saint of human rights.”14
Ecological Catastrophe
The devastating environmental health effects of the war continue to this day, for Vietnamese and U.S. veterans. The ongoing damage to both is told by Arthur Westing in Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War; Fred Wilcox in Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Waiting for an Army to Die; and Edwin Martini in Agent Orange. Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, participated as one of the judges in the 2009 International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange. The panel found that the U.S. government and the chemical manufacturers “knew that dioxin, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to humans, was present in one of the components of Agent Orange. Yet they continued to use it.” It also found that the U.S. war in Vietnam “was an illegal war of aggression (crime against peace) … in violation of the United Nations Charter. It further decided that the use of dioxin was a war crime because it qualified as a poisoned weapon in violation of … international law.” And finally, “The use of dioxin was a crime against humanity, as it constituted an inhuman act perpetrated against a civilian population in connection with a crime against peace and war crimes.”15
The False Story and Denial
Unless challenged, the Vietnam Commemoration and Obama-Reagan view will dominate the lessons of the American war. H. Bruce Franklin’s critique of the dominant view should therefore be considered: “Denial has been, in every sense, the terms necessary to fathom the depths of deception and delusion essential to America’s war in Vietnam.” The main competing American stories of the war are the Noble Cause, the quagmire, and Imperialism. The Noble Cause story is Ronald Reagan’s ignorant history of the war that began after 1954 when “North Vietnam” tried to take over “South Vietnam.” The quagmire story also begins in 1954 when “a ‘reluctant United States’” decided to support the Diem regime and got stuck in “the mire of Vietnam.” The Imperialism history begins in 1945 when American leaders “committed the nation to buttressing, maintaining, and becoming the dominant power within [a worldwide] imperial system.” For Franklin, and this writer, the imperial explanation is the only one that makes sense and can reasonably account for America’s “half-century of military, political and economic warfare against Vietnam and hostility toward every other colony and former colony that resisted” its aggression.16
An Alternative Commemoration
The Veterans for Peace (VFP) is challenging the Commemoration’s propaganda, based on the work of antiwar veterans, historians, poets, writers, and activists. Its Full Disclosure campaign seeks to “speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam.… It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize” that war and thereby “legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.”
Scheduled events and activities in the campaign have included a series of teach-ins around the country that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first teach-in held at the University of Michigan in March 1965; ongoing work with educational advocacy organizations such as the Zinn Educational Project to prepare alternative reading guides, articles, and curricula for students and teachers; antiwar films such as Yes Sir, No Sir, which focuses on the GI antiwar movement; protests against current American military actions around the world; and the development of written material by antiwar activists, scholars, and veterans on the conflict and related contemporary issues. The Full Disclosure campaign will continue during the Commemoration, until 2025. For more information, readers should go to its website.
1
The Noble Cause Principle and the Actual History
A powerful and fundamental belief has marked U.S. history: it is the “exceptional” nation chosen to lead the world. This belief is the essential foundation for the Noble Cause principle that justifies U.S. foreign policy, and the American War in Vietnam in particular. The fundamental lessons of the American war should be viewed within the context of this principle. The actual history of this nation, however, reveals it as a total lie. This principle has dominated political views about this country, however, as reflected by the following proclamations of this faith, beginning with the great American writer Herman Melville:1
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Noble Cause principle was articulated by the narrator in Melville’s novel White-Jacket: “And we Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the arc of liberties of the world.… God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.… We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.”
In 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge proclaimed the principle during the U.S. imperialist war against the Philippines: “We are the ruling race of the world.… We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God of the civilization of the world.… He has marked us as his chosen people.
… He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”
The principle is forever linked with the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson: “Sometimes people call me an idealist.… Well that’s the way I know I am an American. America … is the only idealistic nation in the world.”
After the Second World War, the influential diplomat George Kennan wrote: “Leadership of the free world was … thrust upon the American people by divine providence and the laws of both history and nature.” Our very “security as a nation [is] dependent on … accepting the responsibilities of moral and policy leadership that history plainly intended [us] to bear.”
As he escalated the American War in Vietnam in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson defended it in Noble Cause terms: “We have no territory there, nor do we seek any.… We want nothing for ourselves … we fight for values and we fight for principles.” The United States, “uniquely blessed with surpassing riches and an exceptional history, stands above the international system, not within it. Alone among nations, she stands ready to be the bearer of the law.”
Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to Richard Nixon during the American war in Vietnam, stated that the United States acts for “the well-being of all mankind.… This is why Americans have always seen their role in the world as the outward manifestation of an inward state of grace.”
President Ronald Reagan was a true believer in the Noble Cause. Americans “have never been aggressors. We have always struggled to defend freedom and democracy. We have no territorial ambitions. We occupy no countries.”
Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, stated: “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power—and the world is right. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right.”
Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, continued the Noble Cause celebration: “America’s ideals … are more and more the aspirations of people everywhere in the world. It is the power of our ideas … that makes America a uniquely trusted nation.”
Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, proclaimed: “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
After
