Two Kerrys

by Dana Blankenhorn

I supported Howard Dean, and opposed John Kerry, because there is one Dean and two Kerrys.

Howard Dean opposed the War in Iraq before it began. One John Kerry supported that war, while a second now calls it poorly executed and offers no realistic plan to do better.

The Swift Boat ad that occupies media attention today claimed to attack the first Kerry, a lieutenant who fought in Vietnam in 1969. After letting them have their way for some time, Kerry’s campaign has now blown them out of the water, and made the counter-argument that President Bush put them up to it.

But when those same Swift Boat veterans are pressed on why they attacked their comrade, they talk about a second Kerry. This is the John Kerry who fought the War Against The War, who helped found the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who threw combat ribbons away in an anti-war demonstration, and who testified (eloquently) to the war’s evil before Congress.

I would have been proud to follow that John Kerry:

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

The anti-Kerry vets believe to this day that in 1971 John Kerry attacked them, while he maintains he was attacking the men who sent them.

The problem I have with today’s John Kerry is that, while he eloquently defends the 1969 Kerry he has yet to defend the 1971 Kerry, yet it is that later man I would like to see in the White House. The earlier man had courage. The later man had wisdom.

Because in some places Kerry’s 1971 testimony is literally ripped from today’s headlines:

The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.

In Iraq today, as in Vietnam during my own childhood, men have been sent to take territory and, upon leaving it, seen it retaken. In Iraq today, as in the Vietnam of my adolescence, we have committed atrocities that turned friends into enemies and made a mockery of our highest ideals. John Kerry fought against that in 1971, but in 2002 he voted to authorize the Iraq war, and to this day he gives us nonsense about how he would get out of it.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy.

The Iraq War has been like Vietnam in fast-motion. The campaign before it began was as intense as anything seen against Vietnam before 1968. And today it is obvious that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, no reasonable exit strategy, and no hope of victory.

Instead of fighting for democracy and against tyranny, American soldiers now defend a former Saddam Hussein henchman, a government created entirely in Washington, and a systematic corruption that makes Vietnam look noble by comparison.

It is that which Senator John Kerry must address. In addressing it, he must risk political death, because it’s very possible that most Americans still believe Vietnam was lost by the hippies and the reporters, by Jane Fonda and John Kerry. If they do, history will condemn America as it condemned all previous empires, and all regimes that sought to impose their will by force on faraway lands whose will they had no way to know.

If you believe in democracy, you offer people that clear choice, and accept the verdict of history on the result.

What will happen to Iraq if America admits its mistake? Nothing good. Maybe, in admitting that mistake, America can win back its allies and broker some resolution that doesn’t bring evil men to power there. Maybe not.

But until we admit that we can be wrong, the Vietnam War is not over. And unless John Kerry tells Americans that fact, he will become yet another casualty of it.

As will our children.

Posted by Jon Lebkowsky at August 22, 2004 9:49 PM | TrackBack