"During the Vietnam War, many
young men, including the current president, the vice
president and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't.
John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could
have avoided going, too. But instead he said, 'Send me.'
"When they sent those Swift boats up the river
in Vietnam ... John Kerry said, 'Send me.'
"And
then when America needed to extricate itself from that
misbegotten and disastrous war, Kerry donned his uniform
once again, and said, 'Send me'; and he led veterans to
an encampment on the Washington Mall, where, in defiance
of the Nixon Justice Department, they conducted the most
stirring and effective of the protests, that forced an
end to the war.
"And then, on my watch, when it
was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize
relations with Vietnam ... John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"
So spoke former US president Bill Clinton at the
Democratic Convention - except that he did not deliver
the third paragraph about Kerry's protest; I made that
up. The speech cries out for the inclusion of Kerry's
glorious moment of anti-war leadership; and its absence
is as palpable as one of those erasures from photographs
of high Soviet officials after Josef Stalin had sent
them to the gulag. Clinton's message was plain.
Military courage in war is honored; civil
courage in opposing a disastrous war is not honored.
Even 30 years later, it cannot be mentioned by a former
president who himself opposed the Vietnam War. The
political rule, as Clinton once put it in one of the few
pithy things he has ever said, "We [Democrats] have got
to be strong ... When people feel uncertain, they'd
rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than
somebody who's weak and right."
And now the
United States is engaged in a war fully as wrong as the
one in Vietnam. The boiling core of US politics today is
the war in Iraq and all its horrors: the continuing air
strikes on populated cities; the dogs loosed by American
guards on naked, bound Iraqi prisoners; the kidnappings
and the beheadings; the American casualties nearing a
thousand; the 10,000 or more Iraqi casualties; the
occupation hidden behind the mask of an entirely
fictitious Iraqi "sovereignty"; the growing scrap heap
of discredited justifications for the war. But little of
that is mentioned these days by the Democrats. The great
majority of Democratic voters, according to polls,
ardently oppose the war, yet by embracing the candidacy
of John Kerry, who voted for the congressional
resolution authorizing the war and now wants to increase
the number of US troops in Iraq, the party has made what
appears to be a tactical decision to hide its faith.
The strong and wrong position won out in the
Democratic Party when its voters chose Kerry over Howard
Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
An anti-war party rallied around a pro-war candidate.
The result has been one of the most peculiar political
atmospheres within a US political party in recent
memory. The Democrats are united but have concealed the
cause that unites them. The party champions free speech
that it does not practice. As a Dennis Kucinich delegate
at the convention said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!,
"Peace" is "off-message". A haze of vagueness and
generality hangs over party pronouncements. In his
convention speech, former president Jimmy Carter, who is
on record opposing the Iraq war, spoke against
"preemptive war" but did not specify which preemptive
war he had in mind. Al Gore, who has been wonderfully
eloquent in his opposition to the war, was tame for the
occasion. "Regardless of your opinion at the beginning
of this war," he said, "isn't it now abundantly obvious
that the way this war has been managed by the
administration has gotten us into very serious trouble?"
What of the anti-war sentiment that is still in
truth at the heart of most Democrats' anger? It has been
displaced downward and outward, into the outlying
precincts of US politics. The political class as a whole
has proved incapable of taking responsibility for the
future of the nation, and the education of the American
public has been left to those without hope of office.
Like a balloon that squeezed at the top expands at the
base, opposition to the war increases the further you
get from John Kerry. Carter and Gore can express a
little more of it. Howard Dean, who infused the party
with its now-muffled anti-war passion, can express more
still. Representative Kucinich, a full-throated peace
candidate, has endorsed Kerry and has kind words to say
about him but holds fast to his anti-war position. On
the Internet, Tomdispatch.com, AlterNet.org,
commondreams.org, anti-war.com, MoveOn.org and many
others are buzzing and bubbling with honest and inspired
reporting and commentary. Michael Moore is packing
audiences into 2,000 theaters to see Fahrenheit
9/11.
I know, I know: It's essential to
remove George W Bush from the White House, and Kerry is
the instrument at hand. I fully share this sentiment.
But I am not running for anything, and my job is not to
carry water for any party but to stand as far apart from
the magnetic field of power as I can and tell the truth
as I see it. And it's not too early to worry about the
dangers posed by the Democrats' strategy. In the first
place, they have staked their future and the country's
on a political calculation, but it may be wrong. By
suffocating their own passion, they may lose the energy
that has brought them this far. They have confronted
Bush's policy of denial with a politics of avoidance.
Bush is adamant in error; they are feeble in dedication
to truth. If strong and wrong is really the winning
formula, Bush may be the public's choice. In the second
place, if Kerry does win, he will inherit the war wedded
to a potentially disastrous strategy. If he tries to
change course, Republicans - and hawkish Democrats
(Senator Joe Lieberman has just joined in a revival of
the Committee on the Present Danger) - will not fail to
remind him of his commitment to stay the course and
renew the charge of flip-flopping. But the course, as
retired General Anthony Zinni has commented, may take
the country over Niagara Falls. Then Kerry may wish that
he and his admirers at this year's convention had
thought to place a higher value on his service to his
country when he opposed the Vietnam War.
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens
Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author,
most recently, of A Hole in the World, a
compilation of his "Letter From Ground Zero" columns,
and of The Unconquerable World (just out in
paperback). This article is to appear in the latest
issue of The Nation magazine and is posted here with
permission of Tomdispatch.com.
