Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

I strongly disagree with the assessment, widely shared in the military and the civilian sectors, that the anti-VN protests and demonstrations started because the sons of the middle class got draft notices.

This assessment is based on a view which measures fundamental causes as essentially political and economic. I cannot agree that politics or economics are fundamental causes. Causes, yes. Fundamental ones — and it is about these that VN compels us — no.  Concepts, which is to say moral constructions, are the fundamental causes.

The anti-VN protests and demonstrations were caused by the politicians’ refusal to fight VN as a war. They were using Kennan’s concept of containment — which is a questionable police concept — instead of a military concept. The police concept is inappropriate in the context of international relations. When they did this in Korea MacArthur said “It seared my soul.” There are reasons Kennan developed this concept and reasons both Democratic and Republican parties adopted them — all unsavory reasons that hurt the military and everyone else, ourselves and an enemy.

So we got our military force engaged in a totally inappropriate manner: to keep an enemy at bay instead of what it should be, to destroy an enemy’s ability to wage war. Inappropriate military engagement is definitionally immoral and it was this immorality of the VN conflict that caused the protests, the demonstrations and their success in ending the VN engagement.

Containment was a colossal immorality derived from a colossally wicked conceptuality and no fault of the military’s. It was a political immorality for unsavory political reasons, which I will not detail here. That immorality produced the anti-VN demonstrations and guaranteed their success. The draft on the sons of the middle class was a derivative cause, not a fundamental one. We should exert ourselves always to deal with fundamental causes, so far as we are able.

The enemy of our country — and specifically of our military — is Madrassa Harvard, in toto. Any time the military are having troubles, the cause is in Cambridge, MA. Madrassa Harvard is the locus classicus of evil in our country. Has been since at least the turn of the century.

I believe that this discrimination of causes is extremely important, to all purposes, and I sorrow not a little that it is not a regular part of the military’s own estimate of the times. It should be. It is never too late.

There are good reasons for engaging in war.  There are no good reasons for engaging in conflict.  We thought VN was a war but politicians intended it as a conflict.  They were immoral men and women.

Do not oppose someone until you can defeat them and intend to.

Merely opposing someone strengthens them … and weakens you.

Fight when you can win, and win every fight.

These are the thoughts of an old anti-VN demonstrator who demonstrated not to avoid the draft but to save the military from getting ground up in the politically facilitated immorality of not letting the military do their job, which is to win our wars as quickly and with as few casualties and as little destruction as possible — which in practice means destroying an enemy’s capacity to wage war. There can be no DMZ in a war. DMZ is a questionable police concept.  In war, it is an immoral concept.

Truman called Korea a “police action,” accurately describing US operational conceptuality, which was immoral for being inappropriate. VN was the same thing, different area but still on the Western littoral of the US defense perimeter: keeping an enemy at bay, using an Army as a police force when the context is of belligerent international sovereignties. Kennan’s “Doctrine” was preposterous!

I feel it’s important for the military to assess VN demonstrations not fundamentally as anti-draft but as anti-immorality. If I am right about that — and I am — the distinction is vital and heals scars as well as wounds.

Update I: Scott Johnson at Power Line and Elliott Abrams at The Weekly Standard

Update 2: Why We Were In Vietnam

Update 3: Barry McCaffrey: The Forgotten South Vietnamese Airborne

Related: McCaffrey with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Update 4: Scott Johnson on the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary with more from Scott here and here and here and here.

Update 5: Ken Burns’ Warped Mirror

Update 6: Bing West: The Vietnam War Documentary: Gloom And Despair

Update 7: Vietnam Veterans Set the Record Straight After PBS TV Series Whitewashes Communism

Update 8: David Archibald: Advice for Our Vietnamese Friends on China

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA