Strong And Wrong

"During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current President, the Vice President and me,could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoidedgoing, too. But instead he said, 'Send me.'

"When they sent those Swift Boats up the river in Vietnam... John Kerry said, 'Send me.'

"And then when America needed to extricate itself from that misbegotten and disastrous war, Kerrydonned his uniform once again, and said, 'Send me'; and he led veterans to an encampment on the WashingtonMall, where, in defiance of the Nixon Justice Department, they conducted the most stirring and effective ofthe protests, that forced an end to the war.

"And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations withVietnam...John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"

So spoke President Clinton at the Democratic Convention--except that he did not deliver the third paragraphabout Kerry's protest; I made that up. The speech cries out for the inclusion of Kerry's glorious moment ofantiwar leadership; and its absence is as palpable as one of those erasures from photographs of high Sovietofficials after Stalin had sent them to the gulag. Clinton's message was plain.

Military courage in war is honored; civil courage in opposing a disastrous war is not honored. Even thirtyyears later, it cannot be mentioned by a former President who himself opposed the Vietnam War. The politicalrule, as Clinton once put it in one of the few pithy things he has ever said, "We [Democrats] have got tobe strong.... When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebodywho's weak and right."

And now the United States is engaged in a war fully as wrong as the one in Vietnam. The boiling core ofAmerican politics today is the war in Iraq and all its horrors: the continuing air strikes on populatedcities; the dogs loosed by American guards on naked, bound Iraqi prisoners; the kidnappings and thebeheadings; the American casualties nearing a thousand; the 10,000 or more Iraqi casualties; the occupationhidden behind the mask of an entirely fictitious Iraqi "sovereignty"; the growing scrapheap ofdiscredited justifications for the war. But little of that is mentioned these days by the Democrats. The greatmajority of Democratic voters, according to polls, ardently oppose the war, yet by embracing the candidacy ofJohn Kerry, who voted for the Congressional resolution authorizing the war and now wants to increase thenumber of American troops in Iraq, the party has made what appears to be a tactical decision to hide itsfaith.

The strong and wrong position won out in the Democratic Party when its voters chose Kerry over Howard Deanin the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. An antiwar party rallied around a prowar candidate. Theresult has been one of the most peculiar political atmospheres within a party in recent memory. The Democratsare united but have concealed the cause that unites them. The party champions free speech that it does notpractice.

As a Dennis Kucinich delegate at the convention said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!,"Peace" is "off-message." A haze of vagueness and generality hangs over partypronouncements. In his convention speech, President Carter, who is on record opposing the war, spoke against"pre-emptive war" but did not specify which pre-emptive war he had in mind. Al Gore, who has beenwonderfully eloquent in his opposition to the war, was tame for the occasion. "Regardless of your opinionat the beginning of this war," he said, "isn't it now abundantly obvious that the way this war hasbeen managed by the Administration has gotten us into very serious trouble?"

What of the antiwar sentiment that is still in truth at the heart of most Democrats' anger? It has beendisplaced downward and outward, into the outlying precincts of American politics. The political class as awhole has proved incapable of taking responsibility for the future of the nation, and the education of theAmerican public has been left to those without hope of office. Like a balloon that squeezed at the top expandsat the base, opposition to the war increases the farther you get from John Kerry. Carter and Gore can expressa little more of it. Howard Dean, who infused the party with its now-muffled antiwar passion, can express morestill. Representative Kucinich, a full-throated peace candidate, has endorsed Kerry and has kind words to sayabout him but holds fast to his antiwar position. On the Internet, Tomdispatch.com, AlterNet.org,commondreams.org, antiwar.com, MoveOn.org and many others are buzzing and bubbling with honest and inspiredreporting and commentary. Michael Moore is packing audiences into 2,000 theaters to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

I know, I know: It's essential to remove George W. Bush from the White House, and Kerry is the instrumentat hand. I fully share this sentiment. But I am not running for anything, and my job is not to carry water forany party but to stand as far apart from the magnetic field of power as I can and tell the truth as I see it.And it's not too early to worry about the dangers posed by the Democrats' strategy. In the first place, theyhave staked their future and the country's on a political calculation, but it may be wrong. By suffocatingtheir own passion, they may lose the energy that has brought them this far. They have confronted Bush's policyof denial with a politics of avoidance. Bush is adamant in error; they are feeble in dedication to truth.

If strong and wrong is really the winning formula, Bush may be the public's choice. In the second place, ifKerry does win, he will inherit the war wedded to a potentially disastrous strategy. If he tries to changecourse, Republicans -- and hawkish Democrats (Senator Joe Lieberman has just joined in a revival of theCommittee on the Present Danger) -- will not fail to remind him of his commitment to stay the course and renewthe charge of flip-flopping. But the course, as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni has commented, may take the countryover Niagara Falls. Then Kerry may wish that he and his admirers at this year's convention had thought toplace a higher value on his service to his country when he opposed the Vietnam War.

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author, mostrecently, of A Holein the World, a compilation of his "Letter From Ground Zero" columns, and of TheUnconquerable World (just out in paperback). Courtesy, Tomdispatch.com,a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from TomEngelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of TheEnd of Victory Culture and TheLast Days of Publishing. This article will appear in the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

Copyright C2004 Jonathan Schell