APRIL 1971 OR APRIL 2005
C-Span did the country a favor tonight. It aired John Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its entirety. It was no easy feat, since large sections of the film from that day in 1971 have been destroyed. C-Span spliced in audio during the missing film sections.
As I watched and listened, a few thoughts came to mind. First, Kerry seemed to be a bitter young man, but also an opportunistic one. For whatever reason, he was bitter about two years spent winning medals in what at the time was still a popularly supported war. He was sufficiently bitter to accuse his fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of committing war crimes, acting as racists and terrorists in the name of an immoral and corrupt imperial America that he hoped to "turn," though away from what and toward what Kerry never quite spelled out. Like his "foreign leaders support me" quote from this year, the "turn" sentence invites speculation. In the 1971 testimony, Kerry supported all of the North Vietnamese talking points and all of their positions in the Paris peace negotiations. Did he want America to turn and become more like the North Vietnamese Communists whose side he had openly taken in 1971? It's not an unreasonable question. He spent far more time in his testimony denouncing America for fighting the war and South Vietnam for existing than he did saying anything negative about the Vietcong, or North Vietnam, or Communism. At one point he would equate democracy and Communism as though they're just two sides of the same coin. His abillity to discriminate between ideologies and government was evidently not yet capable of understanding the difference between a Vladimir Lenin and a George Washington. Maybe it was youth talking--he was only 27.
Kerry's opportunism was exposed in questioning from a senator regarding Lt. William Calley. Calley had been prosecuted for ordering and carrying out a massacre of civilians at the village My Lai. Asked whether Calley should have been prosecuted, Kerry offered no defense of Calley but went on to accuse everything and everyone from movie producers to comic book writers of being equally responsible for Calley's heinous actions. It amounted to a guilt-by-culture argument, the same sort of argument we've heard for years justifying the crimes of drug dealers, pimps, murderers and thieves. It's the same sort of argument we hear when a whacked out kid goes on a rampage after watching The Matrix. It's the same sort of argument Michael Moore deploys in Bowling for Columbine, when he essentially accuses defense contractors in the area for turning two teenage boys into monsters, though the boys had no connection to the contractor and the factory in their area made satellites, not missiles. It's the worst sort of demagoguery, accusing Middle America of taking part in the murders committed by one or two or a few derange individuals. It is wrong, but it's an effective way to spread the guilt and thereby, to some measure, absolve those actually guilty and smear the innocent. Kerry used that tactic to brilliant success--he's a senator now, running for president--and smeared his "band of brothers" as murderers, torturers, rapists and thieves.
It may have been a pre-emptive smear. If Kerry knew in 1971 that he was himself a war criminal, albeit unindicted and unaccused, in accusing everyone who fought in that war of doing the same things he knew he had done, he may have been attempting to save himself.
There's another pattern that emerged in 1971--John Kerry the craven politician. Lately we've seen him say things like "I voted for it, before I voted against it," and trying to put his actual voting record across 19 years in the Senate off limits because he recognizes his own past for the liability that it is. He will say to one group that he is their best friend, then to that group's polar opposite that he agrees with them too. He's all about saving himself. He bugged out of Vietnam on the basis of a Navy tradition--three Purple Hearts and you're out--when his wounds had not been serious and the tradition no part of any regulation. He could have stayed and fought with his brothers, but he chose to return to America and smear them instead so that he could begin to build his political career.
Kerry's testimony also got me to thinking about what today's left will do next. It's no secret that for today's left, Vietnam represents their halcyon days, their big day of turning world history. That they consigned millions to brutality under Communism and re-education camps and slaughter for the criming of thinking for themselves is of no consequence. They don't care, because they made America feel guilty, made her turn for a while from her desire to help rid the world of dictatorships ruled by Stalinist thugs.
Maybe that's the turn Kerry wanted?
Today's left has been reminded just how it won Vietnam for the Communists by seeing Kerry's testimony again. Back then they accused America of fighting a racist war for reasons other than those publicly stated by our leadership. They accused American soldiers of committing horrible crimes in the field of battle against civilians, crimes sanctioned by the highest levels of command. They said America was an imperial power fighting an unjust war for all the wrong reasons, and used the enemy's talking points and negotiation stances in their speeches.
It's no secret that the left hates the war against terrorism. Your mileage may vary, but I suspect that the left (and I know I'm painting broadly here, but I'm speaking specifically about that segment of the left that has denounced America for exercising its self-defense since 9-11) hates this war simply because it hates America's way of doing things. The anti-war left hates our openness and the fact that that openness helped defeat their old friends in Moscow. The anti-war left hates capitalism and prefers statism, it hates Christianity and favors anything else (maybe their religious slogan should be "Anbody But Jesus"). The anti-war left distrusts anyone who holds any kind of power who isn't one of them, and prefers strong charismatic one-man rule types like Castro over elected presidents who happen to be Republicans. And in a sense, therefore, the anti-war left simply hates America, since America keeps on being America and actually has the gall to fight back when provoked.
As it hates the war, the anti-war left loathes the war in Iraq, because that war has the chance of blasting away an entire region's layer of despots who have made it a habit of denouncing America. The Iraq war may extend America's style of trade and governance to the Middle East, and with those American traits capitalism, Christianity and constitutional rule will probably follow. And a certain optimistic segment of America will have been proven right, about the necessity of fighting back against fascists and statists of all stripes, and about the need to occassionally assert herself to make things right in the world. We will have proven once again that on balance America is a force for good in the world.
To the anti-war left, America is never right. So the Iraq war, like the Vietnam war before it and to which it bears no resemblance except in the left's fevered rants, is wrong. So the left will use the old bag of tricks to destroy this new war, and thereby put America in increased danger. We've seen the racist canard deployed against the Iraq war. We've seen the war for reasons other than those stated (oil, Halliburton, Bush family revenge) levelled at Bush regarding Iraq. So what's next?
I can imagine the scenario a year or more from now. A young Lieutenant, perhaps an Army tank officer or a Marine platoon leader and an Iraq war veteran, testifies before the Senate, or these days, makes his stand on 60 Minutes or with Barbara Walters. With the serious tones of a young idealist chastened by war, he will deliver a stone-faced diatribe against President Bush, against Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, against Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and anyone else who led us into or supported the war that ended Saddam Hussein's brutal reign. The decorated veteran will lie through his teeth about America's actions and interests, about the Iraqi people's opinion of us and our intentions--just like Kerry did in 1971 about Vietnam--and will lead some kind of Iraq veterans' effort to cut and run from Iraq--just like Kerry advocated abandoning South Vietnam in 1971. Kerry's advocacy succeeded a few years later, and the Communists overran our former allies.
Our young Lt., like young John Kerry before him, will have ties to the worst elements--Communists, socialists, Islamicists, America's enemies du jour, and like the 1971 press today's media will ignore those ties and focus instead on the photogenic young hero speaking truth to power. Or lies to power. Whatever, as long as what he says is servicable to the cause of strengthening socialist causes and impairing America's ability to defend itself.
The point is, the left is using the anniversary of the liberation of Iraq for its annual crawl out from under a rock to lie about America to advance its nefarious causes. They'll find their Lt. Kerry soon enough, or a stand-in like Richard Clarke or Jimmy Carter, and open up a new salvo of anti-American lies.
The difference this time around is that we're not engaged militarily in a foreign country because we believe we're keeping countries from falling like dominoes under Communism's evil sway. We're in Iraq to keep the pressure on the terrorists and to create a genuine transformation in a terrible, nearly unlivable, region. We're there to help millions of people in the hope that by helping them we're making it less likely that they'll want to come here and kill us. It's pretty simple.
The left, like John Kerry in 1971, will be helping the cause of our enemies. Like John Kerry in 1971, the left will be arguing for slavery under dictatorship instead of true freedom and liberty. Like John Kerry in 1971, who I should point out has never disavowed a single word from that testimony, today's left will act as resident surrogates for those who want to destroy us and our way of life.
In fact, some of them already are. Howard Dean takes al Qaeda's talking points at face value, as long as they're criticizing common enemy George W. Bush. Jimmy Carter is running around out there saying George H. W. Bush "precipitated" (which means "started") the 1991 Gulf War and George W. Bush is merely finishing it, justifying it on lies. If that's the case, perhaps Carter can shed some light on why Bush Sr. didn't go all the way to Baghdad when he had the chance. If you're into starting wars with foreign despots, why not finish them? Perhaps because Bush Sr didn't start the war--Saddam did.
And who knows what lie John Kerry will come up with now. He has a track record for creating some real whoppers and riding them to power.