Editorials/The Weird War/On to the Cape of Good Hope
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS THE WEIRD WAR April marked the tenth anniversary of South Vietnam's liberation or fall. It depends on one's point of view. As all the world knows, the Vietnam war was controversial and,...
...Theirs is a curious game...
...ON TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE Why is it, one wonders, that precisely now, beset as we are by foreign policy problems, the progressives of the Republic have heated up the question of human rights in South Africa...
...Finally, it will forever strike me as quite strange that in the middle and late 1970s the peace movement cited the aftermath of Vietnam as a vindication, proving the superiority of negotiations over military action...
...There were "peace" demonstrations of incongruous bellicosity and unsurpassed frivolousness: affairs of state coming under the summary influence of drugged-up Adapted from RET's weekly Washington "Post column syndicated by King Features...
...singers whose identities time has now for the most part obscured and of youths maundering about a decidedly juvenile Utopia...
...Confusion was one of the antiwar activists' most enduring beby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Consider Ethiopia where a tyrannical regime continues to starve thousands of political opponents and to force misery and death on rural peoples whom it is forcibly relocating despite horrible famine...
...But some of the weirdness can now be experienced afresh by following the outbursts that have attended publication of Richard Nixon's new book, No More Vietnams, an analysis of the political and military errors committed by administrations and by Congress in Southeast Asia...
...As all the world knows, the Vietnam war was controversial and, of course, tragic and brutal, but has anyone ever noted that it was also rather bizarre...
...policy immediately set about slaughtering their countrymen because the trauma of that policy was unshakable...
...Surely it was bizarre to send more than 550,000 men into combat without the concomitants of a declaration of war and while LBJ was engaged in the most ambitious and expensive domestic programs in our history...
...The explanation for this sudden outburst of protest against South Africa is that in the past progressives were preoccupied with the transgressions of other nations...
...There was the claim that our veterans were ignored because we blamed them for the Vietnamese defeat-a claim confected by the very same activists who had called these men baby killers and war criminals...
...Alas, they are also armed to the teeth and immensely capable...
...In Africa the progressives have set their sights on an unusually disagreeable regime...
...As Americans do not much interest themselves with the past, recollecting the bizarre episodes of the Vietnam war is not easy, and for many young people today there is nothing to recollect...
...Their retort is that the botch was not theirs but Washington's...
...But now that Iran and South Vietnam have benefited from their meddling, along with Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Cambodia, and Laos, it is South Africa's turn, and, oh yes, El Salvador's and the Philippines...
...At any rate, there are areas in Africa where human rights is a far more urgent issue...
...The Afrikaners have accomplished the rare feat of being at once more self-righteous and stubborn than those Americans now intent on reforming them...
...For instance, it is now deemed quite enlightened to hold that the "dominoes," whose fall we sought to prevent, never fell-only South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia...
...And there were other regimes in need of our progressives' attentions...
...South Africa controls sea lanes of vast naval and commercial importance...
...History testifies that there is no place under the sun where their prescriptions for reform and peace have brought democracy...
...Why do the progressives who call for coalition government in El Salvador not also call for it in Managua where the Communist Sandinistas are being sorely pressed by indigenous Nicaraguans...
...The aftermath brought on more of the same...
...The same protests now being mounted against South Africa could with equal justification have been mounted in the 1960s or even in the late 1970s...
...There was "the corrupt Thieu regime," which had to be brought up to American Good Government standards...
...Once again there are the petiy recriminations, the misrepresentations of American policy, the odd academic discourses, the debating points, the confusion...
...Influential Americans accepted this preposterosity even though these were the years of Indochina's "re-education camps," the boat people, Khmer Rouge genocide, and lethal chemical warfare against Lao tribesmen and Cambodian villagers...
...Had Washington come in at the appointed hour and imposed reform, a coalition government, a peace agreement, or whatever other nostrum the progressives were prescribing, all would have come out for the better...
...After all, South1 Africa has been repugnant for years...
...Has it been an attempt to make traditional American isolationism appear sophisticated, as a session with one's shrink appears sophisticated...
...Reform might have been in the air before Prime Minister Botha backed away from his moderate statements in 1981, but now the regime is implacable...
...If they were truly serious about reform the progressives would still be protesting corruption and tyranny in Southeast Asia, Iran, and Nicaragua...
...To the sober observer it does appear that over the past twenty years our progressives have made a capital botch of every country on which they have fixed their focus...
...Then too, the entire war was broadcast to us while we ate and by reporters who seemed strangely neutral...
...There was the widely celebrated Shawcross thesis arguing that those Cambodians who had triumphed over U.S...
...Moreover, human rights are a decimal point or so more generous in South Africa today than heretofore-though true democracy is probably no closer...
...quests, making foreign policy absurdly difficult then and now, and encouraging the long, long march of weirdly demented assertions...
...Believing as they do in America's capacity to reform other countries, let them save the starving pawns of Lt...
...Through it all, the only participants who remained clear-sighted and resolute were those who on April 29, 1975 renamed Saigon Ho Chi Minh City...
...South Africa's time will come, but even in Africa there are regimes more hostile to human rights and more susceptible to American power...
...Ah, but here is the rub: Our progressives are loath to use American power against anti-Western regimes, even weak ones such as Ethiopia...
...Always our government moved too slowly toward the progressive position...
...There was the alacrity with which Vietnam was-and still is- called a military defeat, though our military won every major battle and was barred by law from the final showdown...
...No friend of democracy is un-bothered by South Africa's racial policies, yet our government has pressing problems in the Middle East and in Central America to say nothing of Geneva...
...Perhaps one has to be steeped in history to notice, but very few wars fought by Western nations and no other war fought by America has been aswirl with so much confusion and apparent weirdness...
...Mengistu Haile Mariam's Stalinist politique...
...In time, of course, historians will see through the bizarreries of the era, and chronicle the war accurately...
...Geographically, it is nearly as large as the entire European Economic Community, and a stupendous source of strategic minerals, including 93 percent of NATO's manganese, 81 percent of the world's chrome reserves, 75 percent of platinum, 51 percent of gold, 49 of vanadium, 35 of fluorospar, plus diamonds, uranium, vermiculite, phosphate, zinc, titanium, antimony, and lead...
...Why do those who were once so fervent in abominating the Shah or the infamous Thieu not now with equal lustiness abominate the Ayatollah or the bamboo politburos...
...I believe so, and after listening to the critics scrupling over our policy in Central America today, it appears that the sophisticates are still with us...
...Our reformers have raised the un-falsifiable hypothesis to the level of dogma...
...But what has been the point of all the critics' weird conjurings...
...If the progressives' prescriptions fail in Ethiopia, America will not have lost influence with a regime strategically important to us...
...Professors looked on admiringly, and from within America's circles of power came antiwar pronun-ciamentoes of the kind Bobby Kennedy uttered but a few years after his brother had introduced 16,000 "advisers" into South Vietnam: "What we are doing to the Vietnamese is not very different than what Hitler did to the Jews...
...There was the tyrannical Shah whose friendship brought us so much discredit...
...Then it will be recorded that much that Nixon has written in this book is unassailable and that the questionable points he makes are at least plausible-for instance, that Congress's 1974 ban on the reintroduction of American military power and its refusal to resupply the South rendered two decades of American foreign policy practically futile...
...Let the progressives protest this atrocity...
...If the progressives' meddling in South Africa brings in the kind of regime now dominant in Iran or Angola, America suffers a geopolitical and strategic disaster...
Vol. 18 • June 1985 • No. 6
