Kerry and Nixon – Partners in Crime
Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
-- John Kerry, Testimony to the Senate, April 22, 1971.
The sense of confrontation that frames John Kerry's most historic line obscures the fact he and his apparent adversary, Richard Nixon, were really on the same side. Kerry and Nixon both wanted to withdraw from Vietnam. What was at issue was only the pace of withdrawal—how fast, not whether. But was Vietnam a mistake?
By now, the typical high school history textbook teaches that Vietnam was pure folly, and by way of explaining that folly, it mentions the "domino theory." By this theory, Southeast Asian countries were like dominoes, and if one fell to communism, the next would fall, and the next, and so on. It is conventional to mock this idea, but it was partially vindicated after the US withdrawal when Cambodia and Laos fell to communism. Historian J. M. Roberts writes:
In the immediate aftermath of the American withdrawal, what happened in Vietnam (and then spread to Cambodia) had become once more and more evidently an Indo-Chinese civil war. The North Vietnamese had not waited long before resuming operations… Early in 1975, American aid to Saigon came to an end. A government that had lost virtually all its other territory was now reduced to a backs-to-the-wall attempt to hold the capital city and the lower Mekong with a demoralized and defeated army. At the same time, the States had supported, but Congress prevented the sending of further military and financial help to do it. The pattern of China in 1947 was being repeated; the United States cut her losses, mainly at the expense of those who had relied on her (though 117,000 Vietnamese fled with the Americans.)
This outcome was doubly ironic. In the first place it suggested that the hardliners on Asian policy had been right all along – that only the knowledge that the United States was in the last resort prepared to fight for them would guarantee that post-colonial regimes would resist communism. (History of the Twentieth Century, J. M. Roberts.)
When we departed in 1973, only Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to communism. But what if we had departed ten years earlier, or never gotten involved?
By 1973, there had been two crucial changes. First, Suharto had come to power in Indonesia, and massacred hundreds of thousands of communists, not only ending the communist threat there, which had been a serious one, but also causing Indonesia to align with the West, whereas the previous ruler, Sukarno, had been inclined to side with the Soviet Union. Thailand had been strengthened by ten more years of participation in SEATO. India, which, like Indonesia, had been inclined to lean towards the communists rather than the west, had also fought a war with China—and accepted American help. The "dominoes" were more resistant to falling. Second, the Sino-Soviet split had taken place (there had even been a war between Red China and the Soviets), and then Nixon had showed up in China and "triangulated" the Soviet Union. This transformed the global balance of power, so that it no longer threatened to tip decisively against us.
Vietnam became a Stalinist state, complete with gulags, secret police, and wretched economic policies, and in Cambodia there was a horrific genocide which killed one-quarter of the population of the country. If three dominoes fell after 1973—South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—how many might have fallen if we had pulled out in 1963? Thailand? Indonesia? If the balance of power had shifted decisively towards the communists in southeast Asia, would that have given more confidence to India's huge Communist party to take over? A flood of totalitarianism might have swept over Southeast and possibly South Asia. From Indonesia, might communism have jumped to Australia? The Australians were afraid of this; that's why they fought side by side with us in Vietnam to the end. (Even if this is conceded, admittedly, one may maintain that American security would not be affected; but allies matter.)
If the domino theory was valid, that opens up the possibility that Vietnam may not have been a mistake at all. Maybe we didn't even lose. Granted, the regime we were defending fell, but we held the line long enough that the spread of communism in Southeast Asia was checked, and long enough for the global communist threat to be weakened because of internal divisions. It was a costly holding action, with which we bought time to render that difficult battlefield irrelevant; then we got out. This logic does not imply that Vietnam was the best option we had: maybe it would have been better to make our stand in Malaysia and Thailand, for example. And to be sure, when we began to defend Vietnam, we planned to save it, not sacrifice it. But in the great global chess game against the Soviets, we had sacrificed a pawn to save the queen, and arguably we captured a rook in the meantime.
Only southeast Asians were not chess pieces, but real people, millions of whom died in the Vietnam war and in the aftermath of our defeat. Given the terribly high price the southeast Asians paid (and are still paying) for our defeat there, could this war really have been worth it? What end could we have had then, big enough to justify such great and terrible expedients?
Well, whether or not it justified the Vietnam war-cum-withdrawal, the ultimate end for which we were working then was a very big one—saving mankind's freedom. Policymakers had learned the lessons from isolationism of the 1930s: we could not be indifferent to horrors in the rest of the world, both because it was wrong, and because we would eventually suffer for it anyway. We had walked through Auschwitz, we had seen the gas chambers, we had come face to face with evil of an inconceivable magnitude. George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and others had helped us to understand the terrible phenomenon of totalitarianism, the collective madness, the absolute of unfreedom, and the murders of millions that proved to be totalitarianism's ubiquitous companion. In 1947, as we came to understand the nature of the Stalinist Soviet Union, we were faced with a horrible dilemma. Communism was murderously oppressive and inherently expansionist, programmed to seek the revolutionary overthrow of our civilization. To let it persist was to condemn dozens of peoples to slavery and to live under a constant threat ourselves. Yet to go to war with the Soviets could result in nuclear annihilation for both our nations. We settled on the policy of "containment." We would leave the communists unmolested where they were already in control, but resolutely block any attempt to expand. Thus we airlifted supplies to West Berlin when the Soviets blockaded it. We fought the communists to a stalemate in Korea. At stake was the right to live, to speak, to worship, to think freely, all over the world—in short, civilization.
But containment became too difficult. It committed us to fight the communists anywhere, at a place of their choosing. We were a self-confident nation, after winning WWII, after turning Germany and Japan from ruined enemies into prosperous allies, with a growing economy, with new technologies constantly appearing. But in Vietnam we reached our limits. When our young people were forced to fight in a war whose purpose was obscure and apparently remote from self-defense, freedom lost some of its meaning, the system lost some of its legitimacy, and our country's unity and self-conviction collapsed from within.
And so we abandoned southeast Asia to its fate, for the greater good. Our Vietnamese allies were betrayed, and many died or went to concentration camps. But our republic survived. Our territory and civilian population were unscathed, of course, since the war took place far away. We had lost 57,000 soldiers and a good deal of military prestige, but we were still not weak. Our grand strategy had been damaged and compromised, but not destroyed, and we soon adapted. Withdrawal from Vietnam worked, for us. But—this question was eclipsed at the time, but would have been asked earlier, and may be asked in hindsight—how could we justify abandoning the Vietnamese to totalitarianism?
And here is where Nixon and Kerry, like Pilate and Caiaphas, were, despite their mutual suspicion and contempt, partners. People like John Kerry, who compared Ho Chi Minh to George Washington, turned the moral universe on its head and created confusion which provided a smokescreen for the cynical realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger. Nixon played the role of Caiaphas, who said "it is better for one man (one nation) to perish than that the whole people (the free world) should pass away." Part of the premise for this decision was provided by the fact that, thanks to people like Kerry, public opinion and young public opinion especially would no longer tolerate the war.
Kerry, strange to say, played the role of Pilate.
Pilate, confronted with a condemned but innocent man whom he dared not take the political risk of freeing, said first, "What is truth?"—moral relativism—and then "I wash my hands of this case"—abdication of responsibility. Kerry took the same two steps, moral relativism and abdication of responsibility, and they define him as a man and as a statesman to this day.
John Kerry told the Senate that "We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy." He called Ho Chi Minh "the George Washington of Vietnam." Yet George Washington was fighting to establish a free republic, Ho Chi Minh to establish a communist dictatorship. Maybe John Kerry, who also opined in 1971 that Ho Chi Minh understood the principles of the US Constitution and was trying "to install the same provisions into the government of Vietnam," was deceived about Ho's ideology. If so, though, it is odd that Kerry did not recant, reverse himself or apologize when the nature of the Vietcong regime became clear, or rather, clearer, since its oppressive and bloody character was evident enough by 1971. This suggests that the "most people" who didn't know the difference between communism and democracy included John Kerry—or rather, he knew, but he didn't care. Americans lived in freedom, other nations lived under communism, it was all morally equivalent. Later, he opposed Reagan's arms buildup, and called the Reagan years eight years of moral darkness, because he did not believe that we should assert ourselves, or that we had anything worthwhile to assert. He negotiated with the Sandinistas in central America, although they were Marxist, because he did not believe in the superiority of democratic capitalism to Marxism. He does not rejoice in the freedom of the Iraqi people, indeed he shows no interest in or acknowledgement of it at all, because has no strong belief in the superiority of democracy to Islamofascism.
And John Kerry washed his hands of the case. He and his fellow soldiers and his generation were not responsible for what would happen in southeast Asia when they were gone. If anyone had to be blamed, blame Nixon. He had been exposed as a crook anyway. But better, blame no one, that was just what the world was like. The whole Western world took the Pontius Pilate solution in that epoch, the post-colonial, post-Vietnam epoch. Just as Sartre thought of the self detached from its social roles, the West sought to detach itself from the global roles it had played, and retreat inward. It watched the horrors that unfolded in the world through lenses of artificial helplessness. If there was a vague thought that we are to blame, it was not because of our abdication (the proximate cause of many of the disasters) but instead because of our long involvement with the rest of the world, which had never been an altruistic "civilizing mission," as imperialists had grandly insisted, but was all about greed, all along—the Hobson-Lenin thesis about imperialism held sway. The more disasters happened in the Third World, the more guilt we heaped upon the imperialists, and upon ourselves inasmuch as we were former imperialists, and still had some relations with the Third World and might therefore be considered neo-imperialists. If things were still bad for them, it was because we were somehow still involved, still in some ineffable way "imperialist." If only we washed our hands of the case enough, maybe they would finally be clean.
Twenty-five years later, Robert Kaplan returned to one of the "dominoes" that Richard Nixon and John Kerry had allowed to fall—Cambodia. His impressions make for ghostly reading. Two million Cambodians had been killed by the Khmer Rouge, one-quarter of the country's population. The cities had been emptied, and were only now, gradually, coming back to life. The country was littered with landmines. A fragile UN-installed democracy existed in the city, but "the Khmer Rouge still controlled the border areas on the Cambodian side." A few of Kaplan's reflections:
From the vantage point of Thailand, everything that I had recently heard about Cambodia seemed unreal… Cambodia was said to be back-breakingly poor, politically unstable, and dangerous, not unlike the West African countries I had visited. But wasn't I in prosperity-bound Southeast Asia?...
[Some backpackers had recently been killed by the Khmer Rouge.] In 1994, the very existence of the Khmer Rouge seemed, like much else about Cambodia, absurd. The Cold War had ended. Vietnam was on the road to becoming a new vacation destination for Americans. Yet in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were still in the forest: It was as if the SS were still roaming through Germany… (Kaplan, 407-408)
Perhaps the most telling and frightening aspect of recent Cambodian history, one that might be a harbinger for other places in the twenty-first century, is its very lack of theme. Chandler refers to the successive collapse of "one-reign dynasties." There was the monarchial rule of King Sihanouk, then the military regime of Lon Nol, then the Marxist-Leninist "central committee" structure of the Khmer Rouge, then Vietnamese occupation, and since 1993 a democratically elected coalition of royalists linked to Sihanouk and communists linked formerly both to the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge… (Kaplan, 416.)
As night fell in the intensive care ward, I could hear deep, struggling breaths. I could see big and beautiful dark eyes shining through the shafts of dust in the half light of declining dusk as mosquitoes whined in my ears. I saw the alert eyes of a young girl about ten years old. She was covered by coarse burlap. Her darting eyes showed hw desperately she was trying to follow the conversation between [relief worker] Gustl and me, though English was unintelligible to her. "In this case," Gustl was saying, "the TB is too far advanced. This child will probably die within a few days. There is little we can do except keep her as comfortable as we can, under the circumstances." Again, it was the squalid normalcy of the situation that hurt. For too much of humanity, this was a typical child dying of a typical disease—tuberculosis—in a typical hospital ward, in a typical provincial outpost with guerilla insurgents in a forest not very far away. (Kaplan, 435.)
Our abdication of responsibility contributed to the chaos of Cambodia today. But who were we to judge the right and wrong of the situation there, and by what criteria, after all? Our own ethnocentric ones? Never mind it then. Far away in America, it was the Age of Clinton, we were at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of nations, and cocky as hell—like the young Siddhartha, we were destined for greatness! An efficient system of visas and border restrictions insulated us from the "squalid normalcy" that remained the lot of "too much of humanity." We were zooming down the Information Superhighway towards a technological utopia with a Dow of 36,000. The Cold War and the nightmarish dilemma of Vietnam was far behind us. The bright sun of New Economy global capitalism blinded us to those who still lived in the shadows of the past.
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