The Immorality of American Wars: Vietnam

I cannot recommend highly enough the fantastic Nick Turse article about Vietnamese amputees at Asia Times Online. Turse allows these two amputees, Nguyen Van Tu and Pham Van Chap, to tell their stories of life as amputees. Both had a leg torn off by the Americans or South Vietnamese in the war.

Pham Van Chap asks a basic question of American readers: "Americans caused many losses and much suffering for the Vietnamese during the war, do Americans now feel remorse?"

Turse writes:

I wish I could answer "yes". Instead, I tell him that most Americans are totally ignorant of the pain of the Vietnamese people, and then I think to myself, as I glance at the ample pile of tiny, local potatoes on his floor, about widespread American indifference to civilians killed, maimed, or suffering in other ways in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Precisely. Americans don't care. I don't think they ever did. Just like we don't care today about what happens to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the fundamental immorality of modern American war. It is one thing to not care about the wounded of your enemies. No one expected us to worry about the wounded of Nazi Germany. They were our enemy. Of course, geopolitical concerns led us to care an awful lot about reconstructing Germany, but that's an issue for another day.

Beginning in the Cold War though, we supposedly fought wars around the world to help the people we were fighting for. Central America, Vietnam, Korea, endless CIA operations around the world. In name at least, these were about protecting the people from some sort of oppression. Yet, not only did we promote oppressive dictatorships on our own, but we showed no interest at all in how our wars affected average people.

One might argue that is not the job of a nation at war. OK, perhaps. But what about when that war is over? Don't we have some kind of obligation to the people we were fighting for? Shouldn't we at least provide them prosthetic legs or arms? Help them eat?

But no, we don't care. Most war supporters sit at home and see the wars through the eyes of America kicking ass. The people on the ground aren't people, they are video game people. The U.S. government is playing a giant video game for them and they love watching it. They don't care any more about an Iraqi, Vietnamese, or Salvadoran than they do about the nameless characters they blew away on their video games.

Nothing is going to change in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we win these wars, if we can win such conflicts, does anyone really think there will be the slightest interest in reconstruction? The tiniest amount of money to putting people's lives back together again?

I sure don't believe we will. And that cuts to the fundamental immorality of American wars since 1945.

Let me close by quoting Turse again:

I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something of his country's torture and torment during the war. I wish I could tell him that most Americans care. I wish I could tell him that Americans feel true remorse for the terror visited upon the Vietnamese in their name, or that an apology is forthcoming and reparations on their way. But then I'd be lying.