On January 8, the NY Times ran an 800-word obituary for Laotian-American leader Vang Pao
which began thus:
Gen. Vang Pao, Laotian Who Aided U.S., Dies at 81
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Vang Pao, a charismatic Laotian general who commanded a secret army of his mountain people in a long, losing campaign against Communist insurgents, then achieved almost kinglike status as their leader-in-exile in the United States, died Thursday in Clovis, Calif.
He was 81.
His death was confirmed by Michael Bailey, a spokesman for the Clovis Community Medical Center.
Vang Pao was a general in the official Laotian Army, the chief of a secret army financed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the undisputed leader of the varied factions of his people, the Hmong. Tens of thousands of them followed him in his flight to Thailand after the Communist victory in 1975. Later, in the United States, he was so revered that some of his people believed he had supernatural powers.
"He is like the earth and the sky," Houa Thao, a Hmong refugee, said in an interview with The Fresno Bee in 2007.
But Vang Pao was also a major drug lord, a fact that the Times completely ignored. At Foreign Policy in Focus, Conn Hallinan set the record straight:
Obits for "Fabled Hero" of Vietnam War, Vang Pao, Omit CIA Drug Connection
By Conn Hallinan, January 11, 2011
Cynicism, as the late Molly Ivins once noted, is the death of good journalism, but reading through the New York Times and the Associated Press' obituaries of Laotian-Hmong leader General Vang Pao made that sentiment a difficult one to resist.
Vang Pao, who died Jan. 6 in Clovis, a small town in California's Central Valley, was described in the Times as "charismatic" and in AP as a "fabled military hero" who led a Hmong army against the communist Pathet Lao during the Laotian civil war. Van Pao's so-called "secret army" was financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as part of the U.S.'s war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.
Well, "financed" is a slippery word, and while, it was true Vang Pao got a lots of money and arms from the CIA, a major source of his financing was the opium trade run out of Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle." That little piece of history never managed to make it into the obits, which is hardly a surprise. The people the CIA hired to run dope for Vang Pao went on to run dope for the Contras in the Reagan Administration's war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And talking about close ties between drugs and the CIA in Southeast Asia and Central America might lead to some very uncomfortable questions about the people we are currently supporting in Afghanistan.
Readers should search out a book by Alfred McCoy called "The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia," and pull up a Frontline piece entitled "Drugs, Guns and the CIA" by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn.
What they will find is not in the Times and the AP obits.
Throughout the Cold War, we never much cared what people were for, we only cared what they were against. Dictators, drug lords, genocidal religious fanatics (Rios Montt of Guatemala), all were welcomed with open arms--despite the heavy cost to American troops and neighborhoods back home, as Hallinan goes on to note:
The trade in opium and heroin in Laos was linked in turn to the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam led by President Nguyen Van Thieu. Much of that heroin ended up in the bodies of American GIs-during the height of the war there were between two and three fatal overdoses a day-as well as decimating neighborhoods back in the U.S.
Nothing much has changed with the "War on Terror" (aka "Long War")....
We have already seen some impressive efforts in this campaign season to do a bit of résumé padding, particularly as it regards things military; so far Illinois' Mark Kirk has managed to turn himself into a kind of camouflage Austin Powers, while Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal's trying to catch up with some "Vietnam" service of his own that no one else in the theater of operations exactly knew about.
But now, in the race for Alabama Governor, we may have seen something that takes us to a whole new level of "inflation": the Republican candidate is running an ad that not only suggests that he served in Vietnam...it seems to imply that he actually died there, and has now come back to save the State.
Which is some serious irony indeed, considering that the candidate is actually a medical doctor.
And with that, let me introduce you to the either living...or undead...Dr. Robert J. Bentley.
In 2008 Joe Allen published "Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost," which provides a terrific and concise history of the United States' involvement in Vietnam, from beginning to end. Doing this in 200 pages results in a limited history, but the basic points all seem right.
Allen concludes that Vietnam was ended by three forces: the resistance of the Vietnamese, the peace movement in the United States, and the resistance of soldiers in the U.S. military. Because he was writing in 2008 or earlier, Allen compares the Vietnam War only to the Iraq War, not Afghanistan. But many points he makes are, or may prove to be, relevant to both of those current quagmires. He finds the Iraqis, the Americans, and the American soldiers all coming up short in comparison with the three groups that ended the Vietnam War. The same can almost certainly be said with regard to Afghanistan.
Like most boys, I grew up interested in weapons and war, from toy guns to model fighter planes to heavily-armed Transformers. Maybe I was drawn to the simplistic morality of "good guys versus bad guys" and "kill or be killed", or the allure of the power to bring death and destruction when children rarely have control over anything. With a patriotism bred into me from both school and patriotic institutions like the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts, there was also a pride in the idea of fighting and risking one's life for one's country, as well as an image of manliness and heroism that only the military seemed to provide.
In short, I wasn't too different from Ron Kovic, who grew up wanting desperately to join the military so he could defend his country, prove his patriotism and be a hero in the vein of his idol, John Wayne. But after volunteering for the Marines out of high school so he could fight in Vietnam, Kovic was soon exposed to the unheroic horrors of actual war, shattering his naive image of war's nobility that he had carried since a child. And after being paralyzed from the chest down and experiencing the terrible treatment veterans received from both the VA hospital and by Americans who cared little for his sacrifice, his faith in God, country and government was irrevocably shaken.
But Kovic didn't give up on his country -- he redefined his love for it. He wrote a book about his experiences called Born On the Fourth of July and became a vocal activist against the Vietnam war, and continues to fight for peace to this day. And by doing so, he became a different kind of patriot than he ever thought he would be.
In 1989, his book was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise, also called Born On the Fourth of July, which changed my view of war and patriotism forever. See my ReThink Review of Born On the Fourth of July and my discussion with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks about the film and patriotism below.
The last time I was on Laura Flanders's GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest -- some Washington, D.C., "progressive" -- argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn't know anything about Afghanistan.
When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don't know any better.
When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.
Let's set aside for a moment the ludicrous propaganda that maintains that the reason we occupy other people's countries is to impose democracy on them. Let's assume we're imposing the rule of elite experts. Even so, even on those terms, here are some possible responses to this line of thinking.
This past week I covered the bold testimony of Ret. Cpl. Rick Reyes before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the comparison between Reyes's anti-war testimony and a young John Kerry alerting the nation to the horrors of the Vietnam War 38 years ago. I certainly wasn't the only one to connect the dots between Vietnam and the current quagmire in Afghanistan, as you can see from this video with excerpts of Andrew Bacevich's testimony.
Bacevich, a retired Colonel who served in Vietnam and is now professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, has become one of the most vocal critics of the "Long War," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates dubbed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paraphrasing General Bruce Palmer's account of the Vietnam War, Bacevich said that our country is once again "mired in a protracted war of an indeterminate nature, with no foreseeable end to the US commitment."
The Long War, as Bacevich exclaimed, has become the second most expensive war in US history (second only to WWII). Now that we our facing trillions in debt, Bacevich urged Congress to question the reasons for escalation in Afghanistan. "We just urgently need to ask ourselves whether or not the purposes of the long war are achievable, necessary, and affordable," Bacevich claimed, "and Afghanistan is a subset of that longer set of questions." Congress needs to address questions of cost before they vote on President Obama's $83 billion war funding bill in the coming weeks. And the most direct way to follow Bacevich's lead and confront Congress is by calling your Representatives as soon as possible, urging them not to vote until we have more oversight hearings like these, and more questions answered.
This week, my Get Afghanistan Right colleagues and I want you to flash back to 1967, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lashed out at the US government over the Vietnam War. We remember Dr. King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," not just to raise parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, which are certainly growing with President Obama's mission creep calls for military escalation. Dr. King's speech also illustrates how fighting a Long War abroad grossly depletes our government's wherewithal to handle (and our nation's ability to focus on) a more critical socioeconomic crisis at home.
Speaking at New York's Riverside Church, Dr. King made the connections between the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam for several reasons. He couldn't advocate peaceful solutions to the rampant racial violence in America when our government stood as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He couldn't ignore the fact that White and Black could die side-by-side on the battlefields of Southeast Asia more easily than they could sit together at a lunch table back home. But the primary reason Dr. King turned his attention to the war was because he saw it undermining President Johnson's ability to fight the "unconditional war on poverty." How could LBJ's poverty program help the destitute at home when our government was channeling so much national attention and so many tax dollars and lives into military escalation abroad?
I've long felt that the politician Barack Obama most clearly resembles is John F. Kennedy. The same youthful, technologically-tinged message of change. The same pop-star style excitement. The same sort of outside-the-party-regular kind of campaign. The same sort of substantively modest modest agenda compared to what a more tradition liberal would be pushing in similar circumstances. The same abundance of tactical and short-term strategic brilliance that can lull one into ignoring the lack of a sound long-term strategic planning.
And the same flawed judgment when it comes to land wars in Asia? It well could be. JFK's Vietnam policy has long been shrouded in myth and mystery, but for me--a boomer who's read about Vietnam in five decades now, the most insightful narrative so far on this particular aspect of the war appears to be David Kaiser's 2000 tome, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War . While Kaiser's view of Kennedy is more favorable than mine, his interpretative touch is relatively light, and I have no reservations in enthusiastically recommending this book for the insight it provides. It makes a very strong case that Kennedy had no desire to fight in Asia, and went to extraordinary lengths to reverse a collision course that Eisenhower had set us on. But one thing Kennedy did not do was replace the ideologically-blinkered advisory apparatus, which kept failing to give him the sort of genuine alternatives he was hungering for.
How sharp Kennedy's hunger really was is subject to debate, as are similar questions about Obama. One thing is for certain, however: Both men recognize the limits of military power, and the need for more wide-ranging thinking, but both, so far, have failed to reach out to create a policy apparatus that might help them find a better way.
"We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war. We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now."
Those were the emotional words of a 27-year-old John Kerry, dressed in green fatigues, Silver Star, and Purple Heart ribbons as he shocked the country with his antiwar testimony before a crowded Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971. Kerry's fiery thirty-minute condemnation of the war became instantly legendary for questioning the reasons our military was in Vietnam; revealing the fact that the nation had turned its back on veterans; and slamming President Nixon for refusing to pull out.
It was a definitive moment for the antiwar movement made possible because chairman William Fulbright called Kerry to testify. Thirty-eight years later, Senator Kerry now sits in Fulbright's seat. Along with Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Kerry has the power to focus the national spotlight on a similar quagmire, the war in Afghanistan. And as the Obama administration just committed an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $775,000 per soldier every year, oversight hearings can't come soon enough.
There is no "end game" strategy for the war in Afghanistan. That is what a military official told President Obama last week, according to an NBC report cited by Think Progress' Faiz Shakir yesterday. In other words, the ultimate outcome for our military presence in Afghanistan is unclear, not just to the activists and bloggers who have been wrestling with this war at Get Afghanistan Right, but to those inside the Pentagon as well. If we have any chance of avoiding further catastrophe in the region, we better make damn sure we Rethink Afghanistan.
That is exactly what Brave New Foundation is calling for in a new campaign launched today. They will hold a series of debates on the issues surrounding this war in the coming weeks, and currently they're asking everyone to sign the petition urging Congressional oversight hearings like those held in 2007 regarding the Iraq war. Vice President Biden, who orchestrated the Iraq hearings as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said, "No foreign policy can be sustained in this country without the informed consent of the American people." Isn't informed public consent what we need now before committing more troops to Afghanistan?
Today, Obama said, "I don't care what they say about me." What a wimp thing to say when you are battling the dirtiest campaigner we have ever seen in our lifetime, Karl Rove.
Here is what Obama should be saying: McCain is a weakling. He is a political weakling, afraid of his own convictions. We have seen him time and again since he started running for president give up his position to whoever yelled the loudest. He caved to Bush on the tax cuts for the wealthy. He caved to the extremists on immigration reform. He caved to the extremists and kneeled down for Falwell. And he caved to Bush on torture.
McCain has no backbone when it comes to standing his political ground. The straight talk express goes straight in one direction until John McCain gets scared, and then it backs up and goes in the opposite direction.
It's too bad that a man of such strength in the Vietnam War is such a weakling when it comes to politics. McCain can't take the heat for his own convictions. It's a real shame to watch him cower in the face of political pressure.
Jim Wasser served in Navy combat during the Vietnam War. His father fought in World War II, a veteran of the Pacific theater.
Wasser, a member of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) union, respects Sen. John McCain's military service-but not his record in the Senate. Wasser puts it this way:
He wants us to keep spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, just like Bush. We could use that money to build schools, and roads, and create jobs with livable wages and benefits and insurance. He even took sides with Bush against increasing health care benefits for veterans.
People should let John McCain know: His agenda is not what we need, not now.
I'm not exactly surprised that the administration's military propaganda program has received so little attention. The establishment has never demonstrated any understanding of the war in Iraq, of why it's such an incoherent, doomed venture. The propaganda program revealed last Monday is not a sideshow. It's an essential component of the only remaining strategic rationale for the continuation of the war -- preventing damage to America's image.
In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."
The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."
Remember the pride Americans felt in its military following the first Gulf War in 1991? Prior to that conflict we had the "Vietnam Syndrome" tainting our military with the stench of defeat and shameful atrocities such as the My Lai massacre. Supposedly, a reformed military culture debunked the legacy of Vietnam, liberated Kuwait with honor while safeguarding America's interests in Saudi Arabia.
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