The debt to war fighters

May 30, 2012|Jules Witcover | Tribune Media Services

WASHINGTON -- When President Obama went to the Vietnam War Memorial for our annual tribute to the nation's fallen veterans, he used the occasion to note the collective injustice shown to those who fought, and many who died, in the war so many Americans never believed in.

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," he said. "You were sometimes blamed for the misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated."

Without spelling out the argument more specifically, Obama was referring to the huge domestic protest in the streets during the Vietnam War that rubbed off on those sent to fight it. The protest expressed a swelling breakdown in the sort home-front unity that had marked America's participation in World War II, when citizens recognized and accepted the imperative of taking up arms against fascist totalitarianism.

Obama called this transference of guilt, from those who launched the folly of American intervention in Vietnam's civil war to those obliged to carry it out, as "a national shame." But the words also could be associated with the wanton killing of villagers and their children in the My Lai Massacre, by a handful of U.S. soldiers caught up in the quagmire of a misguided American foreign policy.

The U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was wrapped up in a misconception that it was essentially a battle to halt the irrepressible flow of global communism. The realization came too late that the war in Indochina was a local revolution with proxy assistance from both sides of the larger Cold War struggle.

Predictions of dominoes of communist conquest falling all across Southeast Asia and beyond if the North Vietnamese were to conquer the south were not, however, fulfilled. In the end, 55,000 Americans lost their lives and millions of Vietnam veterans were dishonored by many at home for their honorable service there.

As a result, what came to be known as "the Vietnam Syndrome" supposedly set in here, a vow that "never again" would the United States get itself entangled in any such foreign endeavor where American self-interest was in such question at home.

A quarter of a century later, U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan was clearly warranted in retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks mounted from there. But 19 months after that, American forces invaded Iraq on mistaken allegations of the existence of weapons of mass destruction there imperiling U.S. security, and a false link of Iraq to the 9/11 conspiracy.

The "never again" vow was summarily discarded amid a trumped-up surge of home-front patriotism that successfully rallied support for the invasion, the deposition of strongman Saddam Hussein, and his eventual capture and execution. Although after a decade of fighting, the American military commitment in Iraq has been declared at an end, it still goes on in Afghanistan, arguably because of the decade-long diversion into Iraq.

Noting the timetables for withdrawal of all U.S. forces from both countries, Obama resolved at the Vietnam Memorial that the "national shame" of blaming the veterans who served there "will not happen again." He vowed that "when America sends our sons and daughters into harm's way, we will always give them a clear mission, we will always give them a sound strategy, we will give them the equipment they need to get the job done."

Nevertheless, as public-opinion polls continue to indicate the American people now believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, and that U.S. engagement in Afghanistan should end, our men and women still serving there inevitably will be regarded by many as victims of misguided U.S. policy. The obvious antidote for Obama, the man who promised in 2008 to end the wars, is to accelerate the drawdown, or at least stick tenaciously to his declared timetables.

Meanwhile, even the smaller trickle of deaths and other casualties to American military personnel reported almost daily from the Middle East is a reminder of the real consequences of flawed policies for those who are called on to carry them out.
