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[Previous entry: "Al-Tuwaitha uncovered"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "The Agonist affair"] 10 April 2003: "Abuse of MLK's legacy"Russel Wardlow, aka "Mean Mr. Mustard," makes some excellent points regarding the state of cognitive dissonance any number of anti-war characters are going through at the present time; specifically, he refers to a column titled "What would Martin do?" by someone called Ruth Rosen, with whom I am mercifully unfamiliar. Rosen asserts in her conclusion: If he were alive today, [Martin Luther] King probably would be reviled by many as an unpatriotic traitor. Why? Because he would oppose a pre-emptive war on Iraq. Because he would organize nonviolent civil disobedience against American military aggression.Wardlow's assessment that "King is just a prop that Rosen sought to pull out of her bag of unassailable progressive icons to make an irrelevant plea to authority" is, in my opinion, right on the money. Rosen bases her assertion on the fact that Dr. King opposed the US involvement in Vietnam, but does not feel the need to illustrate what parallels there might be between that conflict and the present one. It is not difficult to see why Dr. King, or anyone else, would have been opposed to the US involvement in Vietnam; while the American objective was to stop the encroachment of communism, it had the side-effect of propping up a succession of corrupt, repressive régimes in the RVN. For all the talk of "winning hearts and minds," the actual conduct of the war displayed little, if any, sensitivity consideration for the well-being of the population. Counter-insurgency tactics which made sense as abstract concepts were implemented in the worst way possible. For example, one of the problems with counter-insurgency warfare is that it the insurgent relies on the local population for material support, especially food; whether the population gives it willingly or due to coercion is a secondary consideration. So to deprive the insurgent of his source of support, one has to deny him access to the civilian population. The preferred method of achieving this, as far as US Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was concerned, was to identify an area of guerrilla activity, evacuate the local population from the area—forcibly if necessary—and "relocate" them to what amounted to a refugee camp in some flyblown, damn near uninhabitable coastal plain, and destroy their houses, fields and livestock behind them. Former 1st Cav NCO Matt Brennan describes one of these operations in Qui Nhon province in 1966 in his book Brennan's War; from the way Brennan describes it, one can clearly see the military rationale behind it, but one can only marvel at the failure on the part of the American forces to realise what a PR disaster they were causing in the process. Another good example is the implementation of "Free-Fire Zones"; again, an area of heightened guerrilla activity would be identified, and would be declared to be a "Free-Fire Zone," i.e. any person detected in that area would be considered to be combatant, and would be fired on without warning. There were safeguards intended to minimise casualties among non-combatants. In principle, all inhabitants of a prospective Free-Fire Zone were to be warned in advance and given time to evacuate; Zones were meant to be of a temporary nature, in place for a month at most. But in practice, inhabitants were not warned sufficiently ahead of time, if at all, and the duration of many FFZs was extended indefinitely. Also, Zones were often badly defined, resulting in civilians who thought they were living outside the target area finding themselves being fired upon by troops who thought the person in question was inside the Zone. And more often than not, the inhabitants of a Free-Fire Zone had no other place to go anyway, even if they could be convinced to leave their ancestral home in the first place. Most Vietnamese are Buddhists, and ancestor worship plays a large part in their cultural make-up; expecting them to simply up sticks and move out of the valley their family had lived in for generations, leaving behind the spirits of their ancestors, is culturally insensitive in the extreme. And many Vietnamese civilians ended up getting killed because of it. This cultural insensitivity extended to smaller issues as well. USAID pumped in millions of dollars in food and development aid every year of the Vietnam conflict. Taking a highly rational and scientific approach to the issue of food aid, it sent bulgur wheat to Vietnam by the shipload. This made eminent sense; bulgur wheat has one of the highest protein contents found in a cereal, it travels well, and it would have been perfect, had the Vietnamese not found the stuff unpalatable. USAID would have done better to swallow its scientific approach and switched to shipping rice, but it never did, refusing to accept that cultural considerations could override scientific reason. But that's not to say USAID wasn't acting with the best possible intentions. It is entirely possible to have opposed the US involvement at the time, not because one objected to the stated goal of halting the spread of communism, but because of the disastrous way in which the war was being conducted. Indeed, in his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" of 04-Apr-1967, Dr. King does not list objection to some presumed "American aggression" as one of his reasons for opposing the war. As he explicitly stated in this speech: Nor is [this speech] an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem.Emphasis in bold mine. Dr. King's overwhelming objection to the war, indeed to successive American policies towards Vietnam, was that it was plain to see that those policies had inflicted, and were inflicting, more suffering on the people of Vietnam than—at least in his perception—might be caused if the threat of a communist takeover had become a reality. I think I am safe in surmising that Dr. King viewed the main product of the US involvement as being the perpetuation of existing injustices, and to quote another of his sayings Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.Of course, Dr. King's statements must be viewed in the time in which they were made; he never saw the Fall of Saigon, and the ruthless purging by the DRV (North Vietnamese) government of what was left of the National Liberation Front (South Vietnamese communists) that followed. He lived long enough to hear of the discovery of mass graves outside Hue after the Tet Offensive, containing the bodies of those the communists had considered a threat (many of whom were not actually dead when the graves were filled in), but I cannot discover what, if anything, he ever had to say about that. But Iraq is no Vietnam. The Ba'ath party, personified by Saddam Hussein, does not merely pose a possible threat to the people of Iraq itself, as well as the wider region; it forms a very real danger. Hundreds of thousands have died at the hands of the Iraqi régime and it is no great leap of the imagination to assume that, if left unchecked, hundreds of thousands more might have fallen victim to it. This was a régime that snatched the next country over (Kuwait) and when the Coalition sought to wrest that stolen country from the régime's grasp, launched missiles at a nation not involved in the conflict (Israel) in an attempt to disrupt the Coalition, even if this meant risking a region-wide, possibly worldwide, conflagration. This is a régime that promised to behave in 1991, and has consistently failed to do so. This is a régime that refused to accept the Oil-For-Food Programme for five years while the people of Iraq starved; the money it made from the illicit smuggling of oil was spent on recasting missile chambers previously destroyed on the orders of UNSCOM, on buying PCs with Pentium III processors, Hyundai SUVs for the security forces, hundreds of SA-2 rocket engines, but not a nickel on alleviating the humanitarian crisis. Saddam and Ho Chi Minh are not in the same league, and neither is Operation "Iraqi Freedom" in the same league as the US involvement in Vietnam. And frankly, Rosen's resorting to playing the "King wouldn't have approved" card is beyond vile; it's the abuse of an icon to justify one's own self-righteousness. It also makes no attempt to depolarise a discussion already driven beyond the point of reasonable debate by mutual recriminations. At the risk of committing the same sin, I'll say "King wouldn't have approved of that either; let's move on." Note: for anyone interested in a through analysis of the US involvement in Vietnam, I thoroughly recommend A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. |
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