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Where is RFK when you need him?
I read this speech by RFK about Vietnam, and I was struck by the fact that almost every single detail mirrors the situation in Iraq. Here are some excerpts that strike familiar chords with recent events.
EXCERPTS: (in black)
For this is a year of choice — a year when we choose not simply who will lead us, but where we wish to be led; the country we want for ourselves — and the kind we want for our children. If in this year of choice we fashion new politics out of old illusions, we insure for ourselves nothing but crisis for the future — and we bequeath to our children the bitter harvest of those crises.
For with all we have done, with all our immense power and richness, our problems seem to grow not less, but greater. We are in a time of unprecedented turbulence, of danger and questioning. It is at its root a question of the national soul. The president calls it “restlessness;” while cabinet officers and commentators tell us that America is deep in a malaise of the spirit — discouraging initiative, paralyzing will and action, dividing Americans from one another by their age, their views, and the color of their skins.
This statement is no less true today than it was 4o years ago. Add to that division CLASS, amplified by the ever-more invasive corporate control exerted over our politicians and our people as a whole. .
Today I would speak to you of the third of those great crises: of the war in Vietnam. I come here, to this serious forum in the heart of the nation to discuss with you why I regard our policy there as bankrupt: not on the basis of emotion, but fact; not, I hope, in clichés — but with a clear and discriminating sense of where the national interest really lies.
I do not want — as I believe most Americans do not want — to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned — as I believe most Americans are concerned — that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world.
I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: “They made a desert, and called it peace.”
And I do not think that is what the American spirit is really all about.
(…) I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path. It may be that the effort was doomed from the start; that it was never really possible to bring all the people of South Vietnam under the rule of the successive governments we supported — governments, one after another, riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and greed; governments which did not and could not successfully capture and energize the national feeling of their people. If that is the case, as it well may be, then I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, before history and before my fellow-citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live. Now as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient tests, as in the Antigone of Sophocles: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.”
Robert F. Kennedy was the first politician who had supported the Vietnam war to admit his error and accept responsibility. Far from being considered a pariah for it, he is remembered as being great for it. Hopefully the current Congress can comprehend this fact and learn from it.
The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for 206,000 more troops. Recently, it was announced that some of them — a “moderate” increase, it was said — would soon be sent. But isn’t this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of the conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time — at every crisis — we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder.
But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before.
Sound familiar? Does any of this?
And once again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that “we are going to win;” “victory” is coming. But what are the true facts? What is our present situation?
(…) The vice president tells us that the pacification program has “stopped”. In the language of other high officials, it is a “considerable setback,” with “loss of momentum,” “some withdrawal from the countryside,” “a significant psychological setback both on the part of pacification people themselves and the local population.”
(…) Let us clearly understand the full implications of that fact. The point of our pacification operations was always described as “winning the hearts and minds” of the people. We recognized that giving the countryside military security against the Viet Cong would be futile — indeed that it would be impossible — unless the people of the countryside themselves came to identify their interests with ours, and to assist not the Viet Cong, but the Saigon government. For this we recognized that their minds would have to be changed — that their natural inclination would be to support the Viet Cong, or at best remain passive, rather than sacrifice for foreign white men, or the remote Saigon government.
(…) If, in the years those villages and hamlets were controlled by Saigon, the government had brought honesty, social reform, land — if that had happened, if the many promises of a new and better life for the people had been fulfilled — then, in the process of reconquest, we might appear as liberators: just as we did in Europe, despite the devastation of war, in 1944-45. But the promises of reform were not kept. Corruption and abuse of administrative power have continued to this day. Land reform has never been more than an empty promise. Viewing the performance of the Saigon government over the last three years, there is no reason for the South Vietnamese peasant to fight for the extension of its authority or to view the further devastation that effort will bring as anything but a calamity.
(…) He tells us that we are “creating more Viet Cong than we are destroying” — and “increasing numbers of Vietnamese are becoming benevolently neutral toward the Viet Cong.”
(…) American officials continue to talk about a government newly energized, moving with “great competence,” taking hold “remarkably well,” doing “a very, very good piece of work of recovery.” I was in the executive branch of the government from 1961 to 1964. In all those years, we heard the same glowing promises about the South Vietnamese government: corruption would soon be eliminated, land reform would come, programs were being infused with new energy. But those were not the facts then, and they are not the facts today.
It’s not merely a few similarities, it’s the same story over and over.
(…) Meanwhile, the government’s enormous corruption continues, debilitating South Vietnam and crippling our effort to help its people. Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives have officially documented the existence, extent, and results of this corruption: American AID money stolen, food diverted from refugees, government posts bought and sold while essential tasks remain undone. A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations has reported that the Vietnamese Collector of Customs had engaged in smuggling gold and opium — and that he was protected by figures even higher in the government.
(…)Third, it is becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of destruction for the nation we once hoped to help. Even before this winter, Vietnam and its people were disintegrating under the blows of war. Now hardly a city in Vietnam has been spared from the new ravages of the past two months. Saigon officials say that nearly three quarters of a million refugees have been created, to add to the existing refugee population of two million or more. No one really knows the number of civilian casualties.
(…)There is not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough medical care. There is only death and misery and destruction.
An American commander said of the town of Ben Tre, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” It is difficult to quarrel with the decision of American commanders to use air power and artillery to save the lives of their men; if American troops are to fight for Vietnamese cities, they deserve protection.
(…) If it becomes “necessary” to destroy all of South Vietnam in order to “save it”, will we do that too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place?
(…) It is also said that we are protecting Thailand — or perhaps Hawaii — from the legions of the Communists. Are we really protecting the rest of Southeast Asia by this spreading conflict? And in any case, is the destruction of South Vietnam and its people a permissible means of defense?
(…) What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence that we do not have. What they want is peace, not dominated by any outside force.
(…)The fourth fact that is now more clear than ever is that the war in Vietnam, far from being the last critical test for the United States is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades. In purely military terms, the war has already stripped us of the graduated-response capability that we have labored so hard to build for the last seven years. Surely the North Koreans were emboldened to seize the Pueblo because they knew that the United States simply cannot afford to fight another Asian war while we are so tied down in Vietnam.
North Korean Nukes, anyone?
(…) Meanwhile our oldest and strongest allies pull back to their own shores, leaving us alone to police all of Asia; while Mao Tse-Tung and his Chinese comrades sit patiently by, fighting us to the last Vietnamese: watching us weaken a nation which might have provided a stout barrier against Chinese expansion southward; hoping that we will further tie ourselves down in protracted war in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand; confident, as it is reported from Hong Kong, that the war in Vietnam “will increasingly bog down the United States, sapping its resources, discrediting its power pretensions, alienating its allies, fraying its ties with the Soviet Union, and aggravating dissensions among Americans at home.” As one American observer puts it, truly, “We seem to be playing the script the way Mao wrote it.”
Or Osama Bin Ladin. This final bit reverbates the most with me. Robert F. Kennedy was right about Vietnam, and I believe he would have the same conclusions about Iraq:
All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent to Vietnam — and if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask — we are required to ask — how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But this question the Administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer — none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything in the past.
(…) For it is long past time to ask: what is this war doing to us? Of course it is costing us money — fully one-forth of our federal budget — but that is the smallest price we pay. The cost is in our young men, the tens of thousands of their lives cut off forever. The cost is in our world position — in neutrals and allies alike, every day more baffled by and estranged from a policy they cannot understand. Higher yet is the price we pay in our own innermost lives, and in the spirit of our country.
(…) This is no radical program of surrender. This is no sell-out of American interests. This is a modest and reasonable program, designed to advance the interests of this country and save something from the wreckage for the people of Vietnam.
(…) There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America. In these next eight months, we are going to decide what this country will stand for — and what kind of men we are. So I ask for your help, in the cities and homes of this state, into the towns and farms: contributing your concern and action, warning of the danger of what we are doing — and the promise of what we can do. I ask you, as tens of thousands of young men and women are doing all over this land, to organize yourselves, and then to go forth and work for new policies — work to change our direction — and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our own hearts, and all around the world.
Robert F. Kennedy, March 18, 1968, Landon Lecture at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas
Now which Democrat has the heart and the guts to stand up and give that speech today about Iraq? It’s a speech that every politician who cares about this country should be giving. Every day that speeches like this ARE NOT Given - is another day of death and dishonor for America.
posted by Fade # 11/28/2006 10:36:00 AM (6) Volleys | Trackback
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