Some radical conservatives are accusing Kerry of war crimes based on interviews that he gave when he returned from service in Viet Nam. I note that neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush have any war crimes that they can confess to. In 1971 Kerry was one of the few army officers who was willing to talk about what was happening in Vietnam. I remember my father and his friends talking at great length about their experiences in World War II. I remember that soldiers returning from Vietnam never wanted to talk about what happened there. Precious few Americans consider Vietnam to be an admirable chapter in American history. The American government did just about everything wrong that it could have, and learned some lessons from their errors - they managed to keep from turning Panama, Granada, Bosnia, Somalia, East Timor, Columbia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, or Rwanda into new Vietnams. The jury is still out on Iraq, but right now it doesn't look good.
I think that the defence, "I was only following orders," is not cut and dried. Although a person should be held responsible for his own actions, it is true that a person is not responsible if he is subject to overwhelming coercion. If someone straps a remote-controlled bomb to me and tells me that I have to rob a convenience store or I will be blown up, I'm not guilty of the robbery, they are. On the other hand, if I am told to watch a group of prisoners and I enthusiatically shoot ten percent of them just to convince the others to be quiet, I can hardly claim that my actions were implied by my orders. The issue is one of how much autonomy I have, how explit the orders that I was given and what consequences I face for failure to comply. There is always a contention in prosecuting Nazi war criminals that they exceeded the minimal demands of their orders. A lot of Nazi prison guards did not arbitrarily murder people and were not prosecuted.
American soldiers in Vietnam were, for the most part, forced into the army under threat of imprisonment; and then subjected to considerable indoctrination, both in basic training, and in the field, the gist of which was that the Viet Cong were being hidden in every nook and cranny by sympathetic civilians and that the soldiers were going to be ambushed and killed if they did not root them out. The degree to which this was believed, is the degree that it constitutes a moral defense for the front-line soldiers. At the higher stratigic level, there is somewhat more blame to be apportioned to the senior officers for not developing better methods for determining who was supporting the Viet Cong. Anyone could have figured out that burning villages and killing civilians who happened to live in the area of hostile activity was an ineffective strategy that merely made more Vietnamese sympathetic to the Viet Cong. At the highest level, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon must shoulder the most blame for getting into the mess in the first place and then, neither winning nor getting out before 55,000 young Americans were killed.
Suggesting that Kerry should be put on trial for his "confession" is mere partisan posturing and hardly warrents serious reply.
And the claim that Kerry's "confession" indicates weak character carries little weight with me. I am not a fan of the concept of "character" as determining who should be President. Historically, some of the best world leaders - Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchil, John A. MacDonald (Canada's first prime minister) - were philanderers, drunks, and crooks. And some of the worst (Hitler springs to mind) were sober, honest, and (reasonably) faithful. Rather than asking about character, the real question is, "Who will do the job?" or, better yet, "Who will do the job the way I want it done." I don't care a whit about Bill's sex life or Dubya's college drinking. I care a lot about deficit budgets and dropping bombs.
BTW, on the subject of dropping bombs, lest you think I am referring to Dubya, here's a factoid from Bacevich's book, "American Empire" (he quoted an official government source, but I don't have the book handy to get the real reference). To paraphrase: During the thirty years of the cold war the United States intervened militarily in other countries 16 times. During Clinton's eight-year administration, he intervened 48 times. Who would have thought that Bill was such a hawk compared to Regan, Nixon, and Johnson? Before I started counting up the incidents that I could remember (and there were quite a few), I had the impression that Clinton hardly stepped away from his domestic agenda. Now I conclude that he knew how to spin the press for his dovish supporters by making all of his interventions seem small and unimportant. Partly he did this by pioneering the idea of contracting the military work out to private companies (like MPRI) so it would escape the notice of the voters. And who realized that Bill was such an ardent capitalist? Republicans could find a lot to like in that man if they looked at him closely :-).
Thom Whalen