I was born in 1970 so obviously I was not part of any anti-Vietnam protests, but I have wondered lately did the anti-war movement really target soldiers, or is that just what the right wanted people to believe.  I am sure there were some episodes of thing said at soldiers, but I am curious- how wide spread was it really?  I thought during the latest election someone- I wish I could remember who- saying that the "baby killer" was really an urban legend.  Anyone out there know?

One problem is that we on the left often buy into our own sterotypes.  Dee Dee Myers during the Kerry campaign actually criticized Kerry's wind surfing.  How many times have we heard Liebermann say that Democrats need to be tough on defense. 

Mr. Begala, I'm lost in cyberspace here.  There are no valid comparisons, whatsoever, between Viet Nam and Iraq.  Please, imagine me keystroking that or copying & pasting that 100 times, just like on the chalkboard in the olden days.  No valid comparisons . . . just to help, the drafted conscripts in Viet Nam have no connection to the all-volunteer, professional military people in Iraq.

There may be some partial comparisons between the draftees in Viet Nam & the National Guard or Reserve personnel called up for Iraq, but even that is minimal.  The 21st century "weekend warriors" may have thought they were as safe as Bush XLIII, but man did he get a "gotcha" on all of those part-time warriors.  Whoa!

My comments are not meant by me to disparage your views or opinions.  It's just that I don't think any references to Viet Nam will be helpful in discussing, analyzing, and evaluating the war in Iraq.  The paradigm(s) have changed far too radically for useful comparison(s).

Yes, a war is a war is a war.  However, a conscript is not a warrior.

Yes, there is no question that the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era targeted soldiers.  They were treated as pariahs by those opposed to the war. They were thrust into a shameful military situation, with no way to win, with enemies all around them and no exit strategy, often against their will.  Then they came home, and were villified for their service. It was not a proud moment for America anywhere--the right who chewed those kids up out of a gutless unwillingness to face the fact that the Vietnamese could not be beaten and the left who villified those same kids for their service.

Begala is right. But the good news is that Cindy Sheehan is not adopting her position in pursuit of  good optics.  The good news is that the widespread support and respect for those serving in Iraq, even among those who oppose the war, is not posturing in pursuit of some kind of political advantage.  

In fact,  support for the men and women serving their country is heartfelt and honest.  The anger from those who oppose the war is directed at those conducting it.  Those of us who understood what was going on before the election knew who to blame.  Our outrage came in response to the degree of cynical duplicity, the exploitation of false patriotism and outright manipulation of people who hadn't followed the news carefully.  Our fury (or, at least, mine) came in response to the shameful, cynical use of fear, fear that had good optics--speaking to ignorance,racial prejudice and distrust of the unknown--but was grounded in lies.

What's happening now, for many  Americans who supported  the President's commitment to his chimerical war on terror, and who couldn't believe that he would simply, baldly lie about the dangers we face and the sources of those dangers, is that they are figuring it out. 

We really don't want to believe that our President would lie to us in this way.  The president and his men knew that, and exploited that suspension of disbelief as completely as they could.  They used the optics of flag and family, bible and bravery to persuade people that they were fighting for them and fighting for freedom.

Cindy Sheehan is exposing this pack of lies. She's doing it, not in a terribly strategic, political consultant sort of way, but largely by accident.  The crisis the president is facing right now is not that he can't talk to her and share her pain.

The crisis he is facing is that he can't answer her question.  He can't, in any forum, explain why Casey Sheehan was sacrificed. He can't, not to her, not to the white house press corps, not to the American people, explain why Americans are dying in Iraq.  

All his stories have turned to dust, and even the generals he promised to listen to are saying so. 

Sure, democrats got the US into the war. But democrats were the ones who came to their senses and opposed the war. They took down a sitting democratic president over the issue.

BTW, Paul Begala, did you participate in the Vietnam anti-war movement?

Churches and ministers were involved in the anti-war movement. Faith was invoked regularly.

"It was the Democrats who got us in to Vietnam."

Yes, Reece, it was JFK and LBJ who pushed on until we were waist-deep in the Big Muddy -- but they did so with the enthusiastic snarling support of Congressional Republicans, and Ike was the president who had sent the first U.S. SF "miltary advisers" to the aid of the Saigon regime. But it was Nixon who got us into Laos and especially into Cambodia. There CIA had a hand in Lon Nol's deposing Sihanhouk so Phnom Penh would enter the war as a U.S. ally. Nixon then bombed much of Cambodia's rural population off their land but neglected to tell Congress about it -- he feared the Democrats wouldn't let him get away with it. The Khmer Rouge could not have done what they did had Nixon not helped set the stage for it.

Paida: I was in my teens when we finally left Viet Nam, living in the D.C. suburbs and the child of a career military officer. I can't speak to the term 'baby killer' exactly, though I do think it was commonly seen on the news. Whether it was the same news repeatedly of a single incident or a multitude of incidents that were reported on in succession, I haven't a clue. What I do remember is that my father was riding the bus into work at that time so my mother could have the car during the day. And that he was treated with sufficient abuse that he quit riding the bus in uniform and changed clothes at work each day to avoid it.

Walt: I can only imagine that you must be too young to carry the memories of what happened to those who returned from Viet Nam. This country turned on them in ways you can't even begin to imagine. In general, when men (and women now) fight in a war, it is the support of their family and  citizens of their country that allows them to live with themselves and the acts they're forced to commit in the name of their country and every citizen in it. Those who fought in Viet Nam were the first in this country to have that support withdrawn from them. Yes, you see and hear perfectly rational, capable vets of that war today in the news. You might even know some. But for every one who survived intact, countless others survived only to be broken when they returned to their "home". They were treated little better than lepers, and that's probably being generous.

THAT is what Paul is talking about. That is the lesson that was learned. It doesn't matter a tinkers damn whether they were conscripts or volunteers. Both served in Nam and both are serving in Iraq. And none of them signed up to kill civilians and children. Yes, it's a volunteer armed forces today. And volunteering to serve your country should be honored. It is one hell of a sacrifice simply to be willing to be in the military during peace time. and the world isn't even remotely to the point where we can simply not have a military. The fact that a war mongerer was placed in the presidency doesn't mean they can simply resign because they don't like the new management as a civilian could. It is repugnant in the extreme to disdain them as a class because they fight a war they didn't start. If you meet an individual service member who proves to be a Bush loyalist, by all means take him on based on his politics. But please, don't even begin to think that serving in the military automatically makes you either pro-war or pro-Bush. There are multitudes serving whose viewpoint would make the people at this site look like ultraconservatives. They are each and every one, an individual deserving of honor and respect until they, as an individual, prove otherwise. Even then, bear it mind that they may hold those beliefs because to believe anything else would make it impossible for them to look at themselves in a mirror each day.

I'm not gonna defend anything about Nixon. I think he's overrated even at his relatively low level of stature.

But it's inaccurate to portray the Democrats as opposing the war.

The members of Congress that opposed the war might have been mostly Democrats, but not all Democrats opposed the war. Not even close. 

As opposition to the war became something of a fad, other people -- perhaps some of them working for the FBI through Cointelpro -- tried to get attention by burning flags and talking trash. This image was expolited -- almost in the same way the Nazi's used gross charicatures of jews -- to demonize and marginalize the anti-war movement. And this was promoted by the best propaganda money could buy.




But just because it was effectively promoted doesn't mean it was true.




I think this is exactly right. The right has been effectively tying mainstream Democrats to the radical left for decades now, and this gambit has obviously not lost its effectiveness, given that it was at least partially responsible for Kerry's defeat last year. And the rise of blogs has only made this easier to do - hence the blog swarms around such seemingly trivial characters as Ward Churchill.



But while the right has certainly been effective and ruthless in this way, Democrats have, in my opinion, made it too easy for them. How so? Well, for starters, not enough of the party takes national security policy seriously enough. At the Democratic convention last year, only 16% of delegates said that national security was the top issue facing the country. To be sure, there are plenty of "national security Democrats" like Joe Biden or Joe Lieberman or even Hillary Clinton. But these are precisely the Democrats that are most unpopular (and Clinton is trending that way) with the core activists in the party.




What Democrats most need is a set of foreign policy and national security principles that will reassure Americans that the Democrats can be trusted to keep the nation safe. And that must include the use of military force if necessary. As long as Democrats keep trying to change the subject to domestic issues, or else hope that the GOP will collapse under the weight of the Iraq debacle, they will be electorally handicapped.

The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnames army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North.  source 

Of course you are right, Paul Begala, that the left was right about Vietnam.

But I think you are wrong in one particular: you repeat the canard that returning soldiers were blamed for the war, smeared, even called "baby killer" by the peace movement. Some urban legends even have vets returning from the theater getting spat upon.

As has been pointed out before in TPM Cafe, most of these stories can be traced back to reporting in the virulently pro-war Hearst SF Examiner. The incidents, which supposedly took place at the SF airport, may not have happened at all, or been wildly exaggerated by yellow journalism to arouse hostility against the peace movement. Here is a project for historians: what was the basis for the stories?

I was in my mid-teens when Nixon took office, and participated in the anti-war movement. We didn't vilify the troops and I never witnessed a soldier being abused verbally or worse. Veterans and men on active duty marched with us in our demonstrations -- quite a few sailors stationed at Great Lakes came down to Chicago -- and some spoke at our rallies, including a Green Beret officer who had been a POW.
We did not blame the troops, whom we numbered among the victims of the war, for the war; and we did not vilify or hate or abuse them.

I never heard a soldier called a "baby killer" to his face or behind his back. William Calley may have been called that, and an infantry vet, an African-American barely into his twenties in 1971, told me he had refused an order to "waste" a "little baby" whom the officer who had given the order then shot himself, but name-calling still seems a meaningless response in the face of such a horror. The received view on the political right is that "baby killer" was a standard taunt hurled against returning tropps by the anti-war movement, but it is also part of that received view that John Kerry hurled it. He never did -- at least there's no documentation he ever did -- and I'd like to see the claim that others did documented. No doubt many a vet or sodier on leave was refused by a hippie chick and didn't like the terms of the refusal, but that happened to a lot of us who weren't solders (and still does.)

Until the historians can document any widespread use by the anti-war movement or general public of the "baby killer' epithet, I propose a moratorium on the claims that it was so used, that the troops were blamed for the war, vilfied. spat upon etc.

Sorry, but I think referring to Viet Nam as "Mr. Nixon's War" is problematic.  The tragedy that was Viet Nam had roots that went deep and wide and tentacles that touched people of many ideologies.  I think Mr. Begala could have made his point without laying the whole mess on an easy target, Richard Nixon.

As the Iraq war has worn on, I have observed in my generation (Boomer) a curious inability to separate the troops whom we send to fight these conflicts from the policy makers and politicians who commit the COUNTRY to those conflicts.  In the case of Viet Nam, I recall the sense that disapproval of the war spilled over to the troops themselves.  We were still innocent enough to be collectively revolted by My Lai and the war images that the network news brought to our homes at dinner time every night.  I think we somehow we held the troops accountable for the failed policies and terrible brutality that is war.

Now, I see many of my contemporaries (and a number both younger and older) who take the position that criticism of W is criticism of the troops.  We seemed determined to make the same mistake but at the opposite end of the spectrum.  We take care to honor the service of the military and no longer hold the troops accountable for the war and the toll it has taken and takes each day.  In making this correction though, we have failed  to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its stunning failures.  I could only guess at why this is.  Personally, I know I had to grow up (literally)in order  to understand that the troops are essentially pawns in a game run by politicians.  This experience has made me much more vigilant about holding policy makers accountable; for others around me, it seems the opposite is true: Holding the troops harmless for disasterous policy means holding everybody harmless. 

Democrats weren't "right" about Vietnam.  Democrats got us INTO Vietnam.  Kennedy and his "advisors" and Johnson and his escalation, remember that?

What Democrats finally realized was the folly of fighting ideology with a gun, which makes this little incursion all the more akin to Vietnam.

Now don't get me wrong- I can be every bit as medieval as a Wahabi, and Dubya coulda been my guy if he would have brought OBL's head back to New York and put it on a stick in front of ground zero.  But like a drunk at the wheel of a speeding car, he veered off the road and continues to plow up front yards with his tires, all the while thinking he's driving home.

The problem was then and is now a faulty premise that has been swaddled in our flag.  Just as dominos didn't fall around the world, peace and democracy aren't breaking out all over just because we decided that might could make right.  The difference is that Democrats learned the lesson and the right wing continues to ignore it at their peril. 

Oh, and this pickup-drivin' jamoke from Texas- what a metaphor for this administration- if ya don't like what they're sayin', make your pickup a deadly weapon!  After all, it is Texas.  I'm sure James Byrd is crying all over again......

Thank you for your thoughtful post, Paul.   I've read the comments that follow, and there is material there I find very disturbing.  Please indulge me for a moment.

At Christmas, 1966, one of my Captains asked me if I would go with him to a Christmas part that was being held for the children at the Children's Hospital in Saigon.  His mother's social club back home had organized a gift drive to give to the children, and my Captains wanted me to take picture that he could send back.  I agreed.

The kids were so sweet with their bright smiles, in spite of their amputations and burns, but one child, an 8 year old boy, dominated the ward.  He had been so badly burned by napalm that his body had to be braced in a standing position by stainless steel rods that were pinioned by screws into his bones, and his head could only be described as pink pulp, sporting remnants of facial features, such as part of an ear generally where an ear should have been, some two or three teeth in that generally area, a hole that could have been a nose, and one eyeball hanging half of what should have been an eyesocket, and it was looking. 

Napalm does more than burn.  It's chemical toxins actually dissolve bone tissue for the unfortunate survivors, and the child was suffering a gradual loss of his skull.  It seems like I stood in front of the boy for an eternity, eye to eye, but I'm sure is was a very short time.  I turned behind me an a beautiful young girl, who had no legs, was smiling shyly at me, and so on with the rest of the children, who really seemed to enjoy being noticed, and acknowledged.  I can only hope the standing boy felt this was also, as there was no possible way he could have communicated and emotion.

I took my Captain aside and told him that for some reason that I didn't understand, I couldn't take pictures of the kids.  He just said that he felt the same way, and told me not to worry about it.

There were about thirty other Americans there besides us, mostly General and Field Grade officers, some Embassy folks, and a smattering of journalists.  They were standing around with martinis chatting with each other.  The pleasant smiles on their faces overwrought and contrived. I just regarded the whole scene for a while, just trying to get a handle on what was going on.  It was like this.  The kids were on their beds watching these folks - it's hard to describe - craining their heads forward in a sort of yearning posture, trying to be noticed, to make eye contact, to exchange smiles and acknowledgements.  But the American's wouldn't look at them.  None of them.  When they turned around they lowered their eyes to the floor until the lined up with their next chatting partner and raised their head back up and installed those jack-o-lantern smiles on their mouths.  It was repulsive to me.  I saw that the standing boy was taking it all in, his eye moving this was and that, not missing a thing in his field of vision. I think I was falling apart from the inside out because I wasn't smart enough to protect myself from the kids.

But that's not the end of the story.  There are two other things.  One happened some months later when I traveled with a translator I worked with to the farm of his family's friend, about 60 klicks NE of Saigon. While the man was giving me a tour of his small farm, we intruded on a group of Vietnames nuns playing volley ball at their convent.  The farmer, a Buddhist, had sold-off some of land to the convent, which had formerly been located far to the north in the Ba Moi Thot area.  Mother Superior, a French woman, had moved the convent further south with the fighting up there got too dangerous.

And she came out and sent the nuns into hiding, and came over to us and said "There is really not much to show you here, but let me show you our chapel.  It was awkward, we hadn't intended to intrude on the convent.  But we followed her and viewed the small chapel, complimented her and thanked her and began to leave.  But she turned to me and just stared into my eyes for the longest time - like I could feel her looking all the way to the back or my head.  And she told me this, enunciating each word precisely and slowly: "If they really understood what that are doing, they wouldn't do it!"  I was shocked a bit, I think.  I didn't have any idea, at the time, what she was talking about - out of the thin blue sky, just like that.

When my tour was up, and I seperated from the Army, I picked up an issue of Ramparts  magazine and opened it, and right there was a large picture of the standing boy.  I felt rage creeping up my gullet - it was devastating.  I think it was the voyeurism - a deep violation of some puzzling ethic that demanded that if you looked at that child it was only permitted if he KNEW you were looking at him.  To this day I cannot shake off the repugnance that I felt.  Of course that particular issue of Ramparts was THE legendary "anti-war" issue, which, in a fury of controversy marked a very important stage in the building anti-war movement which I fully supported even when I was in country. 

I am a red-diaper baby - weaned on the SF waterfront strikes and the first sentence I uttered must have contained "Harry Bridges" in it.  So I had no illusions about the rights and wrongs of Vietnam.  But I went anyway.  I visited all the old Reds I knew before I left, and I knew they were harboring doubts and conflicts about my going, but they were very kind, family and friends alike.  They all wished me well.  

And when I returned, with the antiwar movement fast approaching full swing,  I did experience some of the criticism and scorn you are talking about, but it wasn't really that bad.  Except for employment - employers weren't critical of returning vets because of any particular disenchantment with the war, but rather that there was a widespread believe that us vets were unstable and likely to blow a fuse at any given moment.  They feared us.

But I gotta say, I'm still flabberghasted by one of the comments made on this thread that "conscripts are not warriors."  It amazes me.  That would mean about 60% of the WWII graves in Europe are occupied by what?  But I think I understand the fantastic thinking behind such a statement.  Mushashi Miamoto was a warrior because he was locked up in the Shogun's palace for eight years and forced to read all the classics of Japanese literature.  But then... volunteer soldiers haven't done that.   Maybe there are no warriors - it's all a big joke.

Thank goodness this issue has come up!

I am of the baby boom generation, and so I was part of that era. I was somewhat active in the movement while in Berkeley and spent a good part of my college years protesting the war.I've been hearing for years how Vietnam vets were mistreated, dishonored and shunned by the American public upon their return to civilian life.

I never saw any mistreatment of vets or even got the slightest inkling of a hateful or resentful attitude toward them coming from the left. I know for certain I never harbored such feelings myself. Toward police, warhawks and other authority figures, yes, but not toward the masses of common draftees. Most of them never asked to or wanted to go to Nam. After all, for most of us of draft age, regarding the returning grunt, we realized there but for the grace of god go I.

So years later, as this Iraq war dredges up old memories and issues such as this, I am once again hearing more about this issue and once again I strongly suspect that the stories are a gigantic myth. 

At the Democratic convention last year, only 16% of delegates said that national security was the top issue facing the country.

Link?

To be sure, there are plenty of "national security Democrats" like Joe Biden or Joe Lieberman or even Hillary Clinton. But these are precisely the Democrats that are most unpopular (and Clinton is trending that way) with the core activists in the party.

If you think that the problem people have with Biden/Clinton/Lieberman has anything to do with the importance of national security, you are out of touch with the "core activists."

The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembke examines the legend of war protestors spitting on Vietnam vets.

>Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus. Born out of accusations made by the Nixon administration, they were enlivened in popular culture (recall Rambo saying he was spat on by those maggots at the airport) and enhanced in the imaginations of Vietnam-generation men — some veterans, some not. The stories besmirch the reputation of the anti-war movement and help construct an alibi for why we lost the war: had it not been for the betrayal by liberals in Washington and radicals in the street, we could have defeated the Vietnamese. The stories also erase from public memory the image, discomforting to some Americans, of Vietnam veterans who helped end the carnage they had been part of.<

>The facsimiles of spat-upon veteran stories that are surfacing now confuse the public dialogue surrounding the war. Debate about the war itself and the politics that got us into it is being displaced by the phony issue of who supports the troops. Everyone supports the troops and wishes them a safe and speedy homecoming. It's the mission they have been sent on that is dividing the nation and it is the mission that we have a right and obligation to question.<

>The "support the troops" symbolism also comes with a hidden agenda, a subtext that is about the anti-war movement. Understandably, the war brings a lot of emotion to the surface and some of that feeling stems from frustration with the economy, a sense of helplessness in the face of large-scale social and technological change, and fear that cherished American values are being lost. For some people, the real war is the war at home and the enemy coalition comes bundled for them in the anti-war movement. The redirection of their legitimate anger about the deteriorating quality of life in America onto peace activists is shortsighted scapegoating that won't solve problems.<

>The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans and nobody is spitting on the soldiers today. Attempts to silence opponents of the war with those figments of hostility are dishonest and should, themselves, be banished from our discourse.<

"Mr Nixon's war"?  Please, Paul, this sounds like the logic of a Republican anti-Clinton talking point.

And the Democrats were right about the war?  Holy Smoke and Mirrors, Batman, what have you been smokin'?

No one in our hubristically deluded cold war political system was right about Vietnam, because they insisted on seeing it as a communist domino instead of a centuries-old civil war between north and south on the pennisula.  Vietnam was and is mistakenly understood as an American problem of victory or defeat, and not correctly as a Vietnamese conflict made worse by foreign colonial intervention.

The parallels to Iraq are obvious.  But the significant difference is the presence of oil in Iraq, which any American govenment is not likely to give up so easily.

Bush will leave office with the war in Iraq still raging on, with no end in sight, and American interest fully entrenched there.  To draw down the presence of American military troops, what will likely happen is the build up of private, corporate 'security' forces, and this will be sanctioned by both the right and the left in the U.S. as the only solution to ending official national involvment.  In effect, the Bush administration has orchestrated the perfect crime, because they will have created a situation in which the left must capitulate to the apparent 'needs' of American involvment in Iraq, no matter which party is in office.  Just listen to leading Democrats who fear the consequences of the dreaded 'cut and run'.

 And what can we who oppose President Bush's war in Iraq learn from that?
------------------------
This key to war support  with the public has already been stated quite well by the masters of war, The Nazis at Nuremberg.  We should be able to learn from Goering's statement below , as he was giving out the key to the charade that day.  Somehow, war lovers must be made aware of when this tactic is at work for pure political gains of a few as opposecd to when the country is really imminently threatened, which was certainly not the case with Bush's Iraqi conflict.

Hermann Goering:   "Naturally, the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia,
nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. <pre>Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, 1946 </pre&gt

Got any evidence the anti-war movement targeted GIs or vets?

Carl, at least one spitting story is true.  My friend who was in Vietnam for a year told me that upon returning home he was spat on by a woman while wearing his uniform.  I believe him.  I knew folks who conflated their anti-war feelings with anti-troop feelings.  It may not have been all that widespread, but it happened.

Democrats are smarter this time.  They lay the blame where it belongs, on the leadership.  It's the Republicans that I see dishonoring the troops, expecially if those in the military have the temerity to express criticism of Bush's adventure.

The antiwar activists tended to be the kinds of people who think that we brought the attacks of 9/11 on ourselves, who think that we invaded for "imperialist" reasons, who think that "war is never the answer" etc. In other words, people totally out of the mainstream of American politics or political thought.

Brad, no offense, but you're talking out of your ass here.

Did you go to the anti-war protests before we invaded Iraq? Did you go to any of the candlelight vigils last night? Have you talked to people at these events?

I did.

They are normal Americans. Mostly middle-aged. They have kids, jobs, normal lives.

You are completely out of touch with the millions of people in this country that thought invading Iraq was a bad idea.

Let me guess: you watch Bill O'Reilly talk about the "Michael Moore liberals" and actually believe him.

Don't you?

The millions of people who protested the invasion of Iraq do not all believe the pacifism should be our security policy. You're talking about a completely minor insignficant fringe elemement.

About the same significance as the Christians who shoot abortion doctors represent the Christian right.

What's hurting the Democrats is people like you lumping together an extreme fringe element with liberals and, yes, "Democrats."

When are you going to stop doing that?

Your post was amazing and astonishing.  It it something I will think about for a long time.  Thank you.

<blockquotes>To be sure, there are plenty of "national security Democrats" like Joe Biden or Joe Lieberman or even Hillary Clinton. But these are precisely the Democrats that are most unpopular (and Clinton is trending that way) with the core activists in the party.</blockquotes&gt

As a leftist it is not these three being "national security democrats," that galls me. It is they're being neocon Democrats that gall me. I want national defense to be just that, defense. I do not want American military power being used to promote and project American economic power and policies around the world. I do not want American power being used to project and promote democratic institutions in foreign lands.

If we cannot do these things on the principles and merits that they are the right principles and the right policies, then we owe other nations the freedom and liberty that we also hold dear to ourselves, that of self determination. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of property/happiness is not an exclusive right to America, and the American people. In that, I am diametrically opposed to neocons whichever party they hide their scoudrel ideology in, and I will work to remove them from power.

Paida: thanks so much for the letter and question. No one can speak for every one who was opposed to the war in Vietnam. I went to the first SDS protest in Washington and I was active throughout the period, essentially dropping out of graduate school because of antiwar activity. In that period I heard of but I NEVER HEARD ANYONE in the antiwar movement indicate anger at our troops. "Support our troops. Bring them home now" was one of the most prominent slogans throughout. We knew of course of some atrocities committed by our troops on the Vietnamese; war is very ugly and Vietnam like Iraq was a dirty war. But I think the almost universal attitude in the antiwar movement was that our troops were getting shafted and that we were helping them get out of an illegal and immoral war (that in fact disgusted many if not most of our soldiers), helping our country and helping Vietnam. The smearing of the antiwar movement followed the same procedure and was carried out by many of the same people involved with the swift boat veterans against Kerry. Reagan in particular used caricatures of the antiwar movement for political gain. He did it particularly as governor. His speeches were ad hominem and played to the lowest caricature of the antiwar movement (unwashed, drug using, free love, commie loving). Of course just as we are warned today that if we withdraw from Iraq the terrorists will win and America will be blown up, then we were told if the US withdrew from Vietnam all Asia would go Communist and the Reds would be on our shores. This was said seriously and often by the mainstream media and by mainstream politicians. The fact that none of that came to pass never has given the pro-war crowd any pause; they never even bothered to modify their slogans.

The military industrial complex got us into the war in Vietnam, and the Democrats of the sixties were deeply implicated with that system.  The great treasonous crime of the McCarthy/McGovern wing of the Democratic Party was to want to develop a policy that was not dictated by it.  The Democrats have paid ever since by being caricatured as soft on defense.  And there are factions within the party now that would be very happy to get back in bed with it.  They tell us that political reality demands it.  The real challenge for a future progressive politics is whether it can be sustained in opposition to the M/I complex.  Is it too late?  Are things too far gone?

They are normal Americans. Mostly middle-aged. They have kids, jobs, normal lives.




You seem to think that having "normal lives" means that they can't hold fringe views.




We know this is totally untrue. There are plenty of people who lead "normal lives" who hold views that put them outside the mainstream of American politics. I happen to work with some of them. My boss is a successful entrepreneur and company president who is ALSO a self-described "radical leftist". So don't lecture me on who these people are.




Let me guess: you watch Bill O'Reilly talk about the "Michael Moore liberals" and actually believe him.




I have never watched Bill O'Reilly in my life. But I do believe that "Michael Moore liberals" make up a significant portion of the base of the Democratic Party and that they are an electoral liability for Democrats.




The millions of people who protested the invasion of Iraq do not all believe the pacifism should be our security policy. You're talking about a completely minor insignficant fringe elemement.




You're right. Not all people who protested the Iraq War think that pacifism should be our security policy. There are very few people who will admit to being a pacifist. But there are a whole lot of people whose views about American power make them effectively pacifists. That is, the set of conditions that would need to be satisfied in order to justify military force is so large and onerous that, short of an invasion from Mexico or Canado, they have trouble envisioning ever using it.




Now I know that there were plenty of people who supported the Afghan campaign but didn't support the Iraq War. But threre were many visible elements in the antiwar movement that wouldn't have supported either. Whether they made up 10%, 30%, 50% or 75% of the antiwar crowds is irrelevant in my view. By not denouncing them, Kerry in effect endorsed their views. This, combined with Kerry's constant talk about needing to reach out to allies and work through the UN, planted enough doubt in the minds of many about Kerry's willingness to defend America vigorously that it effectively cost him the election.




How else can you explain the re-election of a President as manifestly unpopular and incompetent as George W. Bush?

Teamster uses "baby-killer" as an epithet, but that happened recently, and may be influenced by false media reports.

The  Globe runs an AP story about Vietnam vets who had been mistreated or had rejected their own service are feeling better.  Here's the lead:

William Tallerdy arrived back from Vietnam in 1967, still wearing his Army-issued green uniform, and was met by a heckler in a New York City airport who asked if he was returning from the war -- then struck him in the face.

Tallerdy recalls raging against the man, beating him in the terminal before being restrained by relatives and the police.

Soon after, he threw out his war ribbons.

"I was always proud of my military service," said Tallerdy, who is now 57 and lives in Cheyenne, Wyo. "It was just that people made me feel like scum."

Here's the lead from a Miluakee Sentinel-Journal piece:

From the TexArkana Gazette: 

At the end of his first tour in Vietnam in August 1970, U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Greg Beck signed up for another tour. It wasn't that he necessarily wanted to go back to Vietnam, he just didn't want to go home.

"I got transferred to an artillery unit Northwest of Danang," Beck said. "But on my extension before I left, I got 30 days leave to go home to Texarkana."

It was good to be home, but everything had changed. He was amazed how much Que Son Valley, where he had been in combat for the past 13 months, was in the news. He was stunned to learn that as a Vietnam veteran he had been labeled by anti-war activists as a "baby killer."

"It seemed like everybody was scared of you. Even some friends and family didn't want to have nothing to do with you," he recalled. "A lot of it was the media. We were made out to be dope heads, baby killers and murderers.

The central element of  these stories is that the war in Iraq is restoring honor to men who did not feel they were honored for their Vietnam service.   They include examples of the kind of abuse that folks in this discussion are saying didn't happen.

We can't get anywhere if we deny our past.  If there is one thing we should learn from the wingnuts, it's that you shouldn't fool yourself.

Thank you Paul!



I was caught in the crossfire in Hundt's provocative thread. Crypto Busheviks to the left of me, crypto Busheviks to the right, dealin fear and smear at the Angry Prophet.

California uber alles!

Daniel A. Greenbaum: you may "remember" seeing returning soldiers spit on, but that doesn't mean it happened. See The Spitting Image, noted above. I defy you to find one credible contemporary news report. Every supposed eye-witness report turns out to be "A friend of my brother said he saw some hoppy spit on a soldier," etc.

Not to get too far off topic, but many believe that it was the support for the civil rights movement that moved the rednecks from the Democratic to Republican Party in the south. This is what swung the electoral balance.

The fact that overt racism is now invisible does not mean that it is not a big factor in political alignment. Blacks still suffer descrimination in education, employment and policing.

And the rhetoric has been re-adjusted to target hispanics and Mexicans in particular. As long as society operates by encouraging one group to feel superior to another as a means of misdirection from real social and economic issues, there is little chance for minority coalitions to make political headway.

And minority coalitions have been the backbone of the Democratic party for most of the 20th century. 

Brad, I'll ask the question again, because it really was a simple question:

Have you ever been to an Iraq anti-war rally and talked to people, or do you get your perceptions of the anti-war crowd from Bill O'Reilly Sean Hannity the DLC's Blueprint TV?

Grrrrrrrrrr

Sheehan Contributing to Shift in Perception of Iraq War  

We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone." Well I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!

We Americans have a lot of Ghosts. Because we have done things to African people the Belgians brought to this shore that we have never fully digested, as a culture. Because we did things to the people that lived here when we first arrived, and later, as we moved West. We have never fully digested what we did to them. Then, the conflicts that spilled over in the Civil War--that never really ended. And the land we took from Mexico, Columbia, by force. Never fully accepted resonsibility for what we did. And we did some good things in WWII--we are always ready to digest the good things we do we can be proud of. But not so much the other kind of stuff we have done--and that is what has happened with Viet Nam, and Iraq, and again, Somalia, and again, Iraq. Did we do any good in Somalia? Have we done any good in Iraq?

No.

There are no military solutions to political and economic and social problems. Now the Iraqis have exposed our martial vulnerability to the whole world. We have Ghosts because we refuse to face up to the truth about the reality of what we have done--and so, we can never truly be free--as a people, as a community.

We have to own up. Yes we have done some good. But we just won't own up, and deal with the bad we have done. Alot of the conflict in our culture seems to derive from the restless Ghosts of the past wandering aimlessly here and there, looking for an exit.

Paul Begala's comment is extremely wrong-headed; the Democrats were not "right about Vietnam" until it was way too late: antiwar Dems didn't take control of the party until 1972, before then, pro-war Democrats, or Democrats who didn't like the war but felt compelled to "stay the course", dominated.

Many people who voted for Nixon over Humphrey in 1968 thought they were voting to end the war sooner (because of Nixon's claim to have a "secret plan to the end the war" and Humphrey's attempt to avoid the war as a subject, the way too many Democrats seem to want to run today).

Yes, when the protest movement got control of the party in 1972, this scared a lot of middle America and Nixon took full advantage (a famous Nixon line was that the Democrats had become the party of "amnesty, acid, and abortion").  But the protest movement got as unruly as it did because the street was the only outlet; the Democratic establishment kept the people out for too long.  And these were people who could have been heroes to progressive forces; LBJ did more for civil rights than any president ever, and his commitment to end poverty exceeded any president's before or since, including FDR.  But Vietnam destroyed him.

I fear that we're headed for a repeat: there's potential for a Vietnam-style civil war within the Democrats, because of the power position held by pro-war forces.  If you think that the Iraq war was a good idea and the only problem is that you think the Bush administration was incompetent, and you think that we have to pursue the war to the bitter end until some fantasy objective, like the establishment of a neoliberal Western-style democracy that welcomes US military bases, is achieved, you're pro-war.

The majority of registered Democrats oppose that position, but they are largely locked out.

See "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" by Jerry Lembke.

He has done extensive research into this issue and he found that much of what is accepted as common knowledge about how returning Vietnam vets were treated is myth.

He has some interesting ideas on how those myths came to be, and part of that is certainly the use by the right of that idea to try to slander the anti-war movement by making it appear to be anti-solder.

It seems to me that one major difference between Iraq and Viet Nam is that Iraq is completely George Bush's war. He started it. He can't end it. It's all on him.

Paul Begala calls Viet Nam Nixon's war. While I'm no expert and not willing to deny anyone who says that the worst years of Viet Nam were under Nixon -- wasn't it also Johnson's war and Kennedy's war? With so much blame to spread around, it's not hard to see why the left could have been correct on the military side but still lost the political battle.

In this case, we can't let people forget, even for a moment, that the War in Iraq is part of the Republican agenda. They own it and can be heled solely responsible.

I do think current anti-war types have learned a few lessons. The soldiers aren't being blamed for this war. Anti war types are, rather, expressing sorrow at the way in which our volunteer forces have been misused. We've even, quote charitably, not blamed the soldiers for Abu Ghraib and the like. Instead, we've demanded to know where the orders came from. In that case, it's the Republicans and pro war types who are keen to blame the soldiers.

They certainly did not learn it from Jane Fonda though judging by the letters in the New York Daily News Jane Fonda does touch a raw nerve with some vets.  

One of the great crimes committed by those who created the war in Vietman was to turn the generation that fought it and opposed it against each other.  Yes, there were class and race divisions in  those who fought and those who did not.  However, as the continuing of the culture wars demonstrates there was something very useful in dividing the country.

Nice try.

As an ROTC cadet in a major southern university in 1970-73 I can recall a number of times when I was crossing campus in my uniform when people got in my face, spit on me, screamed at me and called me a fascist.  It happened to lots of others as well.  

To say the Vietnam era anti-war movement was universally supportive of the troops and that people spitting on active military is an "urban legend" is a lie.  

Ahh.....now I get it. It was too early in the day for me to catch your cynical snarkyness. :-)

My snark meter is fully working now, so feel free to keep it up!

Sorry to have misread you...

Three things;

1. LBJ claimed we were attacked twice for no reason in the Gulf of Tonkin in August '64. He did not mention our boats were there to support offensive operations along N. Vietnam's coast or that the US boats probably mistakenly shot at each other in the fog in the second incident. He used this deception to get Congress to give him a blank check in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Bush used deception to get Congress to give him a blank check in October 2002.

2."oops." I think we do have to say we made a mistake and leave. We should stop offensive operations in Iraq. Have international and regional organizations help the Iraqis plan their future. We can help fund these effort. Bush has no credibility and our continued military presence is fueling the insurgency because many Iraqis feel we want permanent bases there and we want their oil.

3. Every time Bush says "terrorist" substite the word "Communist" and you can see how the oversimplified rhetoric of the Cold War is being mirrored in Bush's oversimplified post-9/11 rhetoric.

The soldier in Vietnam, just like the soldier in Iraq, knew, with Novak, that the war was an immoral waste of blood and treasure.  They didn't learn this from Jane Fonda. Puhleese...What an insult to those who served!

I respectfully disagree with this statement.  The truth of the matter is that there was a very wide diversity of opinion among GIs in Vietnam.  Many were in fact totally committed to the war, and believed in it.  But many were not.  And I think there was a change in how this count tallied-up as the years rolled over, obviously mirroring some of the things that were taking place back in "the world."

I'm just saying that sweeping statement about how soldiers felt about the war are weak and misleading, given the diversity of thought and opinion that existed among the ranks.   

And I would like also to observe that this seems to be the case with GIs in Iraq, also.  Just to stick my neck out a bit here, it seems to me to be about the same ration, too.   

I can't disagree with JayAckroyd strongly enough.  If there is one thing that the wingnuts have tought us is that you CAN fool the people.  GW Bush still hasn't faced his past as a draft dodger and neither has any of his crowd, yet that did not hurt them politically.

I don't buy the fact that anyone from my ideological roots disliked the troops. Indeed, by very definition they are not of my roots if they felt this way.  The fact that there were idiots that tried to hide in the crowd with me and mine is no suprise. No matter where you go, you'll find idiots like the guy who ran over the crosses in Crawford. 

But spitting on soldiers is not something I must deny because it is not part of my past. The anti-war movement no more spit on soldiers then John Kerry said he'd need a "permission slip" for action. These are quotes manufactured by the right for their own political purposes.

"It seems to me the American people never really forgave the Democrats for being right about Vietnam."

Excuse me for picking up on your starting point, but where did you come up with this? As a matter of history, the Democrats as a party were pro-war. Remember LBJ, HHH, Dailey and Chicago? Eugene McCarthy was a relative late comer. Nixon won both times on social issues, namely race, not Vietnam. Those frame the basic mainstream differences in the country to this day. Second, there was, or was believed to be by those running the country and military, a "Vietnam syndrome" among the population up until at least the first Iraq war (even that war had to be done under the auspices of the U.N.).

If you want to argue that the American people haven't forgiven the Democrats for changing the dominant way of looking at foreign policy, I'd like to see some evidence. The belief shared across the spectrum from the social democratic left to Clintonian liberals is that the goal of U.S. foreign policy is or should to spread human rights throughout the world. This was the slogan Jimmy Carter raised to get elected President and to refurbish U.S. foreign policy and, ironically, is one that even the current George Bush has been forced to fly under to some fair degree. If that's not how the "American people" feel, then I suspect it's much more a product of the rage and ignorance from 9/11 than anything having to do with the Vietnam era and the Democrats.

Here's a letter my husband sent to Larry Northern's email address (when it was still working, immediately after he was arrested.)  I have a hard time reading it without crying, as I knew and loved these men, too.  Nothing can ever replace them, but grief is only made worse by right-wingers in pickups in search of "I'll-show-THEM" antics designed to...what?  To show the world how righteous the right is?  To show the president that yes, it's OK to ignore the death toll in this war?  To demonstrate that Texans are badasses?  No matter how hard I try, I can't figure this one out, and I was born and raised in Waco.  We got lucky and received orders for Fort Hood back in 1998...FINALLY, we were going HOME!  And then Dubya was appointed, and Crawford became a political hot spot (it's about 45 minutes from us), and with Dubya came the invasion of Iraq...it turned out that we paid a heavy price for coming home just in time to retire from 21 years of active duty in the U.S. Army...

We both realize this letter will make no difference in Larry Chad's opinion on the war or its proponents.  We recognize that in all probability, the only message he would understand would be of the "F.U. YOU A**HAT" variety, because that's about how articulate people like him always turn out to be.  But my husband had to write it anyway. 

You may have seen this letter on DailyKos or OperationTruth's website, or you may have heard Randi Rhodes read it yesterday on her radio show on Air America.  Please bear with me if you have, and read it again.  Chris, Henry and Roger would consider it an honor if you would.  (sorry about the raw html; I couldn't remove it no matter how hard I tried)

Mr. Northern;

<span class="812184023-16082005">I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One.
</span&gt<span class="812184023-16082005">
While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an unarmored HMMWV outside of Baghdad.  He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.
</span&gt<span class="812184023-16082005">
One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college.  At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him.  On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.
</span&gt<span class="812184023-16082005">
One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met.  He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her.  He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire.  He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry.  His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.
</span&gt<span class="812184023-16082005">
Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.
</span&gt<span class="812184023-16082005">
Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)</span&gt

Last night I had the opportunity to catch the re-release of ‘Winter Soldier’ at the Walter Reade Theater in NYC.  This is an extraordinary document of the 3-day meeting organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, Michigan in 1971.  The film is incredibly powerful and especially relevant today given the extraordinary disconnect between ordinary Americans and the realities of the war in Iraq.  Regardless of the lessons to be drawn from Vietnam about the current situation in Iraq, the statement this film makes about the horrors of war and its impact on the men who fight is profound. After reading Paul's post and at least some of the discussion it spawned, I thought others may be interested in this film.  It opens this weekend at the Quad in NYC and will be playing in limited release around the country.  The distributors are definitely looking for more opportunities to show the film and I think it would be very worthwhile to bring this to your community. More info can be found at http://www.wintersoldierfilm.com/

To say the Vietnam era anti-war movement was universally supportive of the troops and that people spitting on active military is an "urban legend" is a lie.

However, no such person is saying it.  There is not nor is it implied that regretful incidents never occurred.  What may have occurred happened spontaneously and in the heat of the moment.  They were not planned, calculated or otherwise advocated by the vast majority of people protesting the war. That is the truth.

Much of what is alleged (some of which may be true) are personal recollections that happened one-to-one at airports, on campus, and so on.  This is evidence of organized behavior patterns.

Furthermore, there are numerous posts by people including myself who never witnessed any such abuses - EVER.  That doesn't mean they never happened but it should reassure you that at the time no organized anti-soldier rhetoric, behavior, or intent existed as a ubiquitous sentiment.  Yes, you should feel good about that.

And NO, YOU DID NOT DESERVE THE ABUSE.  Whoever shoveled it out obviously wasn't thinking reasonably.  Another far worse example is a recent presidential election that restored BUSH to power - those people weren't thinking reasonably either.  Maybe it's part of the HUMAN condition and not isolated to specific political ideologies.

In any case we both have to live with the ups and downs of klife and somehow cling to the good stuff - at least that's my recommendation. 

Fascinating thread.  It's divided roughly in three. Some relive the agony of the Vietnam War in one say, arguing over who brought it on, who bears responsibility for it, and who had the courage to oppose it. Some relive it in another way, arguing over dignity and conduct of the protesters. Only a few try seriously to engage his question, about how an opposition party can avoid the blame for surely an already lost war in Iraq.

It sounds silly, and indeed the passions of those years have blinded us all to a sensible question. No doubt, regardless of the events, a minority did displace their anger over the impossible, that America could fail to accomplish its objectives in a war, to those who opposed it; their anger over the sheer breadth of opposition, by the end basically a nation's, to the antiwar movement; and, increasingly since then, that anger to liberals generally and to the Democratic party. It's perhaps only a minority and a tenuous chain, but it is part of the culture wars that have remained so alive, and it was certainly part of the dynamic behind the dismaying success of the Swifties.

Yet that said, the responses here were not offbase, for they suggest strongly, whether they mean to or not, what's wrong with Begali's suggested solution. For him, just as for the bulk of the thread itself, focusing on the character and generosity of the protests is simply an enormous and counterproductive distractor. If people hate the outcome in Iraq now, they will hate it a lot more once we leave. Most will not point fingers in a few years, but some will, and many more will look where they're pointing, and we have to be prepared.  

It's been suggested that talking tough and having a strong stand on national security will help. It can, but not if it means our pretending that future won't come. Come what may, it will be a blame game, and it's about time we started blaming, now.  We have to hammer home again and again the enormity of the mistake Bush made in invading, the enormity of his failure in conducting the invasion, and the dishonest means by which he did so. It doesn't mean splitting the nation further or bashing former supporters. They were lied to. We were all lied to. Let's just keep saying so.

Your post is a welcome and wonderful contribution.

And when I returned, with the antiwar movement fast approaching full swing,  I did experience some of the criticism and scorn you are talking about, but it wasn't really that bad.  Except for employment - employers weren't critical of returning vets because of any particular disenchantment with the war, but rather that there was a widespread believe that us vets were unstable and likely to blow a fuse at any given moment.  They feared us.

This is what I recall most vividly as well and it had nothing to do with the anti-war movement or protests.

After the war one genre of journalism that gained the popular attention were stories of criminal or alleged criminal activity of returning vets.  And it was summarized precisely as you describe it - unstable.  It was a profoundly unfair phenomenon because it left thousands of vets unemployed longer than ususal and sometimes forever.

The sight of minority vets begging in the streets was not uncommon and often as one passed without giving they would shout untruths at your back.  I always felt that many of the frustrations of returning veterans crystallized as 'being spit on' metaphorically and being maliciously literalized as accusation against Democrats by the right.

Another lament of the Vietnam era is being relived in that we, as a society, are no more prepared to treat these vets with psychological and medical care today than we were then.

Finally, I was always disappointed in the political agendas of the POW groups as well. Their imaginations are limited to over there yet the vast majority of POWs are in the federal penitentiaries often serving time for being a vet in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Many probably died at the hands of some tough guy politician like Bush to prove their ability to pull a trigger or flip a switch. And many were probably innocent except for their service.