Out of all the peculiarities of the political milieu in the U.S., what probably stands out the most is the discourse on the U.S. obliteration policies against Vietnam.
What does the general picture of U.S. aggression look like? The U.S. Air Force dropped more bombing tonnage in South Vietnam alone than the total bombing tonnage of every single aerial bombing campaign by all sides in WWII put together. The total amount of U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War was more than twice the size of all the bombings in WWII.
Twelve million acres of forest and twenty-five million acres of farmland, at the bare minimum, were destroyed by U.S. saturation bombing. The U.S. also sprayed over 70 million liters of herbicidal agents on Vietnam. The death toll of the Vietnamese caused by the U.S. military onslaught is routinely debated in hundreds of thousands, sometimes in the millions. According to Robert McNamara, for example, 3.6 million Vietnamese were killed in the war.
One of the most comprehensive studies was published in 2008 by the Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who put the Vietnamese death toll at 3.8 million. According to Nick Turse, an American historian and investigative journalist who has conducted pioneering research on the Vietnam War, even the “staggering figure” of 3.8 million “may be an underestimate.” Furthermore, the U.S. attack wounded 5.3 million Vietnamese civilians and up to 4 million Vietnamese fell victim to the toxic defoliants used by the U.S. against large parts of the country. To enter from the realm of internal U.S. debate on the U.S. attack on Vietnam is tantamount to teleportation into an unsavory twilight zone. Consider the results of a Gallup poll conducted in November 2000. Of respondents between 18 and 29, 27 percent said that the U.S. was backing North Vietnam, 45 percent said South Vietnam and 28 percent expressed no opinion at all. What about support for the war among the U.S. public, say, at the end of the 1960s? According to a Gallup poll conducted in July 1969, more than a year after the My Lai massacre, 53 percent of the respondents approved of Nixon’s handling of the war.
Arguably the main trend after the termination of U.S. aggression against Indochina has been a systematic glorification of U.S. actions. During a conference in 2006 titled “Vietnam and the Presidency,” former U.S. head of state Jimmy Carter gave his well- known account on the war and its effects on his presidency. Carter, not regarded as an ardent advocate of aggressive U.S. foreign policy among post-WWII U.S. presidents stressed the importance of moving “beyond the Vietnam War to better things.” Carter gave special emphasis on what he called a “healing process” for American society and proclaimed that, under his Administration, “that healing process made major strides forward.” Not only that, the “healing process” was only “complete” when “the Vietnam monument, one of the most popular places in Washington,” was set up soon after the Carter presidency.
The inscription on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial states that “[o]ur nation honors the courage, sacrifice, and devotion to duty and country of its Vietnam veterans.” Instead of prosecuting war criminals and paying enormous compensation to Vietnam, for starters, the U.S. gave Vietnam the above sentence. Carter’s commentary serves as an odious, yet illustrative, reminder of the standard line of thinking in the U.S. political culture. In short, when the U.S. attack on Vietnam had finally come to its end, what was of most importance was a “healing process” for the United States and reflecting the progress, if not completion, of that healing process was the erection of a monument singing the praises of the “courage” and “sacrifice” of the U.S. veterans. Now, let us move “beyond the Vietnam War to better things.”
Perhaps even more revealingly, Carter has asserted on the Vietnam War that, “I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability,” stressing that “the destruction was mutual.”
In 2000, then Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed a similar approach towards the U.S. actions in the Vietnam war. “I don’t intend to go into any apologies, certainly, for the war itself” Cohen declared upon his visit to Vietnam. “Both nations were scarred by this. They have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours.”
The tenets of the official U.S. position towards the unparalleled crimes the U.S. military committed in Vietnam remain as disturbing as ever: no apologies for U.S. conduct during the war, certainly no reparations; no intentions to prosecute U.S. government officials and military personnel for any of the countless war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam and romanticizing and glorifying the overall performance of the U.S. military in the war. Indeed, in the post-WWII era, the conventional narrative in the U.S. on the Vietnam War has emerged as arguably the most disturbing case of the perpetrator’s indifference towards, and often approval of, an apocalyptic destruction of the target of its attack.
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Bruno Jantti is an investigative journalist specializing in international politics.
