How America's right bears the longest grudge

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1157360,00.html

America's historic reluctance to be satisfied with anything less than complete victory is now being tested in Iraq, where it seems inevitable that the full conservative programme will not be pushed through, although how far it will fall short of the ambitions of men like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz has yet to be seen. If, for instance, America does not get the right to base substantial forces in that country indefinitely, and Iraq wobbles off on a more or less independent path, the scene may well be set for another of those "Who lost the war?" dramas that have punctuated American political life since the Chinese communists ousted their nationalist foes in the late 40s. That will be especially so if by that time President Kerry rather than President Bush is in charge.

These arguments have always circled around two propositions. On the right, which at times has included the Democratic right, the proposition has been that if only the United States had exerted its full strength, it would have prevailed. On the left, which has sometimes included Republican realists, the proposition has been that there are objectives that are not morally defensible and others that may be desirable but are not practically possible, and that it behoves a great power to recognise when either of these situations arises.

The real importance of the Vietnam war in the presidential campaign does not lie in the contrast between the service records of Bush and Kerry. That contrast may not, anyway, be as great as some would like to make it, given that Kerry's exposure in action was brief, and that Bush, like all trainee pilots, was taking some risks in flying combustible, inherently dangerous military jets. But it is not what the two men put into the Vietnam war but what they and their supporters took from it that matters most.

For old-fashioned conservatives such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, Democratic hawks such as the late Senator Henry Jackson or neoconservatives such as Wolfowitz, Vietnam was a failure of American will. It was of a piece with that earlier failure in Korea, with accommodation with China (even though that was the work of Nixon) and with the error of detente with the Soviet Union. Under Ronald Reagan they tried to put steel back into American policy, and flatter themselves to this day that the USSR would not have collapsed as it did if they had not done so. Clinton, as they see it, steered the US back toward the path of temporisation and appeasement, including appeasement of forces hostile to Israel. But Kerry was one of the young veterans who saw how the Vietnam war had its origins in a kind of absolutist anti-communism, and that it was not only the war but the attitude behind it that should be repudiated. The question is with America again in a new form today.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Excellent piece

I hope many people abroad read it.

The real importance of the Vietnam war in the presidential campaign does not lie in the contrast between the service records of Bush and Kerry. That contrast may not, anyway, be as great as some would like to make it, given that Kerry's exposure in action was brief, and that Bush, like all trainee pilots, was taking some risks in flying combustible, inherently dangerous military jets. But it is not what the two men put into the Vietnam war but what they and their supporters took from it that matters most.

As Woollacott says, what matters to the Right is dissent. That Kerry dissented from the Vietnam War after he returned washes away all of his heroism in their eyes. Also in their eyes, that George W. Bush and Dan Quayle supported that war validates them as leaders, even if they clearly did not have the courage of their convictions. To the right, there is simply no such thing as a chickenhawk; Kerry, by dissenting, became a traitor.

Now, here are a few thoughts of my own.

Attitudes toward service in Vietnam and dissent over the war demonstrates the difference between right- and left-wing ideology. The right is classical in a belief that truth is external to and independent of the individual; it is something imposed from without by a greater authority. Consequently, what the leader says is the truth and citizens must obey. We should ponder here that the well-known conservative Englishman from Missouri, T. S. Eliot, called himself "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"; to Eliot, it was the same set of principles applied to three different fields of human endeavor. Regardless of the endeavor, the principle is the imposition of rules on the individual by an external authority.

To the right, Kerry is a traitor for his defiance of political authority. The authoritarian figure had determined that it was right and necessary to stop Communism in Vietnam and that gave the war the stamp of truth. For one to question authority is to commit the crime of heresy; heretics must be punished.

The left is defined by an opposite principle than that held by Eliot. This is a principle that is freethinking, romantic and democratic. The world must be interpreted by the individual through the apparatus of his mind; truth cannot be known directly, but only approximated. If there is an external authority who can be all wise as to pronounce perfect truth, the individual, unable to participate in the mental processes of this authority, cannot be certain of it. Thus, the final arbiter of truth is not external authority but something internal to the individual. For all intents and purposes, there is no authority external to the individual. We are condemned to be freethinkers.

From this perspective, regardless of whether Kerry was right or wrong about Vietnam, he had every right to express his point of view about it. In terms of certainty and of being authoritative, his moral truth is no better or worse than that of the political leader who sent him to fight in Vietnam. For a leftist, for one to punish Kerry for expressing that view is tyranny.