Let’s face it, if Kerry had come back from service and joined the Republican team, then urging hard-hats to bash hippie skulls, they would still be fawning all over his medals no matter how they had been acquired, whether by torching a hooch or stubbing his toe.  Dissecting the process by which military medals are awarded, much less reconstructing what actually happened in a chaotic jungle war zone three decades ago, is like trying to make a rational well-reasoned argument as to why Paul Hamm deserved an 8.5 rather than an 8.7 in the high bar routine.  You might very well be right, but at some point one has to ask: what’s the difference?  This guy made it to the Olympics.  That guy was in Vietnam.  Both deserve credit just for being there, for attempting to represent their country with honor, for believing, as men in their early 20s are inclined to, that they can be heroes, as the song says, “if just for one day.”

John Kerry’s real moment of heroism, however, came not when he chased down a VC soldier and ended his life on the banks of the Mekong River, but when he returned home and made the choice: do I stand by my government, or do I stand with my fellow soldiers and citizens?  Do I abide by the deceptive practices of those in power, or do I speak out against them? Anyone who reads the statements that the young John Kerry made before the US Congress in 1971 will be impressed with his thoughtfulness, his courage and his dedication, above all, to those soldiers, like himself, who were asked to suffer and die, and to inflict suffering and death, because of their government’s ignorance, arrogance and ultimate irresponsibility.  Contrary to the distortions of those who disagreed with his anti-war position, Kerry was not “accusing” his fellow soldiers of committing atrocities in Vietnam.  Rather, he was reporting on those horrendous acts, which other returning veterans themselves had shared with him as evidence of the brutality and senselessness of the war.

It is that realization of Kerry’s, borne of his fateful positioning as a point man on the front line of American history, a wounded eyewitness to its bloodiest post-WWII blunder, that equips him so perfectly for the job of President in these times, when another Texan has steered the ship of state drunkenly into the mire—not the steaming fens and forests of Southeast Asia this time, but the blistering, shifting sands of Mesopotamia.

The real casualty of this latest reprisal of America’s internal war over the war in Vietnam, however, is the truth of the war itself. There is no question that atrocities occurred in Vietnam, and that Americans committed them.  They were documented by the armed forces themselves and even the staunchest militarist Republican could not honestly deny this. Yet somehow it is John Kerry, rather than the US Government, who is portrayed as the villain in their eyes: not for committing atrocities, but for revealing them, communicating an ugly truth to an American public that was then steeped in denial, and apparently remains so to this day, long after Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.

But now Kerry himself may have become a partner in the collective denial.  In focusing his campaign largely on his exploits as a young man put in charge of a Swift boat for four months—a summer vacation in hell—and neglecting to discuss the opposition to the war that followed, is surrendering the bank while guarding the deck.  After all, he was little more than a boy then, and getting a boy to do crazy shit isn’t necessarily the hardest thing, especially when immersed in an atmosphere of danger and testosterone.  Instead, he has used his experience in one misbegotten mistake of a war as a justification for leading America into another one: not correcting the wrongs but “staying the course.”

By committing himself beforehand to an extended military engagement in Iraq, based on unsound premises and practices, he may lose the opportunity to seize the high ground, to prove not only to the people of the Middle East but to the world as a whole that the United States can honestly deliver the goods. In this case, delivering the goods means giving them up.  Get the fuck out, and pay for the damage at the door.

And how should the Kerry camp respond to the inevitable demand: isn’t the world a better place without Saddam Hussein in power?    Here is my suggested reply: well, it ought to be.  The fact that the very folks we meant to liberate now see us as imperialist occupiers is a pretty good measure of how badly Bush and his boys screwed the pooch on that one.  All you need to do is look at what’s happened, how badly they miscalculated the consequences of their ambitious military action.  Everybody knew that Saddam’s army would be pushovers, but nobody had a clue that the nationalist pride of the Iraqis would be stoked against a foreign army that doesn’t speak the language or understand the culture but presumes that it knows how to run the place.  Think about it.  After the Republican Guard “melted away” and Saddam’s statue fell, a coiffed ambassador was flown in and immediately began issuing executive orders, placing Iraqi markets and industries on the auction block for American contractors.  While Dubya spewed rhetoric worthy of Che Guevara—“Iraqi oil for the Iraqi people”---Paul Bremer began selling off the remnants of the regime.  The American military moved into Saddam’s palaces, took over his prisons, and began conducting operations from behind fortified barricades.  If you were a citizen in Iraq, what would that look like to you?

What if John Kerry simply spoke what appears now to be the truth: that the insurgency in Iraq is not programmed by Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but is instead a bonfire lit by American aggression (“shock and awe”) and fueled by continuing American arrogance?  Every sentence spoken by our government officials on the subject of Iraq drips with condescension, as though we were saying, “The people of Iraq are now free (thanks to the good old U.S. of A) but they are still babies, and we must teach them to walk and talk.”  After three decades of rule by a totalitarian megalomoniac, the benighted masses were supposed to act properly grateful and humble, now being blessed recipients of the evangelical light of free market capitalism, known only by its code name: “democracy.”  The fact that they haven’t done so can mean only one of two things: 1) evil is once again at work, or 2) ain’t no democracy in sight.

But the speeches at the Republican Convention clearly demonstrate that the truth is beside the point when it comes to praising Bush.  From Ah-nold to Zell to Dick to Dubya himself, the illegal invasion of Iraq is seamlessly merged with the pursuit of Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan in response to the September 11th attacks.  “We aren’t going to play defense”, they say, “we are going to play offense.  We are taking the fight to them, digging them out of their holes.”  The fact that Bush originally vowed to smoke Osama Bin Laden and company “out of their holes”, and that Saddam Hussein was later found hiding in a “spider hole”, contributes to the convenience of this bait-and-switch.

The Republicans’ speeches themselves reveal the contradictions that the programmed devotees inside Madison Square Garden are prepared to swallow.  In one speech, disaffected Democrat Zell Miller assails John Kerry for voting against a series of pork-barrel defense contracts over the last three decades, on the grounds that these weapons of precise destruction are necessary to defend America from terrorism.  In the next speech, Dick Cheney, however, plainly remembers the uncomfortable fact that it was 19 men with box-cutters, ticketed passengers on commercial airplanes, who started this whole ball rolling three years ago.  The disconnect there is so obvious that it should scream out to everyone: the military superiority of the US in the world is so absolutely unquestioned that even with billions shaved off it would more than exceed that of every possible rival combined, but this technological wizardry did not prevent the catastrophe of 9/11 and it does not give the American military the capacity to control Iraq, where slum-dwellers with Kalashnikovs and jerry-rigged roadside bombs continue to frustrate every effort to impose American will on one poor but proud land.  The military power of Israel and Russia have likewise proved unable to stem the bloody stream of casualties emanating from the open wounds of Palestine and Chechnya.

As the 9/11 commission and candidate Kerry have both stated, it is the war of ideas and ideals which needs to be won in this conflicted and grossly unequal world.  In 1971, when George W. Bush was still “young and irresponsible”, John Kerry took a difficult stand and delivered a hard truth: that American power and American virtue are not synonymous, and the abuse of one demeans the value of the other.

Can he do it again today?

If he does, I’m afraid he will almost surely lose the election.  Better fight dirty instead.  And call Oliver.