During the Vietnam War, conservative academics and journalists argued that
the war was necessary but badly run; liberals argued that it was a mistake
and couldn't be won.  Neither side expressed the view that, according to
surveys, a large majority of Americans eventually adopted: that the war
was morally wrong -- that it was not a blunder but a crime.

That view could not be encompassed by our ideological institutions,
notably the media and the universities, so it was largely ignored in
polite discourse.  The most advanced liberal opinion in the mainstream
media pronounced the war a "bumbling attempt to do good."  But people are
not fools: in spite of the propaganda, they came to recognize for what it
was the American attempt to impose the sort of dictatorship we supported
in Latin America on South Vietnam by assaulting it with more ordnance than
was used in all of World War II.  That realization -- and the fundamental
rebellion of the American army in Vietnam -- added to the costly
resistance of the Vietnamese people to bring the war to an end.

Much of this history has been mythologized (the polite phrase for "lied
about")  in retrospect.  For instance, it's said that opposition to the
war was concentrated on American college campuses.  That's false.  Most
university communities -- faculty and students -- remained pro-war until
the end, in spite of the existence of articulate minorities of opposition
on many campuses.  Survey data during the war showed that support for the
US government's position among Americans varied directly with years of
formal education -- i.e., the more schooling you had, the more likely you
were to support the war.  (That's hardly surprising -- it reflected whose
children were coming home in boxes.)

Nor was the war particularly bumbling from the point of view of American
policy makers.  It was not, as came to be almost universally claimed, a
"quagmire" in which the US sank, inadvertently and unawares.  The war was
a result of the continuous US policy of preventing the emergence of
independent societies that might attempt to use their resources for their
own purposes, rather than integrate them with the US-run world economy.
And -- as one sees Nike exploit cheap labor in Vietnam today -- it must be
said that that policy was successful, there as elsewhere.  The US won the
Vietnam War.  Its behavior was not stupid but vicious.

I rehearse this ancient history because it seems to me that there are
certain parallels -- indeed a certain continuity -- between it and the
present administration's bombing attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan.  It has
been famously remarked that everything in history happens twice, the first
time as tragedy and the second time as farce.  The American assault on
Vietnam was assuredly a tragedy, but the victims of the "War on Terrorism"
may be forgiven if they fail to note its farcical aspects.

One parallel is found in the division of opinion that I started with.
Evaluating Clinton's bombs, responsible commentators in the media and the
academy divide roughly along the usual lines: (a) the bombings are
regrettably necessary but may not have been done well, or sufficiently
(the conservative view); or (b) they're a mistake because they won't be
effective (the liberal view).

Only outside the "mainstream" is the simple argument made that
        (1) killing people is wrong;
        (2) detonating explosives that will probably kill people is wrong;
        (3) the actions described in (1) and (2) are justifiable if at all
only in the most extreme circumstances -- which surely don't obtain in the
case of Bill's bombings, for which the motives are clearly inadequate and
possibly corrupt: not for nothing has Clinton been dubbed the
"Monibomber."

Only absolute pacifists reject the principle that self-defense may justify
killing in resistance to unjust attack.  Thus the administration attempts
to cover itself with a shred of international law by claiming that the
bombings are justified by Article 51 of the UN charter, which provides for
self-defense.  But it's a ludicrous claim.  Self-defense for an individual
or state involves the use of force to repel attack immediately; it's
hardly self-defense if I go to some one's house some time later and attack
him on the grounds he may have or perhaps will attack me.  It's that sort
of behavior by states that the UN is meant to prevent.  Here again we're
dealing with a great tradition: when the Nazis invaded Poland they
announced that they were "finally shooting back"; and President Lyndon
Johnson justified the war in Vietnam because the Vietnamese "wanted to
take what we have."

So why did Bill bomb?  Ignoring psychological and personal political
motives, we note that the attacks show once again that there is precisely
one dominant military authority in the world.  The US government has
shown repeatedly that it countenances a great deal of incidental killing
so long as an "overall structure of order" is maintained -- i.e., so long
as US corporate profits continue to flow.  "The Administration is
declaring itself to be a violent and lawless state, which does as it
chooses," Chomsky writes.  "Its principle is that the powerful act as they
wish, as long as their targets are defenseless."  The bombings were a
demonstration attack -- as the war on Vietnam was a demonstration war --
designed to show (in the words of Bill Clinton's presidential predecessor,
whom he resembles in this as in other matters) "What we say goes!"

There's a certain chilling personal connection for Bill Clinton himself.
In the letter that he wrote to the head of the ROTC program at the
University of Arkansas during the Vietnam War, Clinton comes quite close
to saying that he couldn't participate in the killing of Vietnamese people
-- unless it was necessary for his political career.  Apparently there are
remarkable continuities in the lives of individuals and states.

                                --C. G. Estabrook