Readers of these pages know well that I believe the no-quarters-asked conflict raging between the supporters of bush and the supporters of Senator Kerry is really a rematch of the counter-culture versus the establishment social revolution of the 60's. Only revisionist historians will argue that the counter-culture forces did not win that struggle decisively, changing the American social and political landscape substantially. That defeat has bitterly chafed the right ever since.
As you may have noticed, in the present campaign sniping of who did or did not do what in Vietnam, that is the only issue in hot dispute--individual or even collective deeds, not the real Vietnam issue that polarized and paralyzed America for more than a decade: The morality of the war itself. The rightness or wrongness of the American military mission in a civil war over sovereignty in an arbitrarily divided country where America's only national interest was ideological, not strategical. That issue is loudly silent in the ugly debate between the "Swift Boaters," their zealous supporters, and the backers of John F. Kerry.
I have made this argument in other words in other posts in these pages. I am certain, however, that I have not done so as persuasively as does Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic. His essay on this matter is in the current issue of TNR; because it is a paid subscription service, I am reproducing it in full below.
Put aside the claims that John Kerry doesn't deserve his Vietnam medals--claims debunked in newspaper after newspaper, claims that, as the Los Angeles Times recently editorialized, "no informed person can seriously believe." Put aside the question of whether John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, as he has (probably incorrectly) claimed. As Slate's Fred Kaplan notes, Kerry's diaries say he was "patrolling near the Cambodian line" on that day. (At least one of his crewmates says it was "very hard to tell.") Does that distinction really constitute an important campaign issue?
The medals and the Cambodia charges are partisan hack stuff, cynically repeated in service of the greater Republican good. What genuinely upsets conservatives--including conservative veterans--is something different. First, conservatives think it's hypocritical for Kerry, who denounced the war, to now take credit for having fought in it. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized this week, Kerry has "managed the oxymoronic feat of celebrating both his own war-fighting valor and his antiwar activities when he returned home." But what's oxymoronic about that? What Kerry "celebrates" is that he volunteered for Vietnam--and served heroically--when elites (including Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, and George W. Bush) were finding ways not to go. That's noble, even if Kerry thinks the war itself was not. And, if Kerry is a hypocrite for having served in a war he opposed, what about Dick Cheney--who avoided serving in a war he supported?
The second thing that genuinely angers conservatives--including some of Kerry's fellow swift boat captains--is that he called the war immoral. Kerry began his famous 1971 Senate testimony by recounting the recent Winter Soldier Investigation, in which soldiers spoke of atrocities they had committed. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's latest anti-Kerry ad intersperses his graphic descriptions of those atrocities (without explaining that he was paraphrasing firsthand accounts) with outraged veterans saying his testimony "betrayed us" and "dishonored his country."
What the ad doesn't argue, however, is that Kerry's charges were false. It merely suggests he was unpatriotic for leveling them. That's consistent with the way conservatives have discussed Vietnam throughout this campaign. In February, when Tim Russert asked whether he had supported the war, President Bush replied, "I supported my government"--as if supporting the war was a matter of loyalty rather than judgment. Mackubin Thomas Owens's influential May National Review article about Kerry's antiwar testimony accuses Kerry of "'Americaniz[ing]' Soviet propaganda"--suggesting that, by calling war crimes widespread, Kerry was serving the enemy. In the new ad, one veteran says, "Kerry gave the enemy for free what I, and many of my, uh, comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, uh, took torture to avoid saying."
Calling Kerry unpatriotic is a useful way of delegitimizing his allegations without disproving them. Some of the organizers of the Winter Soldier Investigation have been discredited, but most of the testimonies themselves have not. Miami University Professor Jeffrey Kimball, one of the most respected Vietnam historians, says, "On the whole, the Winter Soldier Investigations established that some Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. Claims that their testimony has been discredited are unwarranted." Another prominent historian of the war, Wayne State University's Mel Small, says, "Most of the evidence of atrocities presented by the [Winter Soldier] vets remains unchallenged to this day."
On the question of atrocities more broadly, Kerry's claims also find widespread academic support. The University of Kentucky's George Herring, author of America's Longest War, says, "The atrocities that took place are pretty much those described by Kerry in 1971." In a recent interview with The Boston Globe, Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, also said Kerry got it right. Even Robert McNamara himself has stated that "there were atrocities, without any question. ... I don't think enough attention was paid to it by the chain of command."
Conservatives have taken special umbrage at Kerry's statement, in a 1971 "Meet the Press" interview, that he "committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers." What they generally ignore is that Kerry was referring to the fact that he "took part in shootings in free-fire zones"--zones where the U.S. military designated any Vietnamese who did not evacuate as combatants. And Kerry was right: The free-fire zones violated the fourth Geneva Convention, which outlaws indiscriminate attacks against areas in which civilians are present.
In the end, though, Kerry's claims about American atrocities can't be separated from his claims about the war itself. "There is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States," he told the Senate in 1971. Most Vietnamese, he argued, wanted "this foreign presence of the United States of America to leave them alone in peace." It was because the war lacked any strategic or moral justification that Kerry deemed the atrocities committed in its name to be so indefensible.
It is that fervent moral opposition to Vietnam that so galls conservatives today--and that, they claim, undergirds his supposed hostility to American power ever since. And yet, conservatives want to discredit Kerry for being against the war without defending it themselves. In the August 30 Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol wrote that "John Kerry was hostile, to say the least, to the exercise of American power in 1971." Does Kristol think the further exercise of that power in Vietnam would have been wise? The Wall Street Journal editorial page recently chastised Kerry for urging "retreat ... when Vietnam became difficult." Do they think America should have charged ahead? Do they think America could have defeated the communists? And at what cost?
Kerry's detractors are trying to have it both ways. They want to denounce him for calling the war immoral without explaining why they disagree. So instead they call his opposition disloyal, weak, a character flaw--just like Richard Nixon's men did three decades ago.
