Time Warp

Nearly two decades after the final peace accords, it is almost impossible to think of the Vietnam War in any terms but its ironies. The isolated stories are so horrifying--My Lai, "Friendly fire," the idea that we could burn a village to save it--that we rarely get a chance to concentrate on the war as a whole event. Instead, the ironies tell their own story, cluing us in bit by bit to the twisted logic that kept the war going for so long.

One of the greatest ironies of the war unfolded only last week, when Henry Kissinger appeared before the Senate Select Committee on POW and MIA Affairs. Not only is Kissinger back in the news--his grumpy, arrogant mug at the top of The New York Times--but it was a soldier from Vietnam who ordered him there.

John F. Kerry, senator from Massachusetts and head of the subcommittee, was in his final year as a soldier when Kissinger and Richard M. Nixon took the White House on a platform of peace.

As a soldier, Kerry could never have dreamed that he would later call his boss, then thousands of miles away from the Vietnam's jungles and in the comfort of the "Vite House," into a senatorial hearing to explain the greatest, strangest irony of the war: That we had to continue the war in order to end it.

Kerry asked him to explain why American POWs were left behind after the war ended, since their safety was the very reason Kissinger gave for the war's continuance. Kissinger hasn't changed his story one bit, and though that isn't surprising, it is strange.

Kerry's subcommittee has found that Nixon probably abandoned a number of American soldiers in Laos after the "secret war" ended. Kissinger defends this abandonment by blaming it on Congress--if Congress had only let the White House fight for a few more months, all Americans could have been safely brought home.

Kerry, on the other hand, thinks the war went on too long as it was, and if Nixon had wanted to bring the soldiers home, he would have done so in 1968, when he promised, and would have taken much better care of their safety at the war's end. Instead, Kissinger left it up to the Vietnamese to force Laos and Cambodia to return American prisoners.

From a man so suspicious of the Vietnamese, this explanation makes little sense. Taken out of the 1968 Red Scare context, little of Kissinger's ranting makes much sense. Last week he seemed to have been dropped whole from another planet, where Watergate never happened and Americans could still believe in Nixon's honesty.

Rather than taking responsibility for the missing soldiers, Kissinger blamed the abandonment of the POWs on "the Vietnamese," who "are certainly capable of such a cynical act," as if an entire race of people could be responsible for Nixon's neglect of the soldiers.

America isn't afraid of "the Vietnamese" anymore--we now understand that the war may have had as much to do with American politicians as with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Kissinger sounded like a relic, pushing a party line we're all embarrassed to hear.

"What has happened to this country," he asked, "that a Congressional committee could be asked to inquire whether any American official of whatever administration would fail to move heaven and earth to fight for the release of American POWs and an accounting of the missing?"

Is Kissinger really asking us to believe that all presidents are inherently honest and virtuous? Is he really dumbfounded that we dare ask a president to account for his actions? Where Kissinger's question--and we've heard it before--could once divide a nation, now it only creates uneasy silence. His arrogant ranting is bizarre and queasily familiar.

Last week's encounter proved that much has changed in America--the Nixon administration went head to head with the "anarchists," and the anarchists won. Those who opposed the war aren't reviled anymore, but they seem to have ended up on the right side of history, behind Senate subcommittee microphones.

So since Vietnam has started to recede into history, it's clear that we had real moral obligations toward both our own soldiers and to the citizens of Vietnam. Yet when we look around us today, we find nothing but Kissinger-style diversionary tactics which are meant to scare the American public into silence and blur our moral obligations. President Bush seems shocked that we want to know about his arms deals with Iraq, his possible complicity in the Iran-contra scandal, his rush for a land war against Saddam Hussein and any number of other issues which question his judgment as president. When he criticizes the media for hyping issues "the American people" care nothing about, he is in fact imagining a silent majority, telling us what we want to know about his presidency.

And in his most desperate use of Kissinger like logic, he implies that Gov. Bill Clinton is a draft-dodging hippie America-hater, even though people like John Kerry have dispelled that image forever.

Luckily, it hasn't worked. Americans are tired of refighting the Vietnam War, which Bush promised we had "kicked" at the end of the Gulf War. Yet while we may be able to fix our mistakes at home, history may one day ask us why we spend so much time worrying about our own house when we still have no compass to guide our foreign policy. Our children may ask why, for example, we never asked Bush about the genocide of the Kurds in Iraq.

That story isn't much different from that of Vietnam. American promised the Kurds that if they helped fight Saddam Hussein, they would gain independence. Like the soldiers in Vietnam, they upheld their end of the bargain, putting their lives at risk for American victory. And when they became inconvenient once Bush decided that Saddam could stay in power, we simply forgot about them. Where we once had to deal in twisted ironies, now we just ignore our moral problems.

If there's one thing we learned from Vietnam, it is that we should have done something sooner. The voters should have forced the government to take morally responsible action. Yet throughout the Bush administration and in this election, we have chosen to fall victim to the same fears, of Saddam and radical pinkos, as Kissinger propped up for us in the '60s. We have let ourselves deal in tiny ironies again, in insinuating phrases and images, rather than asking ourselves whether our foreign policy was right or wrong.

After seeing the way history turned back on itself last week, we have to wonder how future generations will judge our decisions this fall. Someday a Gulf War grunt may be sitting in a Senate committee, grilling Brent Scowcroft about his neglect of the Kurdish allies, and his answers will sound as foreign and twisted as those of Henry Kissinger.

Michael K. Mayo '94 is a news editor of The Crimson.