[Peace-discuss] No Apologies: U.S. Aggression Against Vietnam

Tue Nov 11 19:23:09 EST 2014

  Telesur
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  No Apologies: U.S. Aggression Against Vietnam

Nearly 60,000 US soldiers died in the Vietnam War

    Nearly 60,000 US soldiers died in the Vietnam War

Published 10 November 2014
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In the post-WWII era, the conventional narrative in the U.S. on the 
Vietnam war has emerged as arguably the most disturbing case of the 
perpetrator's nationalistic indifference towards, and often approval of, 
an apocalyptic destruction of the target of its attack.

Out of all the peculiarities of the political milieu in the U.S., what 
probably stands out the most is the discourse on the U.S. obliteration 
policies against Vietnam. If in any other country there exists a wider 
gap between the conventional portrayals and narrative on a war of 
aggression carried out by that country, on one hand, and the documentary 
record, on the other, then I have yet to come across it.

What does the general picture on U.S. aggression look like? The U.S. air 
force dropped more bombing tonnage 
<http://books.google.fi/books?id=18aEuSp9fj0C&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=%23v=onepage&q=> solely 
in South Vietnam than the total bombing tonnage of every single aerial 
bombing campaign by all sides in WWII put together. The total amount of 
U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War was more than twice 
<http://books.google.fi/books?id=18aEuSp9fj0C&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=%23v=onepage&q=> the 
size of all the bombings in WWII.

12 million acres of forest and 25 million acres 
<http://books.google.fi/books?id=VrqK5VdO2i0C&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=vietnam+%23v=onepage&q=> of 
farmland, at the bare minimum, were destroyed by U.S. saturation 
bombing. The U.S. sprayed over 70 million liters 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/06/17/us-vietnam-dioxin-idUSHAN11143520070617> of 
herbicidal agents to Vietnam.

Reflecting the fundamental defects of the conventional narrative on the 
matter, the death toll of the Vietnamese caused by the U.S. military 
onslaught is routinely debated in hundreds of thousands, sometimes in 
millions. According to 
<http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/081097vietnam-mcnamara.html> Robert 
McNamara, for example, 3,6 million Vietnamese were killed in the war.

Among the most comprehensive studies 
<http://www.bmj.com/content/336/7659/1482> on the matter was published 
in 2008 by Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics 
and Evaluation at the University of Washington. They put the Vietnamese 
death toll at 3.8 million. According 
<http://books.google.fi/books/about/Kill_Anything_That_Moves.html?id=q3LWGAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y> to 
Dr. Nick Turse, an American historian and investigative journalist who 
has conducted pioneering research on the Vietnam War, even the 
"staggering figure" of 3.8 million "may be an underestimate". 
Furthermore, the U.S. attack wounded 5,3 million 
<http://us.macmillan.com/killanythingthatmoves/NickTurse> Vietnamese 
/civilians/ and up to 4 million 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/12/AR2006111201065.html> Vietnamese 
fell victim to toxic defoliants used by the U.S. against large parts of 
the country. The U.S. assault created 200,000 prostitutes 
<http://books.google.fi/books?id=VrqK5VdO2i0C&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=vietnam+%23v=onepage&q=>, 
879,000 orphans, 1 million widows and 11 million refugees 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23427726>.

To enter from the realm of international law, facts and figures to what 
at times goes by the name of 'internal U.S. debate' on the matter of 
U.S. attack on Vietnam is tantamount to an abrupt teleportation into an 
unsavory twilight zone. Consider the following results of a Gallup poll 
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/2299/americans-look-back-vietnam-war.aspx> conducted 
in November, 2000. Of respondents aged between 18 and 29, 27% said that 
the U.S. was backing North Vietnam, 45% said South Vietnam and 28% 
expressed no opinion at all.

What about support for the war among the U.S. public, say, at the end of 
the 1960's? According to a Gallup poll 
<http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet.html> conducted in July, 
1969, more than a year after the My Lai massacre, 53% of the respondents 
approved of Nixon's handling of the war.

Arguably the main trend after the termination of U.S. aggression against 
Indochina has been a systematic glorification of U.S. actions. During a 
conference in 2006 titled /Vietnam and the Presidency/, former U.S. head 
of state Jimmy Carter gave his well-known account 
<http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/press.hom/Vietnam_Presidency/Transcripts/IntroductionbyCarolineKennedyandVietnamInterviewwi.pdf> on 
the war and its effects to his presidency. Carter, not regarded as an 
ardent advocate of aggressive U.S. foreign policy among post-WWII U.S. 
presidents, perhaps quite the contrary, stressed the importance of 
moving "beyond the Vietnam War to better things".

Carter gave special emphasis on what he called a "healing process" - a 
healing process for American society, needless to say - and proclaimed 
that, under his administration, "that healing process made major strides 
forward". Not only that, the "healing process" was no less than 
"complete" when "the Vietnam heroic monument, one of the most popular 
places in Washington" was set up, soon after the Carter presidency.

The inscription on the world-renowned Vietnam Veterans Memorial states 
that "[o]ur nation honors the courage, sacrifice, and devotion to duty 
and country of its Vietnam veterans." Instead of having prosecuted war 
criminals and paid enormous compensation to Vietnam, for starters, the 
U.S. gave Vietnam the above sentence.

Carter's commentary serves as an odious, yet illustrative, reminder of 
the standard line of thinking in the U.S. political culture. In short, 
when the U.S. attack on Vietnam had finally come to its end, what was of 
uttermost importance was a "healing process" for the United States, and 
reflecting the progress, if not completion, of that healing process was 
the erection of a monument singing the praises of the "courage" and 
"sacrifice" of the U.S. veterans. Now, let us move "beyond the Vietnam 
War to better things".

Perhaps even more revealingly, Carter has asserted on the Vietnam War 
that "I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves 
or to assume the status of culpability", stressing that "the destruction 
was mutual".

In 2000, the then Secretary of Defence William Cohen expressed similar 
approach towards the U.S. actions in the Vietnam war. "I don't intend to 
go into any apologies, certainly, for the war itself" Cohen declared 
upon his visit to Vietnam. "Both nations were scarred by this. They have 
their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours."

The tenets of the official U.S. position towards the unparalleled crimes 
the U.S. military committed in Vietnam remain as disturbing as ever: no 
apologies for U.S. conduct during the war, certainly no reparations; no 
intentions to prosecute U.S. government officials and military personnel 
for any of the countless war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam; 
romanticizing and glorifying the overall performance of the U.S. 
military in the war.

Indeed, in the post-WWII era, the conventional narrative in the U.S. on 
the Vietnam war has emerged as arguably the most disturbing case of the 
perpetrator's nationalistic indifference towards, and often approval of, 
an apocalyptic destruction of the target of its attack.
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