February 10, 2013
'Kill Anything That Moves'
Joel Whitney in the San Francisco Chronicle:
In early 1971, the New York Times Book Review splashed its cover with the question "Should We Have War Crimes Trials?" American perceptions of the war in Vietnam were at a sort of tipping point, and the military was nervous. A retired general and respected prosecutor at Nuremberg argued in the Times and on "The Dick Cavett Show" that Gen. William Westmoreland might be guilty of war crimes. "[O]ur army that now remains in Vietnam," a colonel wrote at the time, "is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers ... drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous."
As Nick Turse tells it in his indispensable new history of the war, challenges to the military's perceptions of the conflict, which it pretended to be winning every day for years, started with Seymour Hersh's groundbreaking account of the My Lai massacre. American soldiers murdered 500 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968, and after Hersh's exposé, suddenly war crimes were a hot story. For a moment. But Turse insists that if the editors of Newsweek hadn't "eviscerated" an article that described a much larger death toll in 1972, the wool wouldn't still be pulled over Americans' eyes.
The problem, as described in Turse's "Kill Anything That Moves," is the tension between the "bad apples" argument - which sees atrocities in Vietnam as the exception - and the reality of the broader, official "American way of war."
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:31 PM | Permalink
Comments
Makes a hash of the conservative meme that limited rules of engagement caused the defeat in Vietnam, doesn't it?
Posted by: Erich | Feb 10, 2013 8:36:05 PM
Joel Whitney's review included the following:
"The problem, as described in Turse's "Kill Anything That Moves," is the tension between the "bad apples" argument - which sees atrocities in Vietnam as the exception - and the reality of the broader, official "American way of war."
Frances Fitzgerald, in 'Fire In The Lake', her 1972 book about the Vietnam conflict (she won a Pulitzer for it), wrote:
"To those who who had for so long believed that the United States was different, that it possessed a fundamental innocence, generosity and disinterestedness, these facts were shocking. No longer was it possible to say, as so many American and French had that Vietnam was the 'quagmire' the 'pays pourri' that had enmired and corrupted the United States. It was the other way around. The U.S. officials had enmired Vietnam. They had corrupted the Vietnamese and, by extension, the American soldiers who had to fight amongst the Vietnamese in their service. By involving the
United States in a fruitless and immoral war, they had also corrupted themselves."
Not much has changed in the four decades since Fitzgerald's book was published. In the name of just wars the U.S. continue to prop up corrupt leaders and spend billions for the benefit of the military-industrial complex.
Posted by: waqnis | Feb 10, 2013 9:30:23 PM
I don't think the general public recognizes yet how deeply the military and associated governmental functions collapsed at that time due to revulsion against the war inside and outside the military. For example, the draft system eventually hardly worked at all; so many guys who got their "greetings from the President" either caught the next bus to Canada or just ignored the draft notices altogether that the FBI apparently gave up trying to track them down.
Indeed, the "military-industrial complex" is still with us, although it is rather interesting to note how much discussion defunding of the Pentagon is getting because of the whole sequester issue. If we "peaceniks" had been informed back then by time-traveling visitors from 2013 that some relatively respectable folks would be talking about big cuts in military spending we would have thought that our visitors were smoking some pretty powerful stuff!
Posted by: JonJ | Feb 12, 2013 12:23:14 AM
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