Obama's Place In History: The Triumph Of Health Care Reform Or The Catastrophe Of A Senseless, Unwinnable War In Afghanistan?

I lived through the disastrous American invasion of Vietnam. I was a college student with a high enough draft number to not have to worry about going into the military until Vietcong soldiers had bases in Staten Island and were threatening to cross the Verrazano Narrows in dugout canoes from Camp Pouch-- there was no bridge back then-- into Bensonhurst. After college, having had enough sleepless nights wondering if tax dollars I spent were going towards the deaths of people in that unfortunate country, I moved abroad.

I returned almost seven years later, as Gerald Ford, someone who was never elected to anything other than to represent a rural, backwater congressional district in central Michigan, was muddling his way through a "presidency" historians would rather forget. But the My Lai incident-- a less provocative way to refer to the My Lai Massacre, as it came to be called-- was forever seared into my consciousness.

Of course, I have no way to know how old the readers of this blog are. I asked two of my twenty-something friends, Erik (an entrepreneur) and Irwing (a college student), if they'd ever heard of My Lai. Neither had.

So, in light of what's starting to seep out from the Afghanistan War, I found a few relevant paragraphs from Rick Perlstein's history of that era, Nixonland. At the end of 1969, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was unable to get either the NY Times or the Washington Post to publish the first expose, "Lieutenant Accused Of Murdering 109 Civilians." It appeared in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

He reported that in the awful, bloody wake of the Tet Offensive, on March 17, 1968, the leader of a platoon that had suffered heavy casualties, one William L. "Rusty" Calley, twenty-six years old, received orders to retaliate at a hamlet called My Lai. "The orders were to shoot anything that moved," Hersh reported. That would be Calley's court-marshall defense: he was only following orders, that he was told the village was an enemy stronghold. "None of the men interviewed about the incident denied that women and children were shot... The area was a free fire zone from which all non-Viet Cong residents had been urged, by leaflet, to flee. Such zones are common throughout Vietnam."

A second article recorded the recollections of an eyewitness who had refused to participate: "It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it.... I don't remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive." A second installment ran November 20. It noted death toll estimates from 170 to 700 and that 90 percent of the company had participated, and that the army only began investigating a year later after receiving a whistle-blowing letter from a former G.I. One paper, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, got hold of army photographs of the massacre, and ran them with that second article...

The next Hersh article, on November 25 [a week later], featured an interview with one of the participants, a twenty-two year-old coal miner's son from Indiana named Paul David Meadlo: "There must have been about 40 or 45 civilians standing in one big circle in the middle of the village," said Meadlo (who had his right foot blown off by a mine the day after the massacre). "So we stood about 10 or 15 feet away from them... Then he told me to start shooting them... they didn't put up a fight or anything. The women huddled against their children and took it. They brought their kids close to their stomachs and hugged them, and put their bodies against their children and took it." That night Meadlo told the same story in an interview on CBS News. Hersh started getting more and more phone calls from G.I.s describing atrocities they'd witnessed themselves, going back to 1965."

No people, not anywhere, like a foreign army occupying their country. It always comes to this. Always. It's what's happening in Afghanistan-- in our names-- today.

Today's war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties or homes "suspected" of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable "collateral damage" of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake-- a massacre, which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others in Kunar Province on December 26.

...While American reporters, like the anonymous journalistic drones who wrote "CNN's" December 29 report on the incident took the Pentagon's initial cover story-- that the dead were part of a secret bomb squad-- at face value, Jerome Starkey, a dogged reporter in Afghanistan working for the Times of London and the Scotsman, talked to other sources - the dead boys' headmaster, other townspeople and Afghan government officials - and found out the real truth about a gruesome war crime - the execution of handcuffed children. And while a few news outlets in the US like the New York Times did mention that there were some claims that the dead were children, not bomb makers, none, including CNN, which had bought and run the Pentagon's lies unquestioningly, bothered to print the news update when, on February 24, the US military admitted that in fact the dead were innocent students. Nor has any US corporate news organization mentioned that the dead had been handcuffed when they were shot.

Congress doesn't want to investigate this incident. Back when My Lai was breaking, Congress didn't want to investigate that either. As Perlstein points out in Nixonland, ConservaDem Ernest Hollings (SC), a kind of straight Democratic version of Lindsey Graham, took to the well of the Senate to assure his colleagues that the G.I.s had committed a "mistake in judgment" in combat. He wanted to make certain they would never be tried "as common criminals, as murderers," and he assured his easily reassured colleagues that Meadlo was "obviously sick" and insisted that none of this belonged in front of the public.

The next week the My Lai pictures ran in color in Life: a boy with a stump where his leg should be; a pile of adult and infant corpses lying on a dusty road like broken toys [yes, the picture up top]; a woman splayed in rape position-- did she have a head? Time's essay began with an epigram from the president's speech, "North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that." ... Ronald Reagan and George Wallace were among the right-wingers who said the press was profiteering off the story, and that the photographs were "unverified."

Man-on-the-street interviews began appearing. My Lai "was good," an elevator operator in Boston said. "What do they give soldiers bullets for-- to put in their pockets?" A Los Angeles salesman: "The story was planted by Vietcong sympathizers and people inside this country who are trying to get us out of Vietnam sooner." A woman in Cleveland: "It sounds terrible to say we ought to kill kids, but many of our boys being killed over there are just kids, too." Cleveland was where the photos had first run in a paper. The Plain-Dealer fielded calls like "Your paper is rotten and anti-American." In a poll by the Minneapolis paper, half the respondents were certain the reports were faked.

Jerome Starkey is still in Afghanistan. I worry about what he writes for many reasons, but one is because I sit and talk with Democratic candidates running for Congress all day. Not all of them-- not Marcy Winograd or Bill Hedrick or Regina Thomas or any of the ones endorsed by Blue America-- but most of them tell me they opposed the war policies promulgated by the Pentagon and Bush, but that they support the war policies promulgated by the Pentagon and Obama. I just got off the phone with one just now-- great on the environment, great on Choice and women's issues, great on financial regulation, he was just a swell guy. But it doesn't seem to have dawned on him that Obama could be all wrong on Afghanistan. I honestly don't think it's ever crossed his mind. I should send him Starkey's latest report from Kabul (Monday):

"Tied up, gagged and killed" was how NATO described the “gruesome discovery” of three women’s bodies during a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which several alleged militants were shot dead on Feb. 12.

Hours later they revised the number of women “bound and gagged” to two and announced an enquiry. For more than a month they said nothing more on the matter.

The implication was clear: The dead militants were probably also guilty of the cold-blooded slaughter of helpless women prisoners. NATO said their intelligence had “confirmed militant activity.” As if to reinforce the point, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a Canadian, talked in that second press release of “criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians.”

Only that’s not what happened, at all.

The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials. The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.

The only way I found out NATO had lied-- deliberately or otherwise-- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.

NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged.

This particular raid, in the early hours of Feb 12, piqued my interest. I contacted some of the relatives by phone, established it was probably safe enough to visit, and I finally made it to the scene almost a month after unidentified gunmen stormed the remnants of an all-night family party.

It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.

There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.

President Obama made significant progress yesterday-- as flawed and imperfect as the increasingly popular healthcare reform bill is-- towards doing something that every progressive (and progressivish) president has tried doing in the last hundred years, bringing universal healthcare to this country. The achievement will withstand the laughable Republican lies now being put into a flood of petulant amendments to waste time in the Senate, the vandalism and threats of violence, and the predictable sore-loser court challenges. Oklahoma's "Dr. No," Sen. Tom Coburn, is filing away:

#3556 -- To reduce the cost of providing federally funded prescription drugs by eliminating fraudulent payments and prohibiting coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists and for drugs intended to induce abortion.

#3557 -- To require that each new bureaucrat added to any department or agency of the Federal Government for the purpose of implementing the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act be offset by a reduction of 1 existing bureaucrat at such department or agency.

#3558 -- To revoke the powers given the Sec. of HHS under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

#3559 -- To help the President keep his promise that Americans who like the health care coverage they have now can keep it.

#3566 -- To require all Members of Congress to read a bill prior to casting on a vote on the bill.

But the political benefits of Obama's great achievement can easily get swept away by his wrong-headed policies in Afghanistan. This video isn't really about Iraq: