Living with Regret

"McNamara said there were plenty of bombs -- 265,000 tons of them, either in Southeast Asia or on the way.

''Frankly, we're going to just snow the place under with bombs,'' McNamara said. ''And I'm doing it purposely to make them cry, `Stop.'''

Tapes Reveal LBJ's Vietnam Conversations.
Associated Press
11/17/2006

Bush is currently visiting Vietnam in the time honored tradition of presidents going abroad to escape uncomfortable political reality at home. Or perhaps he is there hoping to consult with some Thai generals for tips on good governance. While Bush was in Vietnam, he had the gall, arrogance, and imperial idiocy to compare the U.S. invasion of Vietnam with Iraq.

Many American politicians and war cheerleaders have been reticent to mention Vietnam in the same breath as Iraq. The failure and criminality of the Vietnam invasion is radioactive. Americans continue to see Vietnam as a moral crime rather than mistake and the Empire's spearcarriers have been doing evertyhing they can for over 20 years to either make us forget about the war or claim it was a well intentioned mistake, sort of like spilling some milk on Grandma when all you wanted to do was help her quench her thirst. Oops, I tripped on the rug and killed millions of people! The comparison between the two situations is glaringly defecient in many ways, but a very crucial similarity is that the same imperial beliefs in American exceptionalism and mythology have helped lead to both catastrophes. Bush claimed the lesson we learned from the American “experience” of 'Nam, the euphemism the New York Times used as if the invasion was a summer camp, is that “we’ll succeed unless we quit.” I struggle to find sufficient words to properly tease out the lunacy hidden in those 5 words, so I will just move on. But before I do, I will just remark that those five words tell you everything you need to know about Bush. In his mind, we just didn’t try hard enough in Nam. 56,000 dead Americans, several hundred thousand wounded, 20+ years of U.S. involvement, a decade of troops on the ground, 500 pounds of bombs dropped for every man, woman, and child in Vietnam, more bombs than were dropped in the European and Asian theatres of WWII, 1-3 million dead Asians depending on the source (and I haven't checked the latest foreigner-to-American human currency exchange rate, but 2 million dead Asians have to be worth at least 4 or 5 white Americans), destruction that destabilized surrounding countries and helped lead to the rise of the mass murderers in Cambodia, and a legacy of dioxin poisoning and land mines that continues causing birth defects, cancers, and other illnesses and ordnance that maims people to this day, *deep breath* and the problem was that we didn't try hard enough. Grit your teeth and strap in Iraqis, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We aren’t quitting you so easily.

Three seemingly unrelated news stories converged that ultimately help show how messed up our world is. The first is an Associated Press article about LBJ’s taped conversations; the source of excerpted quote above. This is another footnote of the Vietnam war documenting explicit calls for mass-genocide in the highest levels of our government during that time period. (No doubt we will be collecting pieces from the current administration for the next forty years as well.) Our current president thinks Vietnam is a good analogy for something he calls the "war on terror." If "snowing" a country under with bombs is not terrorism, then I don’t know anything anymore.

But as I said, the McNamara quote is a small footnote. Here are some more quick examples of genocidal planning from the U.S. government during the Vietnam war era:
1. Undersecretary John McNaughton circulated a memo arguing that the U.S. should destroy Vietnamese rice paddies by bombing locks and dams that would lead to widespread flooding and create mass starvation - he speculated the death toll could rise as high as a million - and ultimately compel the Vietnamese to the negotiating table where the U.S. could use food as a carrot. The dams would make particularly good targets because they would not be well defended. The memo was released with the Pentagon Papers.

2. President Nixon had a recorded conversation with Henry Kissinger in the White House where Kissinger relayed Nixon's order to General Alexander Haig for a "massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is as clear a call for genocide as exists; anything that flies - meaning every plane that has bombs - on anything that moves - meaning any human or animal in Cambodia. ("Kissinger Tapes Describe Crisis, War and Stark Photos of Abuse." New York Times. May 27, 2004)
(H/T on both to NC)

We have Bush in Vietnam comparing the Vietnam War to Iraq, warning that only if we quit, as we did in Nam, will we lose in Iraq. Then we have a story about President Johnson’s mad scheme to bury the country of Vietnam under a blizzard of bombs. A third story brings all of this into stark relief: the conviction and sentencing of Saddam Hussein for his crimes against humanity. You remember that, right? It happened the day before the U.S. elections, coincidentally. Imagine for a moment that we had transcripts and recordings of Saddam and his top military leaders discussing plans to starve over a million Iranians by destroying their food sources, to snow the Kurds under with bombs, and to bomb anything that moves in the Tigris-Euphrates Marsh Arab area. It is inconcievable that any future Iraqi leader would ever go to Iran and express regret that they didn't try hard enough in the 1980s. No, something like that could never happen in this world. That is even too batshit crazy for me to believe.