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Today's
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September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Website of the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
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August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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September 2, 2004
The
War Neither Kerry Supporters or Critics Want to Talk About
The
Real Vietnam
By
ALAN MAASS
Three million southeast Asians dead. Fifty-six thousand
U.S. soldiers killed. Cities flattened by bombs. A countryside
devastated to this day by chemical warfare. That's the reality
of the U.S. war on Vietnam. But to judge from the media, the
only thing that matters about the Vietnam War today is the record
of one U.S. naval officer for a brief period in 1968 and 1969.
John Kerry enlisted in the
Navy in 1966 and served two tours of duty in Vietnam. The first
six-month stint was uneventful, on board a frigate that supported
U.S. warships off the Vietnamese coast. The controversy is over
Kerry's second tour--four months as the captain of a small "swift
boat" that carried U.S. troops on raids into the Mekong
Delta. Regularly involved in firefights, Kerry suffered three
wounds that earned him Purple Hearts--though all were minor enough
that he didn't miss a day of duty.
He also won two medals for
"personal bravery" and for "gallantry"--for
rescuing a Green Beret who had been swept off his boat, and for
going ashore and killing a Vietnamese fighter allegedly threatening
Kerry's crew with a grenade launcher. After the third injury,
Kerry requested to be reassigned out of combat, and ended up
serving as an aide to an admiral back in the U.S.
The anti-Kerry veterans have
many complaints about Kerry's record--from its brief length,
to whether his war wounds were serious enough to warrant Purple
Hearts, to his actions during the battles that won him medals.
But what neither side will talk about is the bigger picture--the
U.S. war on the people of Vietnam, and the role that Kerry and
the other swift boat captains played in it.
* *
*
THE SWIFT boats that Kerry
captained ferried Navy SEALSs, Green Beret soldiers and other
special forces on missions in the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta
is at the southern end of Vietnam, hundreds of miles from the
border that, during the war, separated North Vietnam, with its
USSR-aligned communist government, and South Vietnam, controlled
by a regime of U.S.-backed puppets.
The delta was economically
important as the main center of rice production in Vietnam. It
was also a main base of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of
South Vietnam, the armed insurgents fighting for liberation in
alliance with the north against the southern regime and its U.S.
protectors.
This was Kerry's enemy--the
insurgent fighters of the NLF, which the Americans insisted on
calling the "Viet Cong." Since taking over from the
French colonialists, the U.S. goal was to eliminate the NLF threat
by any means.
Kerry was part of a dirty war
to kill as many NLF fighters as possible--and to terrorize the
rural population into turning against the rebels. Central to
the U.S. strategy was the Phoenix program of assassinating suspected
NLF leaders.
U.S. and South Vietnamese government
assassins killed at least 20,000 people between 1966 and 1973
as part of the Phoenix program. As a swift boat captain, Kerry
transported these murder squads along the canals and rivers of
the Mekong region to the villages where supposed NLF fighters
had been identified.
More generally, the boats were
part of a reign of terror in the southern countryside. "The
entire area, except for certain designated 'friendly villages,'
was a free-fire zone, meaning the Americans could shoot at will
and count anyone they killed as VC," wrote Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair in CounterPunch magazine. Washington
also targeted the Mekong Delta with chemical weapons--using napalm
and the highly toxic Agent Orange to destroy vegetation as part
of the war on the guerrillas.
By all accounts, Kerry never
hesitated to use his superior firepower. His diaries, as described
even by his official biographer Douglas Brinkley, contain numerous
accounts of Kerry ordering his crew to open fire on unseen targets--as
well as attacks on "friendly villages," and on fishing
boats that were suspected of transporting supplies to the rebels,
but turned out to be carrying innocent families.
"Kerry was an extremely
aggressive officer, and so was I," a fellow lieutenant,
James Wasser, told Brinkley. "I liked that he took the fight
to the enemy, that he was tough and gutsy--not afraid to spill
blood for his country."
Washington's "total war"
made life unbearable for rural peasants. "[T]here is hardly
a family in South Vietnam," a Senate subcommittee concluded
in 1971, "that has not suffered a death, injury or the anguish
of abandoning an ancient homestead."
* *
*
THE OTHER part of Kerry's history
that Republicans are sure to turn to in the coming weeks is his
record as an opponent of war after he left Vietnam. Some time
after being discharged from the Navy, Kerry began speaking out
as an antiwar activist, working with the newly formed Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
Kerry was never the most radical
VVAW member--many of the group's core activists came to consider
themselves revolutionaries--and his opposition to the U.S. war
contrasts with his statements while serving in the Mekong Delta,
which were, at most, critical of the Pentagon's strategy. Nevertheless,
Kerry took part in some of the antiwar movement's most dramatic
protests--including a weeklong VVAW demonstration where hundreds
of veterans tossed their medals and other symbols of their time
in the military over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol building.
Representing the VVAW at congressional
hearings in 1971, Kerry became a nationally known figure when
he famously asked: "How do you ask a man to be the last
man to die for a mistake?" Kerry's testimony described what
he had heard at the so-called "Winter Soldier Investigation"--public
hearings organized by the VVAW at which more than 150 Vietnam
veterans told their stories.
"They relived the absolute
horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do,"
Kerry said. "They told the stories at times they had personally
raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable
telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off
limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages
in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs
for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside
of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and
the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the
applied bombing power of this country."
*
* *
COMPARED TO this brutality--inflicted
on the Vietnamese by a U.S. government bent on imposing its will
halfway around the world--the current obsession with Kerry's
war wounds is grotesque. Even as they report every charge and
counter charge in the swift boat controversy, the media complain
that the presidential campaign is stuck in a "time warp"
over Vietnam, as the New York Times put it.
Actually, with the parallels
between the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the crisis of Washington's
occupation of Iraq becoming ever clearer, a serious discussion
of what happened in Vietnam would explain a lot. Then, as now,
the U.S. government unleashed all the savagery it could bring
to bear on a poor country--and justified its barbarism in the
name of promoting "democracy" and "freedom."
Then, as now, Washington blamed
continued resistance on a minority of fanatics--the "communist
menace" in Vietnam, Islamist terrorists in Iraq--and promised
that the end was just around the corner. In Vietnam, the world's
mightiest military machine was beaten by a poorly armed fighting
force because the Vietnamese were fighting for their freedom.
In the process, a significant
portion of U.S. soldiers rebelled against the war when they came
to understand that they were being used as cannon fodder in a
war that served the interests of the wealthy and powerful--and,
for some, that the cause of the Vietnamese was just.
That's the truth about Vietnam.
And it's precisely what John Kerry is desperate to avoid any
discussion of today. He wants to bury his service to the antiwar
movement--and instead, celebrate his service to the U.S. government
in Vietnam, claiming his war stories as a patriotic badge of
honor, just as pro-war veterans did in denouncing Kerry and the
VVAW in the 1970s.
"I learned a lot about
these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta,"
Kerry droned during his convention speech. But the values he
learned were about empire, might makes right, and win at any
cost.
Kerry's attackers may be Bush-loving
cranks, but Kerry is committing an even more disgusting crime
by turning history on its head and portraying his service in
Vietnam as "noble." There was nothing "noble"
about what U.S. troops did in Vietnam.
Washington built its war strategy
around the indiscriminate use of the world's most deadly arsenal
to crush the Vietnamese people's desire for freedom. The only
"noble" alternative for U.S. soldiers was to turn against
the war--and rebel against military hierarchy and political system
that was ready to destroy an entire country and use U.S. troops
as cannon fodder.
Yet that opposition to war--which
a growing number of U.S. soldiers chose, and which Kerry himself
briefly represented--is precisely what the Democrats and their
presidential candidate want to ignore.
Alan Maass is the editor of Socialist Worker.
He can be reached at: alanmaass@sbcglobal.net
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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