Power politics dangerously overlook humanity

Alex Schulman’s submission (“U.S. must remain
adamant, persist with Iraq mission,” Sept. 29) conveys an
ideology requiring a thorough response and rebuttal. While the
Kissinger-esque opinions he expresses will no doubt guarantee him a
comfortable position in a conservative Washington think tank, they
represent a dangerous vision for Americans and for others around
the world.

Schulman’s basic argument is that the United States cannot
afford to show weakness and must be prepared to project its force
in any situation in order to demonstrate its power and thus
maintain its international standing. With regard to Iraq, he argues
that the United States must conclusively show that it is
“crazy enough to stay” and that, if necessary, we must
be crazy enough to take the war to any other states that threaten
our position, such as Iran or Syria.

Drawing a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, Schulman
maintains that the Vietcong was in a weakened state after the 1968
Tet Offensive and that the United States could have won the war had
it not “blinked, lost nerve, and withdrew.” “If
the Communists realized their weakness and held off, we could have
consolidated our hold over the South and pressed for negotiations
from a position of power,” Schulman writes. “Or, if the
North decided send in its regular armies to fill the vacuum left by
the destruction of the NLF (National Liberation Front), which is
what happened, then we were in the favorable position of fighting a
conventional war against outmatched forces rather than a murky,
vexing guerilla struggle.”

Whether or not Schulman is correct in his analysis of the United
States’ favorable outlook for winning the war is not the
issue. Schulman ignores the basic question of whether or not the
United States had any right to be involved in Vietnam’s
internal political struggles, a question that in today’s
political climate is of the highest importance to revisit.

U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia during the ’60s and
’70s caused devastation. Exact counts of the Vietnamese dead
are nearly impossible to come by, but even most conservative
estimates are in the low millions. Villagers were herded away into
settlements while their former land became free-fire zones in which
anything that moved could be killed. Many of those killed were
innocent civilians who chose to remain in their village rather than
leave their livelihood. Forests were defoliated with chemical
weapons and the economy in the countryside was destroyed.

From 1969 on, when Nixon took office, things got worse. Inspired
by the ideology reiterated by Schulman, the Nixon White House
attempted to force North Vietnam into a negotiating position by
increasing the bombing on North Vietnamese urban areas, leaving
more dead civilians in their wake. As the threat to U.S. prestige
and power continued, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos
in what was one the most large-scale bombing campaigns in history.
To this day, people in Laos continue to die from unexploded
bomblets.

This was the price of U.S. prestige, and yes, we did blink. We
lost the nerve. I’m not talking about the hawks in
Washington, some of whom were crazy enough to seriously suggest a
nuclear option. I am talking about the citizens of this country who
put pressure on the policymakers to withdraw because they could not
stand to see our atrocities go on. Many of them understood,
correctly, that the United States had no right to win that war.

Schulman criticizes the media for imbuing the kind of
emotionalism and sentimentality in people that lead them to
question such acts of savagery.

“The media feeds on the imagery and emotion (of war) and
now has access to the front lines in unprecedented ways,” he
says. “The outrage and despair that follows real-time media
coverage of wartime events ““ whether the Tet highlight reel,
Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon and incursions into the
territories or the failures in Mogadishu, Somalia ““ can often
serve to obscure the wider context into which such horrific losses
of life, ruefully, must be placed.”

This suggestion is that if only the peaceniks of the Vietnam era
had been able to see past the napalmed villages, the dead peasants
and the cluster-bombed landscapes, they could have maybe understood
the threat to U.S. prestige that made such violence necessary. In
Schulman’s political world there is no place for
emotionalism, and applied to Vietnam, his outlook leaves no room
for basic humanity.

So where does Iraq fit into all of this? Schulman wants the same
principles that guided Vietnam hawks to steer U.S. actions in Iraq,
and in fact they are.

Iraq comes nowhere near the kind of atrocities in Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos ““ civilian deaths numbering in the
thousands rather than millions. But make no mistake that the hawks
in power will likely follow Schulman’s advice and use
whatever means necessary to enforce U.S. power in the Middle East,
even if it includes invading Syria and Iran and killing people
across the region. If this administration stays in office, we could
have Vietnam levels of death and destruction before long. The cold
brand of power politics espoused by Schulman should have no place
in a civilized society, and peace-loving Americans should act to
remove the current administration in 2004 before this extremist
ideology can manifest itself any longer.

Parello is a third-year history student.