“Some 40 years later, it is a Christmastime story, of the war that raged on and of a long-shot airborne peace mission that became the first round-the-world flight of a U.S. president.” The WP‘s Sid Davis tells the story of LBJ’s attempt in 1967 to forge a Christmas peace (not to be confused with Nixon’s 1972 Christmas Bombings.) “To Johnson, weary of war, his health torn by the human cost, attempting a dramatic, attention-grabbing, globe-circling appeal to the pope at Christmas was worth the chance. Undaunted by criticism of his ‘flying circus,’ his “global extravaganza,’ Johnson defended his effort. ‘No man,’ he said, ‘can avoid being moved to try harder for peace at Christmastime.'”
Category: Vietnam
The Vietnam-9/11 connection?
“There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001.” Every time he thinks he’s going to wake up back in the jungle…In a fit of self-serving revisionism, Dubya attempts to reinvent the lessons of Vietnam before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, arguing that our problems really began because we withdrew from Southeast Asia too early. (Also, apparently we lost the war because of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
So, on the bright side, it looks like Dubya is progressing along his high-school reading list.) As you might expect, this line of argument is not sitting well with many historians, among them the venerable Robert Dallek: “What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,’ he continued. ‘We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.‘”
Gates, See Clifford.
“It’s not quite clear what George W. Bush wants Robert Gates to do. But it’s doubtful Gates would have come back to Washington, from his pleasant perch as president of Texas A&M, if the job description read ‘staying the course on Iraq.’” Invoking Clark Clifford to make his case, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan suggests what incoming SecDef Robert Gates may be able to accomplish over the next two years.
Thick & Thin.
In the trailer bin, Steve Coogan breaks the fourth wall (again) — and gets his Scully on — in the trailer for Michael Winterbottom’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock-&-Bull Story, and Christian Bale gets uber-skinny (again) with Steve Zahn for Werner Herzog’s Vietnam movie Rescue Dawn.
Uncomfortable analogies.
According to National Security Agency historian Robert Hanyok, his recent work outlining a deliberate NSA cover-up following the Gulf of Tonkin incident has been suppressed by the agency since 2001, in part because of Weaponsgate. “He said N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called ‘Spartans in Darkness.’ Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.“
Walt Nixon World.
“Bringing Kutler to the library was going to be like Nixon going to China.” The Nixon library in Yorba Linda — the only presidential library under private management — incurs the wrath of the historical community by spiking a conference on the Vietnam War that would undoubtedly have been critical of Tricky Dick. Whatsmore, “historians still did not have access to about 800 hours of tapes and 50,000 documents withheld by the Nixon estate on the grounds that they deal with personal or political, rather than presidential, matters.” That represents a significantly larger gap in the historical record than 18 and a half minutes.
Orange Crush.
A federal judge dismisses a case brought against chemical companies by Vietnamese plaintiffs for the manufacture of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. I’m torn on this one. While the fact that the companies settled a similar lawsuit by American veterans for $180 million makes them seem rather shady, I think their reasoning is probably sound — the decision for the defoliant’s use was ultimately made by the US Government. (If it can be proven that these companies covered up the harmful side effects of Agent Orange to the US, then the government should be bringing the suit against them — either way, though, it seems to me the responsibility for deployment of Agent Orange rests in Washington.)
As Dangerous Meta similarly noted, Judge Weinstein’s argument that Agent Orange wouldn’t be included in the Geneva prohibition against chemical weapons seems like a reach. “‘The prohibition extended only to gases deployed for their asphyxiating or toxic effects on man,’ said the decision…’not to herbicides designed to affect plants that may have unintended harmful side-effects on people.’” Hmmm…so long as side-effects of a given chemical are “unintended” (which itself is an open question regarding Agent Orange), it can be used in the field? That opens the door to a lot of horrible and underhanded trickery in wartime. Despite what some Dubya-appointed freakshows might think, we should be trying to make the international restriction against chemical weapons more, not less, stringent.
A Man of Constant Sorrow.
“It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. It was especially important, therefore, to avoid if possible focusing on the dead.”
A quick literary shout-out: Hard to read and harder to put down, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, which I read on my plane ride back from Norfolk, is arguably the best anti/war novel I’ve read in over a decade. (I’ll always have a soft spot for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but the surrealism and absurdity of those two seem a world apart from the brutality of Ninh’s book.) Graphic and harrowing to the last, Sorrow tells the story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier full of youth and promise in the heady days of 1964. Unlike virtually everyone he knows, however, Kien actually manages to survive the Vietnam War to its conclusion in 1975, only to discover that peace remains an elusive ideal, and memory a cruel mistress.
A kindred spirit to All Quiet on the Western Front, Ninh’s book doesn’t pull any punches — There are dark moments and harsh visions herein that will remain with me for some time to come. Still, it’s a very powerful book, and one worth reading if you have the strength for it.
New School.
Another semester begins here at Columbia today, although the class I’m teaching this term — “The Asia-Pacific Wars 1931-1975” with Prof. Charles Armstrong — doesn’t meet until tomorrow. (I had been slated originally for Anders Stephanson‘s “US Foreign Policy” class, but have moved over to this Pacific-Specific class due to the usual overbooking and underbooking issues…so, while I’m missing out on a few books on progressive internationalism that had caught my fancy, the reading list for this new class seems intriguing in its own right.)
Busted.
“[O]n close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men’s own statements. Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry ‘unfit’ had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.” The Times ably dissects the Swift Veterans smear-job, complete with a spiffy graphic linking its moneymen to Dubya. “Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family – one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove’s, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush’s father’s presidential library.“