Razorcake Issue #19

something’s up. The truth is that Diem and his uniformed successorswere equally corrupt and unpopular, and so the coup changednothing. But Coulter’s case hinges on the war being easilywinnable, and so she has to find phony turning points wherever shecan. Of course, had Kennedy vetoed the coup, Coulter would nowbe castigating him for being too scared to pull the trigger on a weakleader and replace him with competent military men.Coulter’s rants are not even governed by claims she made earlier.At one point, she describes the Vietnam situation early inKennedy’s presidency: “When the U.S. could have easily won,Kennedy refused to order an invasion of the North.” A few pageslater, she salutes Eisenhower’s policy of restraint toward Vietnam.“President Eisenhower provided economic and military aid toSouth Vietnam. But he also said he could not ‘conceive of a greatertragedy for America than to get heavily involved.’” 5 So which is it?Was the Vietnam War a cakewalk botched by Democrats or was it,as Eisenhower said, a tragic error to go to war in Vietnam at all?The doubletalk continues when Coulter describes Nixon’sVietnam policy:[Nixon] withdrew more than half a million troops fromVietnam, leaving a trim twenty-thousand-troop force behind.He cut spending on the war by over 80 percent... Nixon keptthe Communist North Vietnamese at bay and protected freedomin South Vietnam by relentlessly bombing the North. 6He “kept the CommunistNorth Vietnamese at bay”?What happened to victory?Why didn’t Nixon justinvade North Vietnam andgive the commies what for?The answer of course is thatafter the Korean War,American presidents ofboth parties were wary ofinvading a communistcountry that neighboredChina. None of them wantedto risk another groundwar against the Chinese,especially after Chinaexploded its first nuclearbomb in 1964.More fundamentally, itis a lie that we were protectingfreedom or democracyin South Vietnam.Rather, we were simplysupporting one dictatoragainst another. Neither Diem nor the parade of military rulers whofollowed him represented democratic rule: Diem cancelled the onlyfree, nationwide elections ever scheduled in Vietnam, and did sowith U.S. government approval. The 1954 Geneva Accords, whichsecured French withdrawal from Indochina, mandated that internationallysupervised elections take place in 1956. In the meantime,neither the government of the independent northern part of thecountry nor that of the French-controlled southern part was to permitforeign bases or sign military alliances. The Eisenhower administrationdeclined to sign the accords, but promised to allow them tobe carried out, and also pledged to “refrain from the threat or theuse of force.” However, in September 1954 – just two months afterthe Geneva agreements – the U.S. signed a military alliance withthe French-appointed South Vietnamese government. In 1955, fearingthat Ho Chi Minh’s party would win the upcoming vote, Diemcancelled the elections and declared himself head of the newRepublic of South Vietnam. The U.S. supported the move. 7 It wasEisenhower and Diem, not the commies, who banned the elections.It is simply laughable for conservatives to pretend that we werefighting for democracy by propping up the South Vietnamese dictatorship,or that we could have won the war by invading NorthVietnam, or even that any vital American interest was at stake inSoutheast Asia.For all its distortions of the record in the cases of Korea andVietnam, the most ridiculous account in Treason may be its discussionof President Reagan’s abortive deployment of Marines toLebanon in 1983-4. That intervention would appear to offer a textbookcase of a President committing U.S. troops carelessly andthen pulling them out when things got tough – something Coulterinsists that only Democrats do. However, she is sure that the fiascowas not Reagan’s fault: “Lebanon was a Democrat policy,” shewrites. After an October 1983 truck bomb killed 241 Marines intheir barracks, “Democrats in Congress set to work drafting a jointresolution demanding that Reagan pull the Marines out of Beirut.”In the rest of her book, Ronald Reagan is portrayed as possessingnear-superhuman powers, but in this case, the mere threat of a jointresolution by Democrats (who did not even control both houses ofCongress) is enough to make him reverse course and also to freehim from responsibility for his own policy. A few paragraphs later,Coulter seems to haverealized how pathetic thatexcuse is, and tries anotheron for size. “Reagan hadbigger fish to fry in the1980s. He invadedGrenada.” 8 Reagan’s invasionof that tiny Caribbeanisland might look like a“big fish” operation comparedto, say, an invasionof Club Med. However, itlooks miniscule comparedto the problems of theMiddle East.Our biggest MiddleEastern problem today –the ongoing war in Iraq –may provide the ultimateriposte to Coulter’s claimthat Republicans are bothmore sensible and moreeffective in their use ofmilitary force. The Bushadministration plan for a post-Saddam Iraq seems to have countedon Iraqis forgetting all religious and ethnic differences and acceptingwith joy both a long-term American occupation and a governmenthandpicked by U.S. authorities. Though such sanguine predictionshave been contradicted by events, and though the currentcollection of anti-American rebels has proven more lethal thanSaddam’s armies, Bush and his advisors refuse to accept that a longguerrilla war is underway.Moving to the home front, it is interesting that in compiling herlist of traitors, Coulter seems to have forgotten right-wingers’affection for homegrown terrorists and subversives from theBranch Davidians to the various militia movements. That may bebecause Coulter is one of the right-wingers who expressed affectionfor those groups. She also ignores Republicans’49