JUSIPER

 
Hitchens: Kerry flip-flops on Vietnam!

Posted by Patrick

Ridiculously, Slate's Christopher Hitchens is charging that John Kerry is trying to turn the Vietnam War into "a noble cause". I suppose what he really means, as if the Bush campaign were feeding him lines, is that Kerry has flip-flopped on Vietnam.

Hitchens often writes with an air of desperation - perhaps it's only been that way since the Iraq invasion started heading south (he was pro-war). Usually his tortured logic is maddening, but I try to forget about it and let the anger filter out. This time Hitchens follows such a twisted path that if I ignore its brambles, I don't know what'll happen. I just can't let it pass without responding.

You know what they say.

Serenity now, insanity later.

Hitchens begins his column with an anecdote - about Sir Walter Raleigh being distracted from writing his History of the World after witnessing a brawl - which is so unnecessary that the only reason I can imagine it was included was to showcase his impressive and far-flung anecdotal knowledge of history. In other words, to put his reader at a disadvantage from the get-go. I'm smarter than you; ye who enter, abandon all hope of rebuttal.

Anyway, Hitchens begins by confessing that he has "no idea whether John Kerry is or is not telling the unvarnished truth about his service in Vietnam." He goes on to say:

It's obviously ridiculous for either side to accuse the other of using their recollections for "partisan" purposes. What else? Kerry himself didn't make a fetish of this until he sought a party's nomination (which is what "partisan" means) and his nemesis John O'Neill has been silent since the last time this all came up, which was in the Nixon era. Did Kerry imagine that if he dressed up in his old uniform again, his former critics would decide to keep quiet? What, if anything, was he thinking?

Okay, this may actually be a good point. Kerry did choose to make his veteran status a campaign issue. And I certainly don't want to be caught arguing that only a veteran can serve as commander-in-chief. Yeah, it's a good point. Until you recall that George W. Bush himself opened the door to this kind of thing when he landed on that aircraft carrier. (Just like a real soldier.) And until you remember that Kerry actually has made his veteran status an issue before, contrary to Hitchens' claim, when, as a senator, he returned to Vietnam to investigate claims about POWs. (That is, if you ignore Hitchens' "fetish" language, which is a little unfair - is this campaign theme more of a fetish than any other successful campaign theme that gets repeated over and over again, in other words, all of them?)

Hitchens continues:

On that previous occasion, though, Kerry was using his service as a warrior to acquire credentials as an antiwarrior. Now, he is cashing in the same credentials to propose himself as alliance-builder and commander in chief. This is not a distinction without a difference.

So, someone who's seen combat can't know something about both the values and the terrors of war? Wouldn't that be precisely the kind of person best able to do so? I wonder if Hitchens really means that.

The next bit gets a little self-referential, and more than a little confused:

A few years ago, the faculty and students at the New School in New York (where I should say that I teach part-time) had to vote on whether another Democratic senator—Bob Kerrey of Nebraska—should lose his job as president of the university. He had been accused of committing war crimes in Vietnam. Some of his squad said that he'd personally slaughtered some old people and children, others said he'd been there but not taken a direct part. Nobody disputed that an appalling atrocity had occurred under his command. Whatever the truth of the matter, I thought that Kerrey himself was not telling it. He had, for example, claimed that these cold-blooded murders took place on "a moonless night" when easily consulted records showed this not to be so. The faculty of the school for which I work voted for his resignation, but he sort of copped a pass by having lost part of a limb in a later engagement and having gone on to be anti-Nixon, and a general consensus emerged that one mustn't pass judgment on actions committed in the fog of war. (Incidentally, this was an absolutely astonishing proposition for the New School, which was home to a generation of anti-Nazi refugee scholars, to have accepted.)

Here Hitchens - in addition to getting into the game and relating some of his own recollections - is trying his hand at guilt by association: if Bob Kerrey is lying, then John Kerry is lying too. They're both veterans, they're both Democrats. And their names sound the same. Now that's some real powerful logic.

John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about.

In other words, Kerry admits to doing something that everyone agrees actually happened in spite of the potential for it to reflect on him negatively, whereas Hitchens, had he been in John Kerry's position, would have hid the truth to make himself look better. Hitchens, apparently unknowingly, is now providing evidence against the very suspicion he's trying to raise, that Kerry's every move is designed to promote himself at the expense of the truth.

He used to claim that he was a witness to, and almost a participant in, much worse than that.

Gotta stop here, too, to point out that Kerry didn't witness most of what he testified about to the Senate, but was mainly repeating the stories given to him by other veterans in the anti-war group he was representing. Just more sloppiness on the columnist's part.

So what if he has been telling the absolute truth all along? In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States? This was a combat of more than 30 years ago, fought with a largely drafted army using indiscriminate tactics and weaponry against a deep-rooted and long-running domestic insurgency. (Agent Orange, for example, was employed to destroy the vegetation in the Mekong Delta and make life easier for the swift boats.) The experience of having fought in such a war is absolutely useless to any American today and has no bearing on any thinkable fight in which the United States could now become engaged. Thus, only the "character" issues involved are of any weight, and these are extremely difficult and subjective matters. If Kerry doesn't like people disputing his own version of his own gallantry, then it was highly incautious of him to have made it the centerpiece of his appeal.

This claim of Hitchens' is almost too easy. First, Hitchens is conflating the actions of individual soldiers with the policies they were ordered to carry out. Second, I'm glad he's so certain that a war like Vietnam is no longer "thinkable" in any fashion, but having fought in such an unthinkable war just might make a reflective soldier conscious of some of the ways not to fight another one.

Kerry's highlighting of his service does something else too, which is secondary to that and isn't exactly a qualification to be president, but helps level what's become an unfair political playing field. It makes the point that, contrary to Republican claims, Kerry and other Democrats can be patriots too - a point they must hammer away at if they are to head off nasty GOP charges of softness or treason. Hitchens might reply that fighting in a war is hardly the only way to prove yourself a patriot, and that there are many other ways. But how many of those other ways would be any good at neutering Republican trash-talking in today's political climate? That makes the talk about Vietnam not only useful, but fair and even necessary.

Hitchens concludes with an elegant belly-flop:

Meanwhile, even odder things are happening to Kerry's "left." Michael Moore, whose film Kerry's people have drawn upon in making cracks about the president and the My Pet Goat moment, repeatedly says that you can't comment on the Iraq war—or at least not in favor of it—if you haven't shown a willingness to send a son to die there. Comes the question—what if you haven't got a son of military age? Comes the next question—should it only be veterans or potential veterans who have a voice in these matters? If so, then what's so bad about American Legion types calling Kerry a traitor to his country? The Democrats have made a rod for their own backs in uncritically applauding their candidate's ramrod-and-salute posture. They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as "a noble cause."

Kerry's service speaks to Kerry's service, not to the whole Vietnam war. Once again Hitchens is conflating the soldier with the war. Does he really mean to imply that noble individuals could not or did not take part in an ignoble war? And we're talking about one of the many, many veterans who returned from the war to oppose it as immoral and actually help end it! Just a couple of paragraphs earlier, Hitchens alluded to Kerry's testimony about war crimes in Vietnam, a reminder that Kerry, who began his political career in opposition to it, can hardly be credibly associated with rehabilitating the Vietnam War as "noble".

8:16 PM |