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Skeptic Ian Williams questions an earlier president.

What kind of Veteran?  Calley-type or Kerry-type?

by Ian Williams 

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com   Order his new book from Amazon.com, Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past.   See his Bio.  See his columns listed below.   IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com 

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

          UNITED NATIONS -- 25 August 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /   The new ad from the so-called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” may be doing Kerry a favor –  if he can bring himself to rise to the occasion. 

The SBVFT now accuse him of slandering all veterans because he said there were atrocities in Vietnam, after the previous one accused him of lying to get his medals.

Assiduous off-cable-channel reporters have shown that the veterans’ previous statements contradict contemporary written records, not to mention their own previous testimonies. 

The links between the “SBVFT” and the Bush campaign are being more obvious with each examination. 

Funders and organizers on the ads and performers in them, are all closely connected to the Republican Party and the Bush campaign, and more such links are being revealed daily.

That may in fact be why Bush has now declared that his contender served “admirably” in Vietnam and tried to call a truce on the ads. 

The SBVFT ads have tried Kerry’s chivalry to the breaking point, just as the evidence for Bush’s involvement in them is strengthening, and just as the question of what exactly George W. Bush did during the war is coming to the fore.

Hence the measured and totally hypocritical Presidential call for an end to all such ads before the ones questioning his service and his positions in the Vietnam years begin to cut too close to the bone.

After all, these partisan and prejudiced veterans in effect testify that Kerry was actually in Vietnam. 

Not even the most imaginative G.O.P. veteran has testified to seeing Bush there. 

Indeed, there is still an unclaimed reward put up by veterans in Alabama for anyone who can prove they saw the President serving on a National Guard base there between May 1972-73 – the missing year in his service record.

In his memoirs, Colin Powell spoke like a genuine veteran, “I can  never forgive a leadership that said, in effect:  These young men – poor, less educated, less privileged – are expendable (someone described them as ‘economic cannon fodder’), but the rest are too good to risk.” 

He added, inconveniently, “I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed … managed to wrangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units.  

Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.”

So  the new attack ad also presents an opportunity for Kerry to show some of the gung-ho audacity that he apparently displayed in Vietnam and respond aggressively to this latest ambush. 

The SBVFT have now got to the core of the issue. 

They, and the current President supported a war that killed some three million Vietnamese and 58,000 American troops: a war that was fought for the wrong reasons, in the wrong place and in the wrong way. And they still do.

Are these people saying that U.S. forces committed no atrocities? 

Because unlike the Weapons of Mass Destruction that President Bush thought existed in Iraq even as the evidence mounted that they did not, there is plenty of evidence of war crimes in Vietnam.  

All Kerry has to do is to recite the transcript of the trial of Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre that killed hundreds of civilians, and ask which veteran these Republicans identify with most closely: Lt. Calley, who was found guilty of murdering civilians, or helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his door gunner Lawrence Colburn, whom he ordered to shoot the GI’s if necessary to stop the killing at My Lai?

Thompson and Colburn took thirty years to get a medal for their genuine moral and physical courage in confronting Calley’s C Company when it was rampaging red in tooth and claw. 

Would the SBVFT rescind their medals?

There was plenty of evidence from contemporary trials, and only last year the Toledo Blade won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for its exposure of the murderous exploits of Tiger Company.

And then Kerry can bring it forward. 

He should ask – would these “Swift Boat veterans for Bush” prefer that the abuses of  Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib had been kept quiet? 

Do they condemn the brave soldiers in Iraq, who like Warrant Officer Thompson showed the special courage it takes to break the conditioned camaraderie of the military and invoke our common humanity and morality – not to mention American and International Law?

And then he can ask George W. Bush if he recognizes the similarities between the pointless waste of Vietnamese and American lives that he stayed out of in the sixties – and the current imbroglio he has got us into in Iraq.

Across the world, the military and political leadership of the United States achieved the rare feat of making the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese appear like angels – which they clearly weren’t. 

It took the United States’ moral reputation decades to begin to recover from the stain of a war in which it dropped more bombs on an undeveloped Third World country than were dropped in all of World War II. 

How long will it take the U.S. internally and internationally to recover from the blot on its reputation from the war in Iraq?

Kerry should get away from the self-defeating cult of the veteran, and return to his days of moral courage, when he saw that something was wrong, and broke with the pack to say so.

     Email Ian Williams:  IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

  Just Released: 

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past  

by Ian Williams

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

What kind of Veteran?  Calley-type or Kerry-type?  25 August 2004

Chavez Beating about the Bush...  18 August 2004

The War Records of Bush and Kerry...  12 August 2004

Where is Osama Bin Laden?  6 August 2004

Sudan, To Intervene – or not to Intervene?  27 July 2004

Mr. Sharon, Tear Down This Wall!  16 July 2004

William Safire – Warped, on Speed, or Just Running Mad Again?  13 July 2004

Bosnian U.N. Defender Locked Up  7 July 2004

The U.N., the U.S. & the I.C.C.  30 June 2004

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations  23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546  16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World?  9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC  2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot  12 May 2004     

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