In separate appearances I made on C-Span and the Diane Rehm show on NPR today, the slaughter of Afghan civilians was compared to the My Lai massacre in 1968. While there are more differences than similarities, it's impossible to ignore these haunting parallels: both incidents occurred at a time when U.S. soldiers had a hard time discerning who the enemy was, and during wars in which the overall strategy was failing and the local governments and militaries (South Vietnam and Afghanistan) that were critical to our success could not be relied upon. All of which reminds me of another parallel to Vietnam: the role of one John Kerry, who continues to be a dubious supporter of the Afghan war despite his experience as an anguished Vietnam vet.
In April 1971, his voice quivering with a rare display of public emotion, Kerry, then a 27-year-old Navy lieutenant, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ridiculed the idea of “Vietnamization,” the precursor for what we’re now trying to do in Afghanistan. “Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost,” he declared, “so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.” Kerry, who had lost his best friend, Dick Pershing, in Vietnam, explained to the senators why the strategy—the whole war—was wrong. He ended by uttering the most famous question of his career: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
How indeed. If in fact Obama's strategy in Afghanistan is unworkable, as I suggested yesterday, then we (and Kerry himself, now chairman of the same committee) should be asking the exact same question: how can we justify the death or maiming of even one additional American?
No comments:
Post a Comment