Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, introducing Arnold R. Isaacs.
You might remember, I interviewed him back just a few months ago, earlier this year, about Islamophobia, a great piece that he'd written for Tom Dispatch.
And here's another one that he wrote for Tom Dispatch, which we've reprinted at Antiwar.com.
Misremembering Vietnam.
And I will have you know that he is the author of the books Without Honor, Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Ouch.
And Vietnam Shadows, The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy.
And as Tom explains in his introduction here, Arnold R. Isaacs covered the Vietnam War for the Baltimore Sun between June 1972 and the final defeat of the South Vietnamese government in April of 1975.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Okay.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Well, it's an interesting subject that brought up the larger subject of the Vietnam War, and that is this 50th Vietnam War commemoration, or 50th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam War.
And, well, as you have it here, and as has been, you know, somewhat controversial for the past couple of years here, I guess.
They got a lot of errors of commission and omission in there, and they've motivated a lot of people like yourself who remember what really happened there to push hard, to lobby, to get them to correct it.
That's the, I guess, it's the website.
Is it a museum or something, too, or it's just the website itself?
The other aspects of the commemoration are sort of traveling exhibitions of one sort or another.
They have an oral history program.
They publicize events honoring veterans, that kind of thing.
I'm not sure if they actually have a sort of a physical, they do have these exhibitions, but I'm not sure whether they're theirs or whether they just publicize exhibitions that other people put on.
I've concentrated on the historical material on the website.
Well, and of course, I mean, because this is, as they put it, the official history, as they say.
But, you know, the problem with it is that the official history of the Vietnam War makes the American government look pretty bad.
So they have a huge interest in trying to spin probably pretty much every facet of the thing, right?
I mean, they don't want to call it Vietnam War, that big, horrible thing we should have never done.
You know, it has to be dressed up as an attempted noble adventure of some kind, right?
Well, you wouldn't expect them to advertise it as a horrible example.
But you should expect them to be clear and accurate about the facts.
And to give them credit, they've corrected some mistakes.
There was one little flurry of corrections about four or five years ago, because this site has been up for quite a long time.
But then they stopped, and then they did make a few corrections just within the last couple of weeks.
And as a direct result, I'm not assuming this, this was made explicit to me.
As a direct result of my phone call when I told them I was writing another piece about it.
So they have done, they have tried to make some corrections.
The head of the history branch appeared before the American Historical Association.
In January of 2016, so that's nearly three years ago.
And acknowledged that it needs to be more balanced and more historically accurate.
And said at that time that they prepared a new timeline and they were going to, that would be posted.
But it hasn't happened.
And a year ago, when I, I did an earlier essay for a different publication, different website on this.
And a year ago, I was told that the new website should, was supposed to be ready by the end of 2017.
That is almost a year ago now.
And still nothing had happened.
So when I called them, I guess toward the end of October, they've now changed a few more items.
But they haven't put up the new timeline or the new website.
I think there is some effort within the organization to make the record a little bit less twisted.
But it's pretty skimpy.
Well, and it sounds like it's going to take, you know, continued pressure by yourself and others.
To really make it happen and see it through.
One can only imagine kind of the politics within the organization there, within the agency or the department.
Trying to make it seem the way they want as best they can.
But so, and so that's its own story and it is an important one.
But, you know, it's also a great excuse, in a sense, for you to really remind us of the real history of the Vietnam War.
Which is the kind of thing, you know, most, well, many of the important, you know, turning points or signposts or, you know, major events of the war.
Are exactly the kinds of things that they would prefer to not mention at all.
Like, as you say here at the beginning, they just omitted.
Is that correct?
They just completely omitted the My Lai Massacre?
And for that matter, the Tonkin Gulf supposed battle that justified the resolution that expanded the war?
Now, this was in that first wave of corrections, which had nothing to do with anything I was doing.
I don't think it's right that they had no entry on them at all.
I think there was one, but it was very, on both My Lai and Tonkin Gulf.
But they were very elliptical, I guess would be the word.
You know, the My Lai Massacre, they didn't use, and still don't, even the new entry doesn't use the word massacre.
But it gave no particulars.
It didn't really describe what the truth, which was that an American unit stormed into this village and in cold blood murdered probably about 500 or something over 500 civilians, including quite a few women and children.
And in circumstances where they were clearly not under fire, there was clearly no military reason for them to be using their weapons.
And none of that was in the entry.
It's the new entry, and that has been up for four or five years now.
It gives more detail and does kind of describe the true nature of the event.
And the Tonkin Gulf, similarly, I think there was an earlier entry which glossed over the fact that this gets, as a lot of these things do, the facts themselves get a little granular and sound kind of abstruse.
But broadly speaking, that the circumstances of the naval engagement off the coast of North Vietnam were seriously misrepresented by the Johnson administration as a pretext for starting for the first American airstrikes on North Vietnam.
This is in the summer of 1964.
And the entry, the original entry didn't really clear up those misconceptions.
The new entry is somewhat more straightforward.
So they have made some effort.
I didn't mean to suggest that there's no effort or that nobody there is trying to make the record a little bit better.
But it's still pretty halting and very slow.
The part of it that is puzzling is if they've had this new timeline ready to go, as I understand it, for more than three years, why it's not up and whether it is in fact just complications with the contracting and the technical process or whether there's some deliberate foot dragging.
I mean, I have no, you know, I don't know what the motivations are and I can't really speculate on that.
Yeah.
Well, in effect, they sure are taking their time.
And so, but now you did elaborate a little bit there about My Lai.
I always say My Lai because that's how it's spelled.
But I know it's not.
It's My Lai.
But then so the Tonkin Gulf.
Can we talk about that for a minute?
Because I have a couple of interesting anecdotes.
I'd like to just bounce off you and see what you think of them.
The first one is from Daniel Ellsberg in his book, Secrets.
The whole chapter one is about his first day on the job as deputy special assistant secretary, something of defense there at the Pentagon.
And he basically sits down at his desk and the teletype starts reading off the Gulf of Tonkin attack.
And he's sitting there reading his first day on the new job.
And he said it was clear that the second attack, that they figured it out, that it was a mistake, that the rookie sonar man was listening to his own propeller.
And the captain decided, geez, we've dodged 14 torpedoes or something.
We're doing good.
How about we wake up the real sonar man and see what's going on here?
And he listened and said, no, that's just our own propeller, dum-dum.
And then that was it.
And they knew.
And they sent the message to the Pentagon and to the White House saying that, no, it was a mistake.
And so part of that, I'm sorry, because there's a few different important topics here.
Part of that is Daniel Ellsberg says that before he leaked the Pentagon papers, which reveal the truth here, that he estimated that there must have been 40,000 people inside the U.S. government who knew that the second attack had not taken place and that the government had known that the second attack had not taken place before LBJ went out there and asked for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
So that to me is just really incredible and important for people to understand the power of government secrecy contracts to really hold for that long because he didn't release the data until what, eight years later or something.
And then also now Gareth Porter says that LBJ didn't know that McNamara knew, but he kept it secret from LBJ and LBJ himself was lied to and did believe in the second Gulf of Tonkin attack.
So now I'm going to be quiet and let you say things about that.
Well, to go, there's the other big sort of misrepresentation about Tonkin was the first attack, which was announced as an attack in international waters on a U.S. naval vessel that was legally cruising in international waters.
And they left out the fact that those, there were two destroyers in this task force that it was supporting South Vietnamese commando landings on the coast of North Vietnam.
They'd been inside North Vietnamese waters repeatedly over the previous days.
And this was not innocent passage.
When the torpedo boat finally tracked or pursued them, I guess they did get beyond the territorial waters, but it was not the innocent passage.
Nothing even remotely resembling the innocent passage that the American government declared it was and announced it was.
As to who knew what when about the second attack, I must confess I can't speak with detailed knowledge about that.
It does seem pretty clear that plenty of people in the American government knew about that.
Well ahead of the declaration or the discussion in Congress about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
And so it was, to what extent this was conscious lying and to what extent it was an information gap at the top levels of the government, I guess that's still not entirely clear.
It's pretty clear, but I don't know any more about that than you do or other readers of Ellsberg's book do.
Well, I know Ellsberg says looking back on it, he can't understand how he didn't just break ranks immediately and go straight to the newspapers and tell the truth.
He could have saved millions of lives.
And in fact, like in one interview with me, he even kind of started crying a little bit, I think, about how guilty he still feels, even though he's the one who ended that war with that leak, more or less, of the Pentagon Papers.
To him, he should have done it 10 years before and he'll never forgive himself for not having done it earlier, you know, kind of thing, which is sad in a way.
But it goes to show, though, there's a lesson for other government employees that why be one of the 40,000 to sit on that lie?
Like, what are you going to have to do?
Go to prison for a little while for telling the truth to the American people?
So what?
You know, you got privates out there, 18-year-olds getting killed.
So if they're brave enough to do that, then you should be brave enough to go to prison to tell the truth to the people about what's really going on, you know?
And that's what Ellsberg says.
I'm just parroting him.
Yeah.
But that seems important.
Well, I don't know that foregone conclusion that the war wouldn't have happened even if the Tonkin Gulf story had broken earlier or that the resolution had not been passed.
Right.
There's some other pretext would have come along or some other reason would have come along for starting the air war, which is what the Tonkin Gulf incident did.
And I think it's kind of a stretch to think that that would not have happened if the Tonkin Gulf fallacy had been exposed.
Well, I don't think he ever said like, oh, and then everything would have been different as much as just he should have done everything he could at the time.
I can understand that.
But to think that those lives that were lost would not have been lost, which is kind of what I took it to mean.
I mean, he does.
Yeah, he actually does really kind of put that on himself.
In fact, it's you know, I agree with you that he's being unfair to himself really there.
All right.
So you talk about in here, too, that they just kind of omit the anti-war movement in America and just what.
And, you know, look, I was born in 76.
So I miss this whole thing.
And there are a lot of people listening to this interview who are you know, who will listen to this, who were born a lot later after me, where this is almost kind of ancient history to them.
But this is huge.
Right.
How do you see, you know, the rifts in American society in the 1960s over this war?
Well, there are two sort of separate questions there.
I mean, one.
If I suppose that you could make an argument, I don't I think it's an invalid argument, but you could make it that the.
Division in the uprising at home was a separate history from the history of what was going on in Vietnam, and they're looking at this site was and is explicitly.
So primarily to tell the story of the veterans.
So I guess they could argue that the peace movement as a whole was a separate piece of history and not within the purview of this commemoration.
That breaks down more obviously to me anyway, in that they until just recently, they left out the veterans who protested the war.
And one of the.
The.
More, you know, more searing moments of the whole protest movement movement was in the spring in April 1971, when hundreds of veterans gathered and camped out on the mall in Washington for a week and paraded in front of the U.S. Capitol and threw away their decorations, threw away their medals and their ribbons.
And John Kerry, who was a Navy officer in Vietnam, went and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wearing his Navy fatigues and with his ribbons on his shirt above his pocket.
I think this was before they threw him away and said to the committee, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Now, that was definitely part of the veterans experience.
Anti-war veterans were.
I think almost anybody would who lived through that would agree were a minority among veterans.
Most veterans did not take that point of view, but a significant number did.
And it's certainly part of the story.
Now, they have put that in the in the timeline, as I say, just within the last less than a month.
And as I understood, there's a direct result of my contacting them saying that I was going to post this piece.
So it is there now.
But for five or six years, however long that website has been up, it wasn't.
So even if you accept that they wanted to confine their history to what's relevant and part of the veterans story, it's still incomplete.
And the wider I mean, I think that the wider theme of the division and the debate in the United States certainly needs to be in the history of the war, too.
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Well, and it wasn't all just in a vacuum, too, right?
I mean, there were all kinds of positive and negative lessons learned from this about, well, the Vietnam syndrome after this disaster of a war meant that the American people didn't really have the spirit as Washington, D.C. saw it to continue to contain communism aggressively.
And so Vietnam itself then also served as a perverse inspiration for people like Walter Slocum and Zbigniew Brzezinski to say, you know what?
How about instead of containing them, let's see if we can give the Soviets their own Vietnam and lure them into a giant, massive, no-win quagmire trap that divides the society back home, too, and breaks the bank and destabilizes the culture and all of these things and looked at all of the worst effects of the Vietnam War on American society and said, let's see if we can get the Soviets to do that to themselves in Afghanistan.
Of course, we're doing that to ourselves in Afghanistan again right now, but still, so, you know.
And that was even how they said it then, like, even before they started supporting the Mujahideen, let's give them their own Vietnam.
That was the cliche, you know?
That's true.
It wouldn't have happened without, the American calculation was a kind of a marginal side issue.
The Soviet probably would have gone ahead and invaded Afghanistan in 1989.
79.
Whatever Brzezinski did or didn't do or said or didn't say.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
In fact, I wrote that in my book about how the current dictator did a really lousy job.
And the first thing the KGB did was murder him and replace him when they invaded.
So they had their own reasons.
Sakharov said, and Eric Margulies and others said, they certainly had their own reasons.
But at the same time, it sort of doesn't matter, right?
Like, the same point is still, even if Brzezinski's and their effort wasn't what tipped the scale and got the Soviets to invade, it still goes to show their motive may be narrow-sided, but farsighted.
You know what I mean?
I mean, yeah, narrow, but long in their view.
You know, I guess what I think is more meaningful the way the government, the U.S. government, not only the U.S. government, but a big, big segment of the U.S. public reacted to the memory of Vietnam.
And that was the whole support the troops phenomenon.
And they have, quite successfully, for a generation now, the leaders of this country, the military leaders and the political leaders and veterans organizations and many other public bodies and elements within the public have managed to equate support the troops with support the policy which is completely illogical.
You know, I mean, there's no conflict between respecting and honoring the veterans who fought the Vietnam War and their sacrifice and their bravery and what they went through was real and their hardships were real.
The extent to which they were disrespected after they came home, it's exaggerated.
But it did exist.
But I don't think to the degree that the folklore has it.
But specifically, I think the Pentagon site is a good illustration of this.
There's a kind of a corollary or a variant of support the troops which is honor the veterans and they turn that into criticizing the war is disrespecting the veterans.
There's nothing logical about that.
The fact that the war was a mistake and badly executed and badly commanded and involved a lot of pretty horrendous misdeeds and missteps by the American forces doesn't mean that you can hold that view and still have every respect for the soldiers who didn't make the policy but were the ones for that matter, people who were skeptical but held their tongue out of this perverse respect for the infantry are actually partially responsible.
They're betraying the troops by allowing the likes of LBJ and Nixon and their employees to send these troops off to fight in a war that they should not be fighting.
In America, the people are sovereign and the people are supposed to tell the government to stop doing things when it's doing the wrong thing.
Not sit there and say, I don't want to hurt the feelings of the guy who's carrying out the policy.
That's crazy.
I mean, that basically seeds the entire premise of the American system away.
Well, I agree.
I think that the support the troops was a kind of a post-Vietnam phenomenon explicitly.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people who held their tongue during Vietnam too because not that they were trying to live down the whole spit on the Vietnam veterans yet, but still, right?
Actually, yes, I mean, that was sort of implied and there certainly was a thread in the justifications for the war that included honoring the guys who were fighting it and not disrespecting the guys who were fighting it.
The clearest case of that, I think, was that all through most of the Nixon administration, the first thing they always talked about was getting our prisoners back.
And that we had to stay the course in Vietnam to get the prisoners of war back from North Vietnam.
And somebody wrote, I'm blanking out on who said this and I wish I could give them credit, but somebody wrote that it was, if you only listen to their rhetoric, you would think that the North Vietnamese came over to Hawaii or California somewhere and kidnapped 400 American pilots and took them back to Vietnam and put them in prison camps and that that's why we're fighting there.
Because they could have left out the fact that those POWs were captured fighting this war.
Right.
Yeah, I just heard the other day about, don't you know that the Houthis have been launching rockets at Saudi Arabia since 2016?
Oh, is that how the war started?
Oh, okay.
And when?
Now, two more things here real quick before we gotta go.
You do a great job of explaining here how they get it wrong, but it's insightful for the rest of us too, about really the characterization of the way that the war started with the North-South split, which they get exactly wrong, it seems like, according to the way you quote them here.
And then also the Christmas bombing and the mythology of this massive escalation of air power being behind what finally brought the NVA to the table to agree to American terms when that, in fact, is not true either.
And both of those seem so important.
And not only important, but this is not, this is way more widespread than just on this one site.
The proposition, the first proposition is that the Geneva Agreement of 1954, which ended the war against the French, divided Vietnam into, as the site says, a communist state in the North and an anti-communist state in the South, and that the events that unfolded from there on, from then on, were the result of that division.
And the other mythology is that the Christmas bombing forced the North Vietnamese to sign, which was Christmas of December of 1972, they actually stopped bombing on Christmas Day, but it got that tag anyway, that it forced the North Vietnamese to sign a peace agreement the following month.
Both of those are diametrically opposed to the truth, but they've become part of a standard story that a lot of people tell about the war.
Geneva explicitly, the division of North, it did divide, set up a line between North and South Vietnam, but it was a temporary truce line.
French forces and the pro-French Vietnamese were supposed to regroup on the South side of the line and the Viet Minh forces were supposed to regroup on the North side of the line.
And it was explicitly declared in the agreement that this was not a territorial or a political boundary or territorial division, it was a temporary demarcation line just for the purposes of administering the truth.
And that it reaffirmed that Vietnam was one country.
So that the, then the communist side, and there was supposed to be an election in two more years for a government to rule over a unified Vietnam.
That election was never held.
The U.S., which did not sign the Geneva agreement and the South Vietnamese, the government that came to power in South Vietnam after the French left, did not sign the agreement and they didn't honor this provision for an election.
So that, and that's what generated the new war, which the communist side regarded and proclaimed and engraved all through the war as a war for to reunite an illegally divided country.
You could make arguments about what was foreign aggression and what was not, but the Geneva agreement didn't cause that.
And similarly, the idea that the Christmas bombing forced the North Vietnamese to...
Well actually, wait, wait.
Hold the Christmas bombing thing for a second there.
Just on the beginning of the war, you know, a lot of this is just kind of terminology and categorization which are subjective and I thought it was really instructive to understand the war in a new way where my reference when I was a kid, I remember my friend's mom really angrily because her friends from college had died in the war, you know, and just pounding her fist on the table and saying, it was a civil war and it was none of our damn business and we should have never been there and that's that and she didn't want to hear anything else about it kind of attitude.
And then, so that was to me the anti-war position, I guess.
I heard Chomsky say it this way but I didn't really understand it this way until I read Nick Terse that actually, no, there was nothing like a civil war.
America invaded and occupied South Vietnam and then waged a war against the people of South Vietnam which was aided by the government and the forces of the North.
But that, again, these are categorizations and you can see shades of gray and nuances and this and that but I think it's really valuable to go ahead and state it plainly that this was an invasion.
This was not, oh, we're just here to help this, you know, like there was popular sovereignty for the French and stalled Catholic regime in the South somehow under the slightest, you know, under any interpretation of reality there, right?
Well, I guess I would not accept that description.
There was a war, calling it a civil war gets into the, this question about whether there were one state or two.
There were two states that didn't come into being as a result of the Geneva Agreement but there were.
One side considered that that was a legal, that those were two legal sovereign states.
The other side considered that the other state was illegal, illegally established because it had not come to, the Geneva Agreement had not been carried out.
So there was, that was in dispute whether you were talking about a war within one country or a war that was within one state or a war that was to some extent a local insurgency but also heavily supported by a different country and that that was the sort of the ideological view that the Americans took at the time.
I think it's more ambiguous than what you were saying.
And then the Americans invaded and carried out a war against the South Vietnamese people.
South Vietnamese people, there were plenty of South Vietnamese people who did not want the Communists to win.
I think there were more who didn't want either side to win.
My, you know, I, my, the peace movement, I have never been able to identify wholeheartedly with the peace movement because I think they blind themselves to the nature of the Communist side.
I mean, I thought the Americans should not have intervened.
I think they should not have intervened.
And I wish they hadn't.
But that doesn't make that the other side sort of glorious heroes for freedom and liberty and all that sort of thing, which they were not.
Yeah, but I mean, they killed plenty of civilians and they waited for them to move away and they locked up and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they waited for them to move away and they Right, but there's a lot more to the story than that, which there wouldn't be much point going into all the details.
But you know, Sihanouk bears responsibility.
The Americans bear responsibility.
The Chinese bear responsibility.
A lot of different, Pierre Rouge had a lot of different parents, and the American War was one of them, but not the only one.
Yeah.
Well, I guess, so that's my point, though, is that I think it's okay to talk about any one of them without having to defend, like, you know, in a kind of built-in way, without having to disclaim that also other people did stuff, too.
But I'm just talking about, well, what was Nixon's role?
Because I'm an American, and that's the part that's interesting to me.
That's the part where accountability on this side, and truth, as you're talking about in this essay here, and in this interview, getting the story right is important for hopefully making better choices next time in this kind of thing.
So what all China had to do with the Khmer Rouge is less important for the real point here for us, right?
I'm a writer, and I guess I care about the meaning of words.
And if you're going to talk about the responsibility for a couple of million deaths, the rhetoric of the anti-war movement says the U.S. killed X million people in Indochina, and the U.S. and other actors killed a lot of people in Indochina, and all of them deserve blame for that.
None of them, in my opinion, represented a cause that was worth the brutality and the harm and the suffering that they inflicted.
So I react to the kind of one-sided and, in my opinion, inaccurate history that pretends that it was only the American actions that counted.
Well, okay.
I mean, I guess I can just say I agree with you in every sense, except, I guess, I don't really see too much of just whitewashing away other actors' responsibility.
I mean, like if I say George Bush's Iraq War II caused a million deaths, I mean, that's true.
And now that does not mean that U.S. Army infantry individually shot 1 million people.
That's not what that means, right?
It means that he launched a war that caused a civil war, and he hired the Bata Brigade, and he armed these groups and those groups, and they had huge incentives to fight over the future of power in that country.
And somewhere on the order of a million people died in a war that America started, a war that wasn't on before we invaded.
And so that is all his responsibility, because in essence, responsibility is a quality, not a quantity.
It doesn't have to add up to 100% perfectly, right?
George Bush can be responsible.
He's the one who pulled the trigger on that, but we all know Dick Cheney's plenty responsible, and we all know that the Bata Brigade and the Supreme Islamic Council is responsible, and that al-Qaeda in Iraq did all kinds of insane suicide bombings against civilians and who knows what.
But do we really have to say, listen, when I blame George Bush, I'm not acquitting Zarqawi.
You know what I mean?
It seems kind of like an unfair burden for an anti-war activist.
We all are carrying Jane Fonda around on our back all the time and have to disclaim something that none of us ever even really implied or said, you know?
I guess my answer to that would be that the story of the American involvement in Vietnam and the responsibility of Kennedy and Johnson—back to Eisenhower—and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon is, in my opinion, a more ambiguous story than the story in Iraq.
So— Well, that's a good point.
And I think it is less clear, I think it is less justifiable to say that Americans were responsible for three, four, five, or however many million deaths you want to account for the Indochina War.
Although I think— And there was, you know, the American part, there were fairly significant differences in the kind of the moral calculation and the ethical calculation in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia.
There were three different wars, different circumstances, different American decisions are different.
And I think, yeah, I guess I feel like people should recognize that.
Yeah.
No, that's true.
I mean, again, I agree with that totally.
And I think if someone is really being an adult and careful about it, that they would say that the American war there caused these deaths, you know, overall, in the larger sense, that of course doesn't, you know, mean that the North Vietnamese never killed any civilians or anything silly like that, right?
But I, you know, and I understand, you're right that—and this is before my time—but I believe you that there were a bunch of, like, really ridiculous leftist kooks participating in the marches who thought that Ho Chi Minh was some kind of hero or some ridiculous thing.
But I think, I mean, certainly in our era, you see a lot of—hopefully you see a lot of criticism of all of America's wars, and you see virtually no, you know, support for, like, if only Mullah Omar was here or, you know, some kind of thing, right?
We don't see Americans taking the side of America's government's enemies.
We just see Americans opposing our government's policies against those enemies for all kinds of reasons, like they shouldn't be our enemies, for example, that kind of thing.
I think that's true.
But I think that the nature of the protests in Vietnam was actually different.
I hear you.
In that respect.
And I think there was a lot more identification with the other side than there has been in the more recent wars.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
I mean, there's more appealing guys than Saddam Hussein or— In some ways, anyway, yeah, I could see that from his history that, yeah, he does make a more compelling character, and it was the whole Cold War and the whole right-left split and all that.
You don't have too much leftist support for right-wing reactionary Islamic conservatives and that kind of thing, you know.
Right.
Exactly.
All right.
Listen, it's been fascinating talking with you about this and reading this great article, and I learned a lot, and thank you.
Well, thanks for inviting me on the show.
I appreciate it.
Good to talk to you.
Okay.
All right, you guys, that is Arnold R. Isaacs, and he's at TomDispatch.com.
It's called Misremembering Vietnam, Making America's Wars Great Again, The Pentagon Whitewashes a Troubling Past.
And I want to read these books someday.
Without Honor, Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, and also Vietnam's Shadows, The War, Its Ghosts and Its Legacy.
And also, this is the one we discussed last time, From Troubled Lands, Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in Post-9-11 America.
His website is ArnoldIsaacs.net.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
