I learned about an extraordinary woman, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who refused to be intimidated by those who would silence themselves and others when the dogs of war were about to be unleashed on Sept. 14, 2001. One of her comments that day was particularly foreboding…and accurate. She said, “…let us not become the evil that we deplore.” She took a stand and was the one lone voice out of 535 Congresspeople who cast a vote against “the gathering madness.” Her words of attempted restraint have frighteningly come true. James Baldwin is incredibly accurate when, in the quote that ends the piece, he speaks of our collective and individual need to demand more of ourselves. Congresswoman Lee reminds us that this is not only possible to do, but essential for us to preserve our moral center, especially when so many remain caught in the misrepresentations and manipulations of our government.

Here is the article about the Congresswoman, THE LONE VOICE, which was published in the VALLEY ADVOCATE (www.valleyadvocate.com) of August 16-22:

Between the Lines:

The Lone Voice
Let us now praise an infamous woman.
By Norman Solomon
GETTY IMAGES PHOTO
Congresswoman Barbara Lee

The problem with letting history judge is that so many officials get away with murder in the meantime—while precious few choose to face protracted vilification for pursuing truth and peace.

A grand total of two people in the entire Congress were able to resist a blood-drenched blank check for the Vietnam War. Standing alone on Aug. 7, 1964, senators Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Forty-three years later, we heard another lone voice on Capitol Hill standing against war hysteria and the expediency of violent fear. Days after 9/11, at the launch of the so-called “war on terrorism,” just one lawmaker out of 535 cast a vote against the gathering madness.

“However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said on the floor of the House of Representatives. The date was Sept. 14, 2001.

She went on: “Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.’”

And, she said: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

With all that has happened since then—with all that has spun out of control, with all the ways that the U.S. government has mimicked the evil it deplores—it’s stunning to watch and hear, for a single minute, what this brave congresswoman had to say (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf1N-y9Mbo4).

After speaking those words, Rep. Barbara Lee voted no. And the fevered slanders began immediately. She was called a traitor. Pundits went crazy. Death threats came.

Barbara Lee kept on keeping on. And nearly six years later, she’s a key leader of antiwar forces inside and outside Congress. In her own way, she is a political descendant of Sen. Morse, whose denunciations of the Vietnam War are equally inspiring to watch today (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiLV-Xeh8bA).

Not surprisingly, the president has sought to use the Vietnam War to further his Iraq War agenda. His misapplication of the lessons of Vietnam, so vividly detailed in the book IRAQ AND VIETNAM - HOW NOT TO LEARN THE LESSONS, is deeply disturbing. I felt that this editorial from the Los Angeles Times, which I came upon in the Las Vegas newspaper en route from the southwest back to Massachusetts, captured the enormous problem of his flawed analogy. What do you think?

Tom Weiner

August 28, 2007

From the Los Angeles Times

The misleading Vietnam analogy

August 23, 2007

With rhetoric that would stir any patriot but logic that should persuade few, President Bush on Wednesday waded into the historical quagmire of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, Bush said, “people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.” He then listed the tragedies that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia — the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia, the harsh communist rule in Vietnam. “The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’ ” Likewise, he argued, innocents will pay if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq empowers Al Qaeda.

The president’s Vietnam-Iraq analogy begins with a large kernel of truth, but goes astray. First, no serious Iraq expert believes U.S. withdrawal would end the killing. The debate today centers on whether the civil war that has been only partly suppressed by the surge of 30,000 U.S. troops will inevitably rage until the Sunnis and Shiites reach a rough equilibrium on the battlefield.

It’s true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal — whenever that occurs. But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitelyunless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades. Killing fields? Iraq’s already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?

There is one Vietnam analogy that unfortunately does apply. U.S. frustration over Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s failures surely rivals the disdain President Kennedy had for the first South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. We can only hope the Maliki-Diem analogy proves false, because Diem was ousted in a CIA-approved military coup, then executed. Perhaps Maliki is better compared with the last South Vietnamese leader, Nguyen Van Thieu? The hated Thieu never managed to make “Vietnamization” work — and the U.S. refused to keep 500,000 troops in South Vietnam for another decade or three to help him.

The real lesson of Vietnam is that its civil war was a nationalist struggle that toppled no communist “dominoes” across Asia. Bush’s rhetoric implying an Al Qaeda “domino effect” in the Middle East has the same false ring.

I am reading IRAQ AND THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM OR, HOW NOT TO LEARN FROM THE PAST, edited by Marilyn Young and Lloyd Gardner, and this morning it was Christian Appy’s well-written and persuasive piece entitled “Class Wars” that received my attention.  He writes about the parallels between the social classes of the soldiers in both wars, despite the fact that there was a draft during most of the Vietnam War and that today’s army is all-volunteer.  One of the big lessons he points out that was learned from Vietnam (for all of the wrong reasons, of course) regarding the make-up of America’s fighting forces is “the importance of unit cohension for the preservation of military morale”.    Referencing a NATION article by Christian Parenti, Appy agrees with him that “the military has honed to a fine art the ability to motivate soldiers not around an abstract cause, but around the duty to fight for their comrades.”  He goes on to say that, “This idea has been around since the beginning of war, but has been hammered home in the years since Vietnam, a war in which unit cohesion was profoundly compromised by the military policy of rotating most soldiers in and out of Vietnam as individuals rather than as whole units.”  Needless to say this had a powerful effect on unit cohesion as did drugs, the frustrations of fighting a seemingly unwinnable war, and the incredibly challenging climate and conditions.  Surely there was great loyalty to one’s comrades during the Vietnam War.  In fact, in both wars there is considerable evidence that some of the more extreme actions taken by soldiers, especially towards the civilian population, have been a direct result of feeling a need to avenge a buddy’s death.  But this time the loyalty seems to go deeper.  Appy writes about a former student who has signed up for a second tour of duty despite having “fundamental doubts about the legitimacy of the war”.  He feels forced to return to active duty, but writes to Appy, “For me, it is a lose-lose sitation.  I have lost respect for myself for going because I know in my heart that this war is wrong, but only slightly less respect than if I would again have to watch marines go into combat without me.”  As Bush ridiculously pronounced, “Mission accomplished.”  The goal of having soldiers overcome their own critical faculties and deny the truth of their experience of the illegitimacy of yet another war has been achieved when deeply thoughtful men put aside their conscience and judgment in order to “sacrifice for their buddies.”

Appy ends his piece with a few cautionary notes.  He points out that increasing numbers of servicemen are questioning why they should be so loyal to their fellow soldiers when they no longer support the war’s supposed purpose, “especially when the larger society seems so unwilling to share the sacrifice.”  He then contrasts our time with the Vietnam era in terms of our diminished commitment to social and economic justice.  His last words are ominously still ringing in my ears so I share them with you.  “Today working people not only supply the troops who die in our name, but bear the lion’s share of the economic sacrifices as we wage an apparently permanent ‘war on terror’ without so much as a slight increase in the minimum wage.”  Yes, we have seen a slight increase in the minimum wage since the arrival of the Democratic majorities in the Congress (and since Chris wrote his essay), but his point remains well-taken as we once again, as has been true so often in our country’s history, place the greatest burden on those with the fewest resources, the least means of finding alternatives and the least educated among us.

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on these and other related matters…

Tom Weiner

As those of you who know me are aware I relish coincidences and synchronicities, but there are occurrences in these realms that even I would prefer not to have happen. Take the fact that I launched my website and blog all about the effects of the Vietnam draft on a generation of Americans on Thursday, August 9th and, bizarrely to be sure, on Saturday, August 11th there is an article in our local newspaper, THE DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE, entitled “Bush Advisor: Draft is Worth Considering”! The article quotes Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute who said in an interview on NPRs “All Things Considered”, “I think it makes sense to certainly consider it…And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.” Here’s the website for the rest of his interview:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12688693
Yes, a draft during Vietnam helped immeasurably to fuel the protest movement in both the civilian and military populations, and yes, our armed services are stretched to near a breaking point, but it is not a draft, but a withdrawal of troops that is needed. Your thoughts?

Tom Weiner

I am hard at work with my dear friend, Diane Clancy (yes, she has a blog, too, www.dianeclancy.com/blog and she is an extraordinary artist) who is teaching me much about blog creation. Today we have added several new features including poetry about the war as well as several more stories from CALLED TO SERVE. I am presently reading the book I have now included by Marilyn Young, entitled Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam or How not to Learn from the Past and in her introduction she quotes Chris Appy (author of Patriots, the War from all Sides) whose words are haunting in their linkage of the two wars in terms of those who served. I would appreciate any feedback this engenders:

“Another perhaps less noticed connection between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam is that in both cases the U.S. sent a disproportionately working-class military to kill and die while asking or demanding virtually no sacrifices from more privileged Americans at home. Despite the differences between the Vietnam-era draft and the current all-volunteer force, both systems put most of the dirty work of warfare in the hands of people with significantly fewer choices and opportunities.”

Tom Weiner