Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, Barack Obama in Afghanistan:
Seven Lessons and Many Questions for the President
http://www.truthout.org/041709K
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175060
Thursday 16 April 2009
by: William Astore
In 1967, outraged by the course of the Vietnam War, as well as her
country's role in prolonging and worsening it, Mary McCarthy,
novelist, memoirist, and author of the bestseller The Group, went to
Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to judge the situation for
herself. The next year, she went to the North Vietnamese capital,
Hanoi. She wrote accounts of both journeys, published originally in
pamphlet format as Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), and later
gathered with her other writings on Vietnam as a book, The
Seventeenth Degree (1974). As pamphlets, McCarthy's accounts sold
poorly and passed into obscurity; deservedly so, some would say.
Those who'd say this, however, would be wrong. McCarthy brought
a novelist's keen eye to America's activities and its rhetoric in
Vietnam. By no means a military expert, not even an expert on Vietnam
-- she only made a conscious decision to study the war in Vietnam
after she returned from her trip to Saigon -- her impressionistic
writings were nevertheless insightful precisely because she had long
been a critical thinker beholden to no authority.
Her insights into our approach to war-fighting and to foreign
cultures are as telling today as they were 40 years ago, so much so
that President Obama and his advisors might do well to add her
unconventional lessons to their all-too-conventional thinking on our
spreading war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What were those lessons? Here are seven of them, each followed
by questions that, four decades later, someone at President Obama's
next press conference should consider asking him:
1. McCarthy's most fundamental objection was to the way, in
Vietnam, the U.S. government decided to apply "technology and a
superior power to a political situation that will not yield to this."
At the very least, the United States was guilty of folly, but
McCarthy went further. She condemned our technocentric and hegemonic
form of warfare as "wicked" because of its "absolute indifference to
the cost in human lives" to the Vietnamese people.
Even in 1967, the widespread, at times indiscriminate, nature of
American killing was well known. For example, U.S. planes dropped
roughly 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam and parts of Laos and
Cambodia during the war, nearly five times the tonnage used against
Germany during World War II. The U.S. even waged war on the
Vietnamese jungle and forest, which so effectively hid Vietnamese
guerrilla forces, spraying roughly 20 million gallons of toxic
herbicides (including the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange) on it.
In her outrage, McCarthy dared to compare the seeming
indifference of many of her fellow citizens toward the blunt-edged
sword of technological destruction we had loosed on Vietnam to the
moral obtuseness of ordinary Germans under Adolf Hitler.
Questions for President Obama: Aren't we once again relying on
the destructive power of technology to "solve" complex political and
religious struggles? Aren't we yet again showing indifference to the
human costs of war, especially when borne by non-Americans? Even
though we're using far fewer bombs in the Af-Pak highlands than we
did in Vietnam, aren't we still morally culpable when these
"precision-guided munitions" miss their targets and instead claim
innocents, or hit suspected "terrorists" who suddenly morph into
wedding parties? In those cases, do we not seek false comfort in the
phrase, C'est la guerre, or at least that modern equivalent:
unavoidable collateral damage?
2. As Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 by
calling for "peace with honor" in Vietnam, McCarthy offered her own
warning about the dangers that arose when the office of the
presidency collided with an American desire never to be labeled a
loser: "The American so-called free-enterprise system, highly
competitive, investment-conscious, expansionist, repels a loser
policy by instinctive defense movements centering in the ganglia of
the presidency. No matter what direction the incumbent, as candidate,
was pointing in, he slowly pivots once he assumes office."
Questions for President Obama: Have you, like Vietnam-era
presidents, pivoted toward yet another surge simply to avoid the
label of "loser" in Afghanistan? And if the cost of victory (however
defined) is hundreds, or even thousands, more American military
casualties, hundreds of billions of additional dollars spent, and
extensive collateral damage and blowback, will this "victory" not be
a pyrrhic one, achieved at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable
from defeat?
3. Though critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam, McCarthy was
even more critical of American civilian officials there. "On the
whole," she wrote, they "behaved like a team of promoters with a
dubious 'growth' stock they were brokering." At least military men
were often more forthright than the civilians, if not necessarily
more self-aware, McCarthy noted, because they were part of the war --
the product, so to speak -- not its salesmen.
Questions for President Obama: In promising to send a new
"surge" of State Department personnel and other civilians into
Afghanistan, are you prepared as well to parse their words? Are you
braced in case they sell you a false bill of goods, even if the
sellers themselves, in their eagerness to speak fairy tales to power,
continually ignore the Fantasyland nature of their tale?
4. Well before Bush administration officials boasted about
creating their own reality and new "facts on the ground" in Iraq,
Mary McCarthy recognized the danger of another type of "fact": "The
more troops and matÈriel committed to Vietnam, the more retreat
appears to be cut off -- not by an enemy, but by our own numbers. To
call for withdrawal in the face of that commitment... is to seem to
argue not against a policy, but against facts, which by their very
nature are unanswerable."
Questions for President Obama: If your surge in Afghanistan
fails, will you be able to de-escalate as quickly as you escalated?
Or will the fact that you've put more troops in harm's way (with all
their equipment and all the money that will go into new base and
airfield and road construction), and committed more of your prestige
to prevailing, make it even harder to consider leaving?
5. A cursory reading of The Pentagon Papers, the famously secret
government documents on Vietnam leaked to the New York Times by
Daniel Ellsberg, reveals how skeptical America's top officials were,
early on, in pursuing a military solution to the situation in South
Vietnam. Nevertheless, knowing better, the "best and brightest," as
journalist David Halberstam termed them in his famous, ironic book
title, still talked themselves into it; and they did so, as McCarthy
noted, because they set seemingly meaningful goals ("metrics" or
"benchmarks," we'd say today), which they then convinced themselves
they were actually achieving. When you trick yourself into believing
that you're meeting your goals, as Halberstam noted, there's no
reason to reexamine your course of action.
Questions for President Obama: Much has been written about an
internal struggle within your administration over the wisdom of
surging in Afghanistan. Now, you, too, have called for the setting of
"benchmarks" for your new strategy's success. Are you wise enough to
set them to capture the complexities of political realities on the
ground rather than playing to American strengths? Are you capable of
re-examining them, even when your advisors assure you that they are
being achieved?
6. In her day, Mary McCarthy recognized the inequities of
burden-sharing at home when it came to the war in Vietnam: "Casualty
figures, still low [in 1967], seldom strike home outside rural and
low-income groups -- the silent part of society. The absence of
sacrifices [among the privileged classes] has had its effect on the
opposition [to the war], which feels no need, on the whole, to turn
away from its habitual standards and practices -- what for? We have
not withdrawn our sympathy from American power and from the way of
life that is tied to it -- a connection that is more evident to a
low-grade G.I. in Vietnam than to most American intellectuals."
Questions for President Obama: Are you willing to listen to the
common G.I. as well as to the generals who have your ear? Are you
willing to insist on greater equity in burden-sharing, since once
again most of the burden of Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen on "the
silent part of society"? Are you able to recognize that the "best and
brightest" in the corridors of power may not be the wisest exactly
because they have so little to lose (and perhaps much to gain) from
our "overseas contingency operations"?
7. McCarthy was remarkably perceptive when it came to the
seductiveness of American technological prowess. Our technological
superiority, she wrote, was a large part of "our willingness to get
into Vietnam and stay there... The technological gap between us and
the North Vietnamese constituted, we thought, an advantage which
obliged us not to quit."
Questions for President Obama: Rather than providing us with a
war-winning edge, might our robot drones, satellite imagery, and all
our other gadgetry of war seduce us into believing that we can
"prevail" at a reasonable and sustainable cost? Indeed, do we think
we should prevail precisely because our high-tech military brags of
"full spectrum dominance"?
One bonus lesson from Mary McCarthy before we take our leave of
her: Even now, we speak too often of "Bush's war" or, more recently,
"Obama's war." Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and
Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what
McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: "There is something
distasteful," she wrote, "in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam]
as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan
[President Lyndon Baines Johnson]."
Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely
refers to Bush's or Obama's war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
and Afghanis suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only
ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for
ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.
--
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught
for six years at the Air Force Academy. A TomDispatch regular, he
currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and is
the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press,
2005), among other works. He may be reached at [email protected].
.
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