War Crimes Are for Communists

Let us stipulate the following: Had the Soviet Union not been around 30 years ago, the United States would without hesitation have pummeled Vietnam into the ground using force 10 times in excess of what was actually used. War crimes like the one Bob Kerrey is accused of?and much worse?would have taken place every day. Then, with Hanoi in ruins, the United States would have imposed a puppet regime on Vietnam. Its leaders would have been hailed as champions of free markets even as they were under instruction never to hold any American responsible for war crimes. War crimes were the exclusive prerogative of the Communists. Occasionally long-concealed events like Bob Kerrey's night in Thanh Phong would see the light of day. But few would pay much attention.

The Soviet Union enabled North Vietnam to prevail against everything the United States threw at it. Having lost the war, Americans then convinced themselves that it was moral failure that had led to defeat. It was all ludicrously self-serving?a way to justify future military interventions. The United States did not conduct the war in Indochina any more immorally than it had conducted any of its wars either before or since. It was the sting of defeat that made the difference.

Last year in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh wrote about how Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton drug czar, ordered the deaths of thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and even children in the last days of the Gulf War. Using missile-firing Apache attack helicopters and Bradley tanks, the U.S. murdered thousands of Iraqis as they fled in panic. "We went up the road blowing the shit out of everything," Hersh reports one soldier testifying in terms eerily similar to Gerhard Klann's. One of the targets destroyed was a bus filled with children. Without question this was a war crime. Such killings were different from the ones in Vietnam only in that U.S. soldiers were able to carry them out from a distance, happily safe from retaliation. Yet Hersh's story barely made a stir. No one demanded that McCaffrey resign, let alone face the music at the Hague.

The bombing of Iraq, much like the bombing of Yugoslavia a few years later, could fairly be described as terror-bombing of civilians. The United States attacked Iraq's power grid, food, water treatment and sewage systems. In Yugoslavia the United States went after roads, railways, bridges and factories, while killing thousands of people along the way in hospitals, old age pensioners' homes or doing their Sunday shopping?not accidentally, but as proof of what we are willing and capable of doing. These were all war crimes, according to Article 51 of the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of Aug. 12, 1949.

Yet these American war crimes have met with general approval. Without powerful friends to call on, Yugoslavia and Iraq were easily beaten into submission. Moreover, the U.S. government announced that only Iraqis and Serbs had committed war crimes for which they must be held to account.

Eighteen months ago we learned that at the beginning of the Korean War American GIs had killed hundreds of unarmed South Korean refugees as they cowered in terror under a railroad bridge at No Gun Ri, a hamlet 100 miles southeast of Seoul. The soldiers claim they shot the civilians because they were afraid there might have been North Korean soldiers in disguise among them. Bill Clinton went through his usual nonapology "apology" routine. He announced: "Although we have been unable to determine precisely the events that occurred at No Gun Ri, the U.S and South Korean governments have concluded...that an unconfirmed number of innocent Korean refugees were killed or injured there? To those Koreans who lost loved ones...I offer my condolences." No acceptance of U.S. responsibility, no acknowledgment of a war crime, no identification of perpetrators?just "condolences."

One need hardly mention the most spectacular onslaught to date against unarmed civilians?Hiroshima and Nagasaki?carried out on a defeated Japan desperate to get out of the war. No one was or will ever be held accountable. Compared to this, Vietnam is minor league stuff.

What made America's involvement in Vietnam so objectionable was not its criminality but its arrogant contempt for any international norms of conduct, contempt the U.S. displays even more unashamedly today. Instead of the puppet regime in Saigon, we now have the puppet regimes in the Balkans, whose inept rulers regularly come to Washington to plead for arms and aid to survive. For the fraudulent incident at Tonkin Gulf, used by LBJ to justify the bombing of North Vietnam, we had the bogus "massacre" at Racak in Southern Kosovo in January 1999, in which the Yugoslav army was accused of executing 45 Albanians in cold blood. The European newspapers ridiculed the story from the beginning. Recently, Finnish forensic experts found no evidence of a massacre, only of a firefight between the army and the KLA.

For the violated 1954 Geneva accords and the 1973 Paris accords?both of which the United States completely disregarded?we have the bombing of other countries sanctioned by no UN resolution. And we have UN resolutions the United States simply ignores. The Geneva accords stated that the "military demarcation line [between North and South Vietnam] is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary." Moreover, elections were to be held in 1956. No elections took place. And the United States did act as if the state of South Vietnam was here to stay. Similarly, contrary to U.S. pretense otherwise, the 1973 accords did not acknowledge the Saigon government as the government of South Vietnam. There were to be negotiations between Saigon and the Vietcong about establishing a joint government. None of this ever happened. At least back then such violations could be excused as being necessitated by the exigencies of the Cold War. Today it is just the arrogance of power.