It hardly seems possible, but it has been almost ten years (April 1975) since the downfall of South Vietnam and America's first defeat in warfare. That war changed the nation permanently, making it hesitant at best, fearful at worst to project and protect U.S. interests abroad. For both the politicians and the military leaders, avoiding "another Vietnam" whether in Central America, the Middle East or elsewhere guides major foreign policy decisions. In short, America's pride in its power was shattered (Lev. 26:19). The relatively safe adventure in Grenada did little to change this. In the January 14 WALL STREET JOURNAL, a major article appeared entitled "Vietnam's Legacy: A Decade After War, U.S. Leaders Still Feel Effects of the Defeat." Here are excerpts:
In the decade since the Vietnam War ended, the world has changed in ways that no one could have predicted .... Who would have imagined then that Vietnam's archenemy today would be China, that Washington and Peking would be friends, that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, twice, and that West Point would be swamped with applicants for admission?...
Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong expresses the general sense that things haven't turned out quite as expected. "Yes, we defeated the United States," he says. "But now we are plagued by problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, underdeveloped nation. [Confirming the fact that those who curse Abraham's descendants are not blessed — Gen. 12:3.] Waging is simple, but running country is difficult."
What haven't changed are the painful memories of Vietnam .... The wound hasn't healed. "No Vietnams" has become a guiding principle — some would say crippling obsession — of American foreign policy. Yet there is no consensus, even now, about what went so wrong in Vietnam or how the U.S. can use military power abroad without making similar mistakes. The soul-searching over Vietnam extends even to the Reagan cabinet. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argues that the nation should avoid future Vietnams by fighting only popular, winnable ...
Vietnam frightened America. It was the nation's first defeat in war, and it made Americans more cautious and less certain about the world. Indeed, in the decade after Vietnam, the U.S. has been wary of military commitments and uncharacteristically worried about the future. The perceived hesitation and drift in foreign policy came to be known as "the post-Vietnam syndrome."...
Vietnam set America wobbling. Television brought the killing and the seeming futility of the conflict into every home and sparked public protest, and some old values and institutions were weakened. Much of the public came to distrust the country's leaders, especially those who had involved America in Vietnam. Congress distrusted the executive branch .... The tradition of bipartisan foreign policy disintegrated .... The acrimony continues. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, says the old establishment lost its will to rule, and that it now wants the U.S. to be loved rather than feared and respected....
Ronald Reagan, who called the war "a noble cause," entered the White House in 1981 hoping to end the post-Vietnam syndrome .... President Reagan may have eased the residual pain of Vietnam, with his patriotic talk about standing tall. But certain problems of the post-Vietnam era remain, especially the absence of bipartisan foreign policy. The bitter debates of the past four years over Lebanon, Central America and arms control suggest that the old consensus is dead. "One of Mr. Reagan's achievements is that he has undone much of the damage we have suffered," says Mr. [Henry] Kissinger. "But he can't undo the sequence of events — Angola, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua — which were the indirect consequences of Vietnam. The fact that we have such difficulty today discussing Central America in strategic terms — as opposed to abstract moral terms — is a burden Reagan must carry."
Richard Holbrooke, a politically liberal former State Department official who spent three years in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, sums up how the war changed America's image of itself: "I grew up in school believing that the United States had never lost a war. My children don't think that. I grew up thinking that the United States was the strongest country on earth. My kids think that maybe Russia is. Suddenly we became fallible."...
If President Reagan has restored an image of strength in foreign policy, it is thanks to his military buildup. But in dealing with regional crises — especially in Lebanon and Central America — the administration's foreign policy has seemed confused .... Lebanon contributed another disturbing image to post-Vietnam foreign policy: the bombed-out rubble of the American Embassy and Marine headquarters of Beirut, which the U.S. couldn't protect and wouldn't avenge.
A recent cartoon by S. Kelley, circulated by the Copley News Service, reflected America's fearfulness in reacting to foreign challenges. In the cartoon a gun-toting guerrilla labeled "Moslem Terror" is seen standing on the American flag, his dirty boots having sullied half the stripes. A whimpish figure labeled "State Department" says to the terrorist: "Oh yeah? Well, if you cross that next line, I'm gonna get really, really, really mad."
Another post-Vietnam syndrome is the typecasting, in Hollywood, of nearly all authority figures as evil or immoral, or both. Of course, the movie industry, like the media, is dominated by crusading left-wing types. Here is a report by Vernon Scott, UPI's Hollywood reporter, received over our UPI wire service on January 16, 1985.
The United States of America is becoming a favorite Hollywood heavy, second only to Nazi Germany as a source of villainy and infamy. There is something about the American government that filmmakers find inherently evil. If Hollywood movies were made elsewhere, critics and moviegoers alike would brand most of them anti-American propaganda.
Favorite menaces in Hollywood films these days are the CIA and FBI who, according to moviemakers, are conspiring at all times to deny us our rights. Even the KGB doesn't take as many raps as the CIA. Next in order of menace are the joint chiefs of staff, followed by an array of high-ranking military officers. Then come corrupt politicians and oily diplomats. Right behind them are Southern sheriffs and city cops. Thereafter, industrialists, capitalists and finally the just plain rich are singled out as favorite movie bad guys.
If a movie heavy turns out to be an impoverished criminal, pains are taken to make clear the felon's plight is a result of pressure of some kind from the establishment, which has driven him or her to commit the crime.
This year ...THE KILLING FIELDS, like THE DEER HUNTER ...falls into the let's-blow-up-Southeast-Asia-again category. This time it is Cambodia, which would be a tropical paradise had not Uncle Sam been around. According to this film, the blood-thirsty Khmer Rouge was spawned by the U.S.A .... ICEMAN indicted almost every branch of the government, which seemed bent on killing a stone-age man miraculously brought back to life....
It's not always the United States government and American institutions that make handy heavies for film fare. The USSR takes its shots, as do the dictatorial governments of South American countries. Rarely, however, insurgents portrayed in a bad light. The atrocities of left-wing South American and Asian regimes rarely are the focal point for villainy as compared to, say, the old imperialistic nations. England is a wonderfully accommodating nation when it comes to playing the villain. A couple of years ago it was GANDHI, an Academy Award winner, that revealed the British Empire as the cause of all things evil in India. This year's down-with-Brits film is A PASSAGE TO INDIA. Maybe the only picture altogether untainted by Uncle Sam's calumny was Disney's [rerelease of] PINOCCHIO.
The Kennedy "Crusade" Stirs Up a Hornet's Nest
Senator Edward Kennedy's eight-day trip to South Africa could not have been more controversial. The liberal Massachusetts politician succeeded in angering and in large part uniting South Africa's white community as well as confusing and further dividing the various black African ethnic groups and organizations. That was surely not the way the Senator had planned it, but then his main audience was not in South Africa, but rather in the United States.
The various stops on his "anti-apartheid crusade" (as London's DAILY TELEGRAPH called it) were carefully stage-managed in order to play well on network news programs back home. In the Senate, Kennedy intends to make South Africa a major foreign policy focus — and to keep it and himself in the forefront from now on as he readies himself to for the presidency in 1988. (An editorial cartoon by MacNelly showed Kennedy hunting big game in Africa. Three Africans with him were carrying boxes and sacks on their heads labeled "Apartheid Issue." A "thought balloon" over Kennedy's head showed what kind of "big game" he was really after — the 1988 Republican Elephant!)
Senator Kennedy did not go to South Africa on a "fact-finding trip." His own aides admitted this was not the case. His visits were well arranged beforehand. They were mostly with government dissidents or involved excursions to some of the poorest areas in the country in order to present the most negative, emotion-laden impact of the country. He did have one frosty meeting with Foreign Minister Roelof "Pik" Botha, in which there was absolutely no meeting of minds. Afterwards, Mr. Botha took the unusual course of composing an open letter to Kennedy on the day of the latter's departure from the country. "Your motive," wrote the Foreign Minister, "was to use your visit as a forum for a set of preconceived value judgments. You arrived with your mind made up and you will depart with it made up."
By his own admission, Kennedy refused to see the South African situation in any other light than that of his own liberal American perspective. He told one anti-government rally: "I disagree with the present American policy toward South Africa precisely because it offends abiding American values."
The high-profile Kennedy team (nine aides plus six family members) did appear startled, according to one report, by the complexity of South African politics. They certainly did not expect to be greeted by black demonstrators such as those of the militant Marxist fringe, such as AZAPO (the Azanian People's Organization) who angrily picketed Kennedy's meetings yelling "Yankee Go Horne" and carrying posters calling him "Imperialist" or "CIA Pig." Kennedy told Reuters interviewers that he was saddened by the divisions and polarizations among black groups.
The Senator and his band attempted to elevate the stature of Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the two individuals who invited him. But they were dismayed to see how little political power Tutu actually has in the country, Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. The bishop couldn't even calm black protesters at a meeting Kennedy was scheduled to address on his last day. It was scrubbed.
The Senator did not want to be influenced by black leaders who held ideas different from his own. For example, he embarrassed one of the few genuine African leaders, Zulu chief Gatsha Buthelezi, who enjoys wide support among his own people (but not much among other black tribal nations). Buthelezi is an outspoken opponent of the idea of U.S. "disinvestment," calling it "madness." After their private breakfast meeting in Durban, Buthelezi tried three times to persuade a reluctant Kennedy to greet hundreds of his Zulu supporters outside. Finally, he yanked the Senator by the arm and propelled him outside. Buthelezi said later he was "flabbergasted" at the Senator's behavior.
South African whites of a more liberal persuasion were also offended by the Senator's simplistic moral posturing. With an obvious reference to the Chappaquidick incident, the FINANCIAL MAIL headlined: "He's Teaching Us Morals?" An accompanying editorial said that "nothing about [Kennedy] suggests that he is...in a position to pass moral judgment." Perhaps the best reporting on the visit for the U.S. press appeared in the LOS ANGELES TIMES. The TIMES has a new correspondent in South Africa, Michael Parks. He is quite perceptive, and rather free of reportorial bias. The following is a summary by Parks of the Kennedy visit (January 16 issue). It dramatically shows how impervious to the facts the Kennedy troupe was: Parks reveals some rather amazing confessions on the part of the Kennedy aides, such as admitting they had thought South Africa was just a "black and white issue." They also displayed remarkable callousness as to the future wellbeing of the Afrikaner people.
Whatever Senator Edward M. Kennedy's recent trip to South Africa does to mobilize U.S. public opinion against the policy of racial separation here, his controversial visit left this country's anti-apartheid opposition — black as well as white — in disarray .... "Most of us are now wishing that he had never come," said a prominent member of the United Democratic Front, a multiracial alliance of 645 anti-apartheid groups. "There may be benefits in the future — we hope so — but the costs were very great."...
The Kennedy trip was ...targeted principally on the United States rather than South Africa. The senator's appearances here were the carefully arranged media events typical of U.S. political campaigns. His speeches, resonant with the rhetoric of his late brothers, John and Robert, largely went over the heads of his local audiences and were really pitched to American audiences ....
"Fact finding" was really not the point of the trip. Kennedy had come, it was clear from the outset, to launch a broad antiapartheid campaign in the United States, to make South Africa one of the top American foreign policy issues and to move the Reagan Administration from "constructive engagement" to full confrontation if possible.
The visit thus was conceived largely in terms of U.S. politics, and its far-reaching and unforeseen ramifications in South African politics were not taken into account. "We have to deal with Tutu, we have to deal with Boesak [liberal Coloured cleric], and we really don't know what these AZAPO folks (the Azanian People's Organization) are all about," a Kennedy aide said as the senator began his tour. "Frankly, did not realize the complexity of politics here. We thought — can I say it? — it was just black and white."
In U.S. terms, recalling America's own civil rights campaigns, the politics might have seemed a matter of "black and white" but ...south Africa's blacks are as politically divided as its whites — and the recurrent anti-American, anti-capitalist, antiKennedy demonstrations by black militants proved it.
When questions were raised about the strong bias against the government in Kennedy's tour, both in the places that he visited and the people he met, another aide commented: "This is not a research project, some staff study or a doctoral dissertation. This is a high-profile senatorial visit, and the senator is Ted Kennedy and the place is South Africa. We are not here to probe or calm the fears of a few hundred thousand Boers (Dutchdescended Afrikaners) but to work for the liberation of almost 30 million blacks. Probably there are two sides — or three or four — to this matter, but we are weighting it, seven or eight blacks to a white, to take into account the population."
This offhandedness, a matter of style more than of substance, was taken as arrogance here and compounded the South African view — black almost as much as white — that Kennedy thought he could solve the country's problems. And the result here was virtual political hysteria, implying that many thought Kennedy powerful enough to impose some solution, or at least to try ....
The fact that the trip did not change Senator Kennedy's mind one whit was made evident when he returned to Washington. He said on January 16 that he'll pursue congressional passage of some sort of economic sanctions against South Africa. An ASSOCIATED PRESS dispatch reported that he will seek bipartisan support for the plan, to be drafted in the next two weeks by anti-apartheid activists including Walter Fauntroy, the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress and Randall Robinson, executive director of the TransAfrica lobbying group. (Robinson has been directing the demonstrations at the South African embassy in Washington.) Republican leaders might go along with the "crusade" too. They see it as an opportunity to rebuild their party's support among the country's black community which overwhelmingly voted Democratic last November. Politics, politics.
In sum, Mr. Kennedy has chosen the path of confrontation over cooperation and the results will be nasty — for the United States as well as South Africa. A recent Congressional study, for example, says the U.S. should look for ways to reduce its heavy dependence on South Africa and the Soviet Union for important metals that American industry needs. The future health of the American economy could be at stake.
ON THE WORLD SCENE
Worldwide Church of God