This
week Republican Senator John McCain showed an unusual
nuance in United States politics. He supported his
party's president, sort of, even as he dealt him one of
the deadliest subtle put-downs in recent US history.
He called on the George W Bush campaign to
condemn the recent anti-Kerry TV ads questioning the
Democratic contender's Vietnam War record, saying, "I
think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. I think
George Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National
Guard during the Vietnam War."
The contrast is
killing. The advertisement, paid for by "Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth", alleges to be from a group of
veterans who seem to have some form of recovered-memory
syndrome, since they have only chosen to speak out some
35 years late. They have ties to the Republican Party
going back as far as Richard Nixon. But as McCain so
subtly implies, they all inadvertently confirm one
thing. Kerry was in Vietnam, in combat.
In
contrast, not even the best investigator's dirty-tricks
department can find a single veteran who saw Bush in any
military capacity whatsoever in Vietnam. Nor during his
National Guard service in Alabama for 12 months from May
1972.
Indeed, there are no veterans to dispute
the merit of First Lieutenant George W Bush's combat
medals or the quality and depth of the wounds that he
suffered for his Purple Hearts. Because he was never in
combat.
Of course, that is the whole barb of
Vietnam veteran McCain's nuanced knockout. Bush
"honorably" chose the height of the Tet Offensive to
engage in aggressive maneuvers - using his family
influence to get into the Texas Air National Guard
specifically to avoid being drafted to go to Vietnam.
To do so, he overcame a 25% score on his pilot
aptitude test - and a series of driving convictions that
should have required a special waiver. He was
commissioned an officer despite having no pilot
experience, no time in the Reserve Officer Training
Corp, and without attending Officer Training School. He
ticked the box saying "no" to overseas service.
It was not that he disagreed with the war. Not
at all. He kept taking time off to go to campaign for
Republican pro-war candidates around the US South.
It was in the course of one of these campaigns,
in Alabama, that he secured a transfer to the local Air
National Guard - and never turned up. He "failed to
accomplish" his flight medical there, and then did not
turn up to the inquiry that should have been called
about his failure, which in effect deprived the US Air
Force of several years' expensive training as a jet
pilot.
The organization that sponsored the
anti-Kerry ads declares on its site: "We believe it is
incumbent on ALL presidential candidates to be totally
honest and forthcoming regarding personal background and
policy information that would help the voting public
make an informed decision when choosing the next
president of the United States."
One of the
effects of recovered-memory syndrome is that the
memories thus conjured up do not necessarily join up.
None of these veterans seem at all exercised about the
holes in Bush's war record, let along the gaps in his
public memories of this era.
Strangely, the
group originally waxed angry because Kerry went home
early from the war and denounced the free fire zones and
"collateral damage" to civilians. The massacre of My Lai
notwithstanding, these amnesiacs deny that any such
thing ever happened, but now they claim that indeed
there was at least one atrocity - young Lieutenant Kerry
shot a fleeing wounded Viet Cong. There are many
strange aspects to this for non-Americans. Why is
Vietnam an issue in a US election in 2004? For many
voters today, it is almost as remote as the question of
whether politicians in the 1960s had served in World War
I.
Then there is the stunning sound of silence.
There is no debate whatsoever about the ethics of a war
that killed millions of Vietnamese, or about the way it
was fought. Even Kerry, who returned from the war
repelled by what he saw, and then campaigned against it,
no longer seems to question why he was there.
It
is of course the Republican Party that made the war its
own and began to attack the integrity of those who did
not serve in the "war of their generation". Strangely
enough, however, it was Democrat John F Kennedy who got
the war rolling, his Democratic successor Lyndon Baines
Johnson who pumped it up to its height - and the
Republican Richard Nixon who eventually ended it and
left America's South Vietnamese allies in the lurch.
Now the issue has been an appropriated
Republican one. Campaigners around the Bush family first
drew blood with it. Their first big target was Bill
Clinton, who disagreed with the war. Clinton had waffled
a lot about it, and eventually put his name down for the
draft - but with his typical luck, was not called.
As Clinton pointed out at the time, if he had
had the blue-blooded connections of Dan Quayle, he could
have wangled his way into the National Guard and avoided
the war. But while Quayle's intellect was often called
into question, no one attacked his "patriotism".
There was only one side firing this gun. His own
evasion of war service didn't really even become an
issue for George W Bush in his various campaigns, not
least since records frequently went missing and, after
all, from a liberal-Democratic point of view, what was
wrong with not going to Vietnam? It was only sensible to
avoid it.
But as they got away with it, they
became even more shameless. Democratic Senator Max
Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was unseated
after a campaign that impugned his patriotism.
The same team even operated inside the
Republican Party, suggesting that McCain, when he was
running against Bush, had problems because of his long
incarceration by the Vietnamese - in between allegedly
fathering an illegitimate black child. (In fact he had
adopted a Bangladeshi girl.)
So now we have a
belligerent Republican administration, whose least
bellicose member is the only actual Vietnam veteran,
Colin Powell, whose president, vice president and
leading hawks all dodged service in the "war of their
generation", who decided to attack Kerry's fitness to be
"commander in chief" in the "war on terror".
Bush himself, notably with his landing in a
pilot's outfit on the USS Abraham Lincoln a year and 800
dead GIs ago to declare "mission accomplished", has
never missed an opportunity to appear on military bases
in bits of uniform and declare himself to be
commander-in-chief.
In the face of this assault,
it made sense, of a sort, for Kerry to surround himself
with veterans, to parade his military credentials, not
least because he actually has them.
But it does
present a bizarre spectacle for outsiders. The two
contenders for the leadership of the free world and
democracy are sparring about who is the best military
commander with the best combat experience.
It
only adds marginally to the oddity that the instigator
of the fight has no military credentials, went AWOL
(absent without leave) during Vietnam, and now has his
country bogged down in a desert replay of that messy
conflict.
However, fighting on the ground of who
has more medals on his chest is fighting on the
Republican ground where perception is everything. One
cannot help but long for Kerry actually to state
outright what he did 30 years ago. "I fought in Vietnam.
What we did there was wrong for the Vietnamese, and
wrong for Americans. And what you have done now is wrong
for Iraqis and equally wrong for Americans."
But
he won't, so this strange shadow-boxing will go on.
(Ian Williams' latest book is Deserter;
Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His
Past (Nation Books).
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
on our sales and syndication policies.)
