Echoes of the American war in Vietnam
We are living in perilous, frustrating, horrendous times. It’s hard to do anything — brush your teeth, take a walk, read a book — without remembering that now, right now, bombs are falling on families in Gaza, bombs made in USA. As a child of the Vietnam war era, I can’t help that familiar feeling. What can we do? It isn’t enough. And . . . what will we tell our grandchildren we were doing while the bombs were falling?
Clearly the two periods, the two conflicts, the two dilemmas are different in so many ways. But there are disturbing similarities — some of which are infuriating, and some that might give us reason for hope. Let me explain.
First there is the dreadful logic of counterinsurgency warfare — the thinking of the rich military powers that hold total air superiority and very little on the ground. “We are not against the civilians,” US generals in Vietnam declared, “but we have to make them suffer enough that they will kick out the bad guerrillas who are the reason the bombs are falling.” This crime that claimed to be a “strategy” justified the cowardly practice of a ten-year pounding of an air war — which inevitably had the opposite effect. At Ben Tre in 1968, an American major declared, “we had to destroy the town to save it.” That’s the logic of Israel’s war on Gaza, a preannounced genocide.
Another parallel is the dehumanization of those being bombed. The comments of the Israeli War Minister that “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” is only one example among many. I well remember being in US army boot camp we were subjected to a regular diet of racist “othering” of Asians as “gooks, slopes, mama-sans.” American General William Westmoreland declared, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Biden and Netanyahu and all their supporters think nothing of the children being blown up, trapped under rubble, burned with phosphorous bombs. They are just the cost of policy.
Which brings me to the next horror of the logic of imperialism. It is the delusion that military might, the ability to project violence, to tear bodies apart, is how a war is won. American generals have always been frustrated. “We won every battle; we beat the enemy every time we faced them.” But the truth is that the outcome of conflict only depends partly on military force; equally important are the moral, psychological, and political dimensions. The US inflicted unspeakable military suffering on the Vietnamese people but was steadily losing the war. Israel’s isolation, the exposure of the horrors of the war and occupation, do more damage than bombs.
Needless to say, all of these blunders, costing hundreds of millions of lives, making billions of dollars for the war industries, destroying thousands of veterans’ lives, were repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the dead-end logic of imperialism.
On the other side, what do we learn from the Vietnam era about movement building and resistance to the war? We tend to look back on that period with a single lens — there was a war, everyone agreed that the draft was terrible, there was a huge anti-war movement. But it was not such a straight line.
Today it can be frightening to see the kinds of assaults and repression people face for opposing the ethnic cleansing and bombing in Gaza. Campus groups are banned, job offers are withdrawn, people are fired, lives are threatened. Social media shadow-bans criticism of the war, university presidents bow to demands from ultra-Zionists. In Israel it is worse. Anyone voicing any doubts about apartheid or the war faces firing and often beatings.
But remember that back then the powerful did everything they could to squash opposition to the American war in Vietnam. In 1965, 70% of Americans supported the war. Dissent was met with repression — imprisonment, firing, and slander. Protesters were called anti-patriotic, sullying the memories of those Americans who were killed. The government subpoenaed membership lists of anti-war organizations. The press, from local outlets to the New York Times, ridiculed the movement as spoiled and misguided kids.
In time, yes, Americans’ disgust with the war grew. In time, the heart of the anti-war movement became the soldiers themselves and the veterans who had come back from the horror and were eager to expose the war crimes that were rampant. But it took courage and constant organizing to reach that point.
In many ways, the exposure of the criminal enterprise of the occupation has proceeded more rapidly, the shift in understanding the colonial project has been broad and deep. The self-proclaimed fascists in Israel like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich can continue to spin their fantasy of domination. But the ground is crumbling under them.
As people around the world come to understand the reality of occupation and mass murder, the possibility of a just solution seems more attainable than ever.
