From Barry Goldwater, on Vietnam
This is from an interview with Barry Goldwater conducted by either the Army Times or Stars and Stripes, I forget which. It made such a powerful impression on me that I remember it word-for-word. I can’t link to the article because it dates to pre-internet days. I am 100% confident that I am not in any way mis-representing what he said: I suspect someone who has a Lexis-Nexis account can find the article. It is from one of the two publications I mentioned, between January 1986 and October 1987.
The interviewer asked him how the Vietnam War might have gone differently, had he been elected in 1964. His answer:
“I would have gotten every B52 I could get my hands on, and flown them all over North Vietnam. They would have dropped leaflets that said, ‘We’ll be back in 3 days.’ They would also have said the next thing they dropped would not have been leaflets.
If they didn’t quit the war, I would have made a damned swamp out of North Vietnam. I mean that: I would rather have killed 2 or 3 million North Vietnamese than the fifty thousand American boys we lost.“
[UPDATE] The irony of course, is that he ended up getting a grim two-fer: 50,000 American deaths and 3 million Vietnamese.
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The modern right, which in some respects can be traced back to Goldwater, has violence as its life blood. Guns, war, torture, the American military..all good, and sometimes glorified. There are some Catholic bloggers today who call themselves pro-life and yet who link with approval to a person called Robert Stacy McCain, who is most famous for calling for mass murder of the Palestinians, in the rhetorical style of Goldwater above.
Exactly. MM. Billmon has described certain segments of the right (the one represented by, say, the Little Green Footballs crowd) as “genocide junkies,” which is about right.
That any Catholic could echo this kind of thinking is a scandal.
But calling for the mass murder of the Palestinians is a prudential judgment, and people of good faith and disagree about its merits.
As for Goldwater’s comment, a military strategy can never achieve political ends. It just never happens. The means (military) are not proportionate to the end (political).
We are seeing the truth of this right now in Iraq. We won the military struggle a long time ago. The only reason we remain in the country is because political reconciliation has not been achieved.
Goldwater was a Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force. He spoke the military talk. But the fact that the military speaks this way is indicative of the Achilles Heel of U.S. national security policy.
This is nothing more than policy by testosterone, just like the modern Right’s modern drumbeat for torture.
And drumbeat for war, Mickey.
I read a lot of horse manure from right-wing commentators about how war makes men of boys, the country needs a good war to keep our men tough, etc.
A good friend of mine told me a story once of calling in an airstrike on a bunch of NVA regulars in a treeline about 150 yards away.
He spent the next few minutes (minutes he wishes desperately he could forget) listening to the consequences when napalm incinerates human beings – men about his age, just as frightened as he was, who were loved by their mothers just as much – screaming their lungs out as they were incinerated. The ones who were caught in the main blasts died pretty quickly, as they inhaled burning napalm which destroyed their lungs and suffocated them. The ones who were on the edge took long, agonizing, screaming minutes to expire.
Killing people didn’t make him feel manly or heroic or powerful. He says the way he felt that day gave him a glimpse of what being in hell might feel like.
This does remind us of one other useful point, one that Goldwater would agree with. You should never, ever, fight a war if you are not first determined to win. It would be greatly of benefit if our national leadership would give consideration of what will be required for victory, in terms of what we must sacrifice, and what we must destroy, BEFORE going to war.
I once had a terrifying series of conversations with some mid-level Congressional staffers about use of force and military policy. These were mostly staffers of Democrats, but included at least one Republican staffer. All of them thought of use of force in purely domestic political terms. None of them were capable of thinking of it from a moral point of view, none of them were capable of thinking from the point of military strategy, and none were able to grasp the international political and propaganda side of the equation. All they could think of was things like the number of casualties before domestic opinion would turn against something.
I will never forget the lessons I learned that week.
Well, I suppose it’s a good thing he lost the election, huh?
What’s the point of this post? To show a dead man in a bad light? That you can’t bomb people into surrendering? To get a bunch of chin-stroking, nodding amens from the amen corner? Or to provoke the usual suspects to bloviate, as they do above, about “the right” and their unholy thirst for human blood?
GKC – The point is to show where the mindless militaristic nationalism that infects the American Right leads: namely, to millions of dead people.