to recover: If we should not be killing for a romantic illusion of mankind’s betterment, the same should apply a million times more to any communist, and it should have been apparent to anyone in Asia willing to look.
The real tragedy, then, is not so much our dead and damaged veterans (ruined for partial blind idealism), but the complete blind idealism that over three million people in Vietnam paid to attain a political system relegated everywhere else to the dustbin of history, which they are now trying to run away from.
Peaceful, evolutionary development based on free trade (so far as that ever really happens) is the only known path to prosperity, but it makes for a poor political slogan. Of course, this dichotomy infects the dialogue of the politically developed world too.
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