[Mb-civic] Kerry's Past Is Key to His Future Robert Scheer

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/oe-scheer3aug03,1,367950.column?coll=la-
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ROBERT SCHEER

Kerry's Past Is Key to His Future
 Robert Scheer

 August 3, 2004

 The Republicans have tried to turn John Kerry's military service against
him with repeated derogatory references to his 1971 testimony on behalf of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. But this negative tactic could backfire. If voters were actually
to read what the young war hero said 33 years ago, most would come away with
increased respect for Kerry's prescience, his patriotism and his willingness
to speak truth to power.

 After all, the young veteran was daring to state the obvious to leaders who
had been in denial for nearly a decade, pointing out that tens of thousands
of Americans and many more Vietnamese were dying because "we can't say we
have made a mistake" in taking sides in a civil war.

 "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be ‹ and these are his
[Nixon's] words ‹ 'the first President to lose a war,' " continued Kerry.
What Kerry did not know, because the White House tapes were then still
secret, is that Lyndon B. Johnson had uttered sentiments similar to Nixon's
to justify the major escalation of the U.S. intervention in 1964.

 "I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing," LBJ told national
security advisor McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964. "And the more I think of it
Š I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out,
and it's just the biggest mess." But stay he did, launching another decade
of carpet-bombing of Vietnamese peasants, subjecting farmers and soldiers
alike to the lifetime suffering of Agent Orange exposure, and even
generating war crimes by the U.S. side, such as the infamous My Lai
massacre.

 Why would Johnson expand a war he didn't believe in? Because, as another
advisor cynically warned: "The Republicans are going to make a big political
issue out of it" in that year's election. Johnson agreed. "It's the only
issue they've got." So off to war went hundreds of thousands of Americans,
many of them still suffering today ‹ mentally, emotionally and physically.

 Consider, for one, Max Cleland, who gave three limbs to that misguided war,
only to lose his Georgia Senate seat in 2002 to a Republican demagogue. His
opponent, Saxby Chambliss, who avoided service in Vietnam with a knee
problem, ran campaign ads morphing Cleland's image into Osama bin Laden's,
implying the veteran was a soft-on-terror traitor. This is a prime example
of how false patriotism can trump the real thing.

 Unfortunately, the measured cadence of Cleland's and Kerry's calls for
strength tempered by wisdom during their party's convention were muffled by
almost obsessive flag-waving, which is fine so far as it represents a
genuine love of country but too often is a cover for mindless
us-against-the-world militarism. It is one thing to criticize the war in
Iraq ‹ President Bush's version of Vietnam ‹ but it helps little if your
solutions center on even heavier applications of military force, as some
Democrats advocate. Kerry, to his credit, on Sunday vowed to bring a
significant number of troops home.

 If Kerry can adhere to the integrity he displayed at key moments in his
life, he could be the man to end U.S. isolation on Iraq and rally the world
toward cooperative solutions. This would undermine the recruitment of
terrorists, rather than inadvertently increasing it, as Bush has clearly
done. But to do that, he must be Kerry the hero and patriot who came back
from Vietnam and risked his future to expose the folly of a stupid and
doomed war ‹ not merely an echo for Bush's militarism.

 "At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the
security and freedom, I will be one of the first people to pick up a gun and
defend it," testified Kerry at 27 years old. "But right now we are reacting
with paranoiaŠ. We may have to fight Š somewhere based on legitimate
threats, but we must learn, in this country, how to define those threats."

 How timely to reread that testimony now, after the current U.S.
administration so underappreciated the threat Al Qaeda posed before 9/11 and
so overplayed the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the U.S. afterward.
Unfortunately, the paranoia that young Kerry warned against is now a staple
of the Bush reelection campaign, and Kerry must meet it head-on.


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