War Crimes and Politics
Wrong, Dennis H.
The knotty problem of war crimes—what they are, how to respond to them, whether the Left should •try to make them into a major political issue— is likely to figure largely in the next year or...
...To claim that civilian and military leaders in Washington were unaware that the execution of these policies resulted in the killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant peasants defies all credibility...
...I am impressed, moreover, by Neil Sheehan's argument in his recent brilliant New York Times Book Review piece, "Should We Have War Crime Trials...
...but I doubt that national revulsion against the Vietnam disaster and a determination to avoid any rep etition of it will be strengthened by an attempt to personalize guilt...
...True, the Army will cover for its own and seek to avoid, as it already has, indicting any but a few scapegoats...
...Sheehan himself quotes American generals in Saigon who were well aware that the destruction of the rural population deprived the enemy of new recruits, thus "revers[ing] Mao-Tse-tung's maxim by drying up the sea (the peasantry) in which the guerrillas swam...
...because a trial procedure would ensure endless diversionary litigious wrangling on a far greater scale than that of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals...
...The proposal often heard on the Left for a UN tribunal makes even less sense...
...Violations of international law com mitted by the United States in Southeast Asia, and even destruction that was not in express violation of existing international agreements, should receive maximum publicity...
...Calley was found guilty of war crimes (and Medina may well be too), but men above them were also guilty under the U.S...
...But if we adopt formal legalistic procedure to assign individual guilt, it is just such piddling legal questions that are unavoidable...
...There was considerable ambiguity and arbitrariness in the selection of those who were tried at Nuremberg, not to speak of the legal confusion resulting from the combination of the charges of "conspiring to wage aggressive war" and "crimes against humanity...
...I think it preferable to appoint a commission, like the Kerner or Warren commissions, to investigate and report on our actions in South east Asia since 1965, but not to assign legal or quasi-legal degrees of guilt to individuals...
...Why compound these errors by adopting them as precedents...
...Finally, will judgment by foreigners be more or less likely to bring Americans to a full realization of the evil their government has wrought in Indochina...
...I disagree, how ever, with the New Republic's suggestion that U.S...
...Someone is bound to reply that Hitler didn't kill all the Jews of Europe, or even of Poland, either—that the attempt is COMMENTS AND OPINIONS what should count...
...responsibility for waging "aggressive war," the old Nuremberg charge, should be explored by the commission...
...Air and artillery bombardments of civilian populations and search-and-destroy ground missions were general policies established by the top military command with the support of Washington— where political leaders opted for such policies in preference to an occupation of Vietnam by ground troops, which would have required higher draft calls and more American casualties...
...THERE CAN BE NO POSSIBLE DOUBT that the United States has violated in Indochina the laws of war laid down by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the principles on which the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials were based, and several specific regulations in the U.S...
...Should we, then, demand that Lyndon John son be put in the dock and tried for war crimes...
...A liberal columnist the other day, advising the Democrats not to renominate Hubert Humphrey in 1972, said he belonged in the dock on trial for war crimes in Vietnam...
...We will do so in our next one...
...But avoid the guilt-mongering and adversary pro COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ceedings of a criminal trial assigning degrees of individual guilt and imposing penalties...
...Yet the population in question was hardly the South Vietnamese people as a whole...
...very probably, others among us have different opinions...
...Also, much of the killing has been a by-product of the massive and indiscriminate use of modem technological warfare, a use favored for reasons other than that it guaranteed the killing of large numbers of civilians whatever military advantages cynical generals, such as one quoted by Sheehan, may have discerned in this result...
...Pakistan belongs to the UN and the Pakistani army killed an estimated three or four times as many people within a few weeks last April than have been killed by U.S...
...The knotty problem of war crimes—what they are, how to respond to them, whether the Left should •try to make them into a major political issue— is likely to figure largely in the next year or two...
...It was rather the peasantry in areas where the Vietcong were most active...
...Let individual policy-makers be named and criticized, let the orders of staff and field officers that resulted in violations of international law be enumerated and their authors named, let new laws restricting the technological devastation of people and land be suggested...
...Continuing public debate and the appointment of a commission to prepare a report will increase the likelihood that other My Lais will come to light and be exposed to the glare of publicity, especially if we elect in 1972 a President who is an unambiguous opponent of the war...
...It makes no sense to fry to comment on them in this issue...
...This has been suggested in a recent issue of the New Republic, which even lists possible members of the commission...
...that genocide is an inaccurate charge in view of the fact that the population of South Vietnam has, despite all war-related deaths, grown by 2 million since the early 60s...
...328 okay, but what about influential advisers on the White House staff like Rostow, Bundy, or Kissinger, who are invariably mentioned as candidates for trial and yet possessed no formal "line" authority in the chain of command...
...The invocation of that deadly term by critics of the war is a form of rhetorical overkill more likely to prevent than to encourage a real facing up to what the United States has done in Vietnam...
...What about senators, including Senator Fulbright and leading doves now running for President as antiwar spokesmen, who voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1965...
...When it comes to the actual commission of crimes like Calley's, let the perpetrators be judged as he was by military courts...
...Below appears a comment by an editor of DISSENT giving his opinion on this matter...
...We expect to open our pages on this topic during the coming months to a range of views from among our contributors and readers —ED...
...Where would we stop...
...Bad as this is, and I think it suggests the necessity for new international laws restricting the use of aerial and perhaps artillery bombardments in war, it is not really genocide...
...Army Field Manual...
...I thought then, and still think, that the first charge was a mistake, a flagrant imposition of victor's justice even when invoked against the Nazis...
...And this was even more clearly the case in the Tokyo trials...
...And, of course, there were other My Lais...
...Presidents, secretaries of defense, the joint chiefs, Generals Westmoreland and Abrams— Vietnam Papers The sensational Vietnam Papers are being pub lisped just as we go to press...
...I am one of the middle-aged described by Peter Gay in his Introduction to Karl Bracher's The German Dictatorship who "rage at the facile abuse of the terrible words of the 1940's that disfigure so much of our discourse today...
...Would it not also have to investigate the war crimes committed by North Vietnam, at Hue for instance during the Tet offensive, even if not those of the Vietcong and the ARVN forcesbecause they are participants in a civil war...
...This, it could be argued, comes close to genocide: the total destruction of a population...
...Thus the Yameshita precedent is clearly applicable— more justly so indeed than it was to General Yameshita—to Presidents Johnson and Nixon, their secretaries of defense, joint chiefs of staff, and commanding generals in the field...
...Army's code up to at the very least Major-General Koster, against whom the army dropped charges although he was in a helicopter above My Lai at the time of the massacre...
...What about the international crime of genocide...
...As one descends the chain of command, general policies become translated into ever-more specific orders, as is always the case in large bureaucracies, until one reaches a Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai who led his men in actually carrying out orders he had received from Captain Medina...
...What about South Africa and Sharpeville where the UN has been urged to take stands under statutes derived from the Nuremberg tribunals governing "human rights...
...A piddling legal question, to be sure, when everyone knows that their advice was crucial to involving us and keeping us involved in Southeast Asia...
...But the Vice-Presidency is, as we all know, largely a ceremonial and public-relations office without any real authority...
...Not because everyone, and therefore no one in particular, is guilty—a proposition on which both the outraged patriots who have tried to make a martyr out of Calley and those radicals who call the war "genocidal" and equate the United States with Hitler's Germany are in essential agreement...
...But the report—impending and actual— of a prestigious commission documenting war crimes as fully as possible should make it harder for the Army to pursue this policy...
...forces in Southeast Asia in six years, yet that is a civil war presumably outside UN jurisdiction...
...Will we really come to terms with Vietnam by opening this Pandora's box...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
