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| 2004 Election and the Vietnam War Syndrome | This year's presidential election is historic because it will help determine whether the United States will break with the destructive legacy of the so-called 'Vietnam Syndrome'. This syndrome basically maintains that sustained American military action abroad is ethically wrong and inherently doomed to fail because the United States has no business interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries. US military action abroad since the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s has often facilitated left-wing domestic protest movements. | |
| In some ways, the emergence of an 'anti-war' protest movement is an almost inevitable by-product of the Bush Administration's resolve to take military action abroad following the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The really substantial development however, has been that the issue of sustained American military action abroad is becoming the most prominent fault line between President George W Bush and his probable Democrat challenger, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Because President Bush has already 'laid his cards on the table' by committing American troops abroad, Senator Kerry's anti-war stance and political background requires scrutiny because his political career was launched and in part shaped by his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Therefore, Kerry's election to the presidency will help perpetuate the 'Vietnam Syndrome', despite the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire. | |
| The Making of John Kerry | Any political biography of a future President Kerry would probably commence with his impassioned and eloquent testimony in April 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations in which he called for an American withdrawal from South Vietnam. He made his plea from the perspective of a decorated war hero who had seen the carnage of war and the futility of sacrificing further American lives in pursuit of a lost war. The publicity that Kerry gained from his testimony helped propel him to the forefront of a burgeoning 'anti-war movement' and to forge a new political movement amongst 'anti-war' American Vietnam War veterans. The political contacts that Kerry established from this movement provided a support base that helped launch his political career. This led to his election to the Senate in 1984 and make his current run for the White House (his 1992 run for the Democrat presidential nomination fizzled). | |
| Due to the importance that his opposition to the Vietnam War has played in forging Senator Kerry's political career, the validity of the assumptions which he made during his 1971 Senate testimony require examination, particularly because they have a contemporary resonance. In calling for an end to the war, John Kerry was essentially calling for the United States to immediately withdraw from South Vietnam, regardless of the probable adverse consequences for its people who were vulnerable to a communist takeover. The Nixon Administration had committed itself in July 1969 to withdrawing American troops from South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972 a policy of 'Vietnamization' was implemented in which allied troops were withdrawn at a pace which would enable the South Vietnamese army (which was still undertaking the bulk of the fighting) to successfully stand alone after the remaining allied troops had withdrawn. | |
| The dynamics of American domestic politics at the time of John Kerry's 1971 testimony were such that it was near impossible for the Nixon Administration to maintain a troop commitment in South Vietnam beyond its first term, which was due to end in early 1973. Therefore in calling for an end 'to the war' critics of the Nixon Administration often obscured the fact that it had already commenced a policy of withdrawal and that a premature departure from Vietnam could only endanger its people. The Vietnam War protest period of the late 1960s and early 1970s has been mythologized as a time of idealism. However, it was President Nixon and his National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger who were the true idealists because they refused to unilaterally abandon the peoples of Indo-China to communist totalitarianism. | |
| Indeed, when the United States finally withdrew its troops from South Vietnam in early 1973, the military balance was such that, had promised American military aid South Vietnam been delivered to that country, it undoubtedly would have consolidated its military advantage and survived. The American Congress' action in blocking military aid was due to both the outbreak of the Watergate scandal in 1973 and the adverse political climate that the anti-war protest movement had helped to create. The communist conquest of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1975 inflicted immense suffering on the peoples of those countries (particularly Cambodia where over two million people lost their lives in less than four years). | |
| Consequences for the 2004 Election | For Senator Kerry to have the morality to stand for and assume the office of president, he should at least acknowledge or explain why opponents of American involvement in Indo-China such as himself ignored the brutal nature of the communist movement in that region and subsequently helped precipitate their victory by opposing continued military aid following the final withdrawal of American troops in 1973. These questions are all the more pertinent given Senator Kerry's reluctance to support a sustained American military commitment to Iraq and military action against rogue states. This position, similar to his stance concerning the Vietnam War, ultimately benefits the forces of despotism and repression. | |