Muslim Brotherhood Declares War on America; Will America Notice?
By Barry Rubin
http://www.gloria-center.org/gloria/2010/10/muslim-brotherhood-declares-war-on-america[Sal - voluminous confirming links at URL]
This is one of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don't fit their policies; and by experts, because they don't mesh with their preconceptions.
This explicit formulation of a revolutionary program makes it a game-changer. It should be read by every Western decisionmaker and have a direct effect on policy because this development may affect people's lives in every Western country.
OK, cnough of a build-up? Well, it isn't exaggerated. So don't think the next sentence is an anticlimax. Here we go: The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood has endorsed (Arabic) (English translation by MEMRI) anti-American Jihad and pretty much every element in the al-Qaida ideology book. Since the Brotherhood is the main opposition force in Egypt and Jordan as well as the most powerful group, both politically and religiously, in the Muslim communities of Europe and North America this is pretty serious stuff.
By the way, no one can argue that he merely represents old, tired policies of the distant past because the supreme guide who said these things was elected just a few months ago. His position reflects current thinking.
Does that mean the Egyptian, Jordanian, and all the camouflaged Muslim Brotherhood fronts in Europe and North America are going to launch terrorism as one of their affiliates, Hamas, has long done? No.
But it does mean that something awaited for decades has happened: the Muslim Brotherhood is ready to move from the era of propaganda and base-building to one of revolutionary action. At least, its hundreds of thousands of followers are being given that signal. Some of them will engage in terrorist violence as individuals or forming splinter groups; others will redouble their efforts to seize control of their countries and turn them into safe areas for terrorists and instruments for war on the West.
When the extreme and arguably marginal British Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary says that Islam will conquer the West and raise its flag over the White House, that can be treated as wild rhetoric. His remark is getting lots of attention because he said it in English in an interview with CNN. Who cares what he says?
But when the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood says the same thing in Arabic, that's a program for action, a call to arms for hundreds of thousands of people, and a national security threat to every Western country.
The Brotherhood is the group that often dominates Muslim communities in the West and runs mosques. Its cadre control front groups that are often recognized by Western democratic governments and media as authoritative. Government officials in many countries meet with these groups, ask them to be advisers for counter-terrorist strategies and national policies, and even fund them.
President Barack Obama speaks about a conflict limited solely to al-Qaida. And if one is talking about the current military battle in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen that point makes sense. Yet there is a far bigger and wider battle going on in which revolutionary Islamists seek to overthrow their own rulers and wage long-term, full-scale struggle against the West. If it doesn't involve violence right now it will when they get strong enough or gain power.
More than three years ago, I warned about this development, in a detailed analysis explaining, "The banner of the Islamist revolution in the Middle East today has largely passed to groups sponsored by or derived from the Muslim Brotherhood." I pointed out the differences-especially of tactical importance-between the Brotherhood groups and al-Qaida or Hizballah, but also discussed the similarities. This exposure so upset the Brotherhood that it put a detailed response on its official website to deny my analysis.
Yet now here is the Brotherhood's new supreme guide, Muhammad Badi giving a sermon entitled, "How Islam Confronts the Oppression and Tyranny," translated by MEMRI. Incidentally, everything Badi says is in tune with the stances and holy books of normative Islam. It is not the only possible interpretation but it is a completely legitimate interpretation. Every Muslim knows, even if he disagrees with the Brotherhood's position, that this isn't heresy or hijacking or misunderstanding.
Finally, this is the group that many in the West, some in high positions, are urging to be engaged as a negotiating partner because it is supposedly moderate.
What does he say?
--Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront the Muslim's real enemies, not only Israel but also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded. Governments have no right to stop their people from fighting the United States. "They are disregarding Allah's commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah's word will reign supreme" over all non-Muslims.
--All Muslims are required by their religion to fight: "They crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life." Notice that jihad here is not interpreted as so often happens by liars, apologists, and the merely ignorant in the West as spiritual striving. The clear meaning is one of armed struggle.
--The United States is immoral, doomed to collapse, and "experiencing the beginning of its end and is heading towards its demise."
--Palestinians should back Hamas in overthrowing the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and unite in waging war on Israel.
Incidentally, what Melanie Philips has written on this issue fits perfectly here:
--Rational calculations of the kind applied by the West to its adversaries, mirror-imaging, assuming that Muslims won't act in a revolutionary and even suicidal manner want a better future for their children, etc., do not apply to the Islamist movement:
"Allah said: 'The hosts will all be routed and will turn and flee [Koran 54:45].' This verse is a promise to the believers that they shall defeat their enemies, and [that the enemies] shall withdraw. The Companions of the Prophet received this Koranic promise in Mecca, when they were weak... and a little more than nine years [later], Allah fulfilled his promise in the Battle of Badr....Can we compare that to what happened in Gaza?....Allah is the best of schemers, and that though Him you shall triumph. Islam is capable of confronting oppression and tyranny, and that the outcome of the confrontation has been predetermined by Allah."
This says: It doesn't matter how long the battle goes on, how many die, how much destruction is unleashed, how low your living standards fall, how unfavorable the odds appear to be, none of that is important or should deter you.
In the real world, of course, the Islamists are unlikely to win over the long run of, say, 50 or100 years. But those views do mean that these 50 or 100 years are going to be filled with instability and bloodshed.
Equally, Badi's claims do not mean all Muslims must agree, much less actively take up arms. They can have a different interpretation, simply disregard the arguments, and be too intimidated or materialistic or opportunistic to agree or to act. Yet hundreds of thousands will do so and millions will cheer them on. And by the same token, neither the radical nor the passive will assist in moving toward more moderation or peace or compromise.
Well, will the problem go away if people in the West condemn "Islamophobia" or make concessions or apologize or produce a just peace? No.
His words provide some important points for people in the West to consider:
"Resistance is the only solution.... The United States cannot impose an agreement upon the Palestinians, despite all the means and power at its disposal. [Today] it is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance - and the wars of Lebanon and Gaza, which were not so long ago, [are proof of this]."
First, the more the likelihood that U.S. policy might obtains a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, the more anti-American violent activity will be sparked among the Islamists and their very large base of support, the more Iran and Syria will sponsor terrorism. Desirable as peace or even progress toward peace might be, the West should have no illusions about those things providing regional stability, and they will produce more instability.
Second, U.S. actions of apology, concessions, and withdrawals-whether or not any of the specific steps are useful or desirable-they are interpreted by the Islamists and by many in the Middle East as signs of weakness which should spark further aggression and violence. There are hundreds of examples of this reaction every month. Here's a leading moderate Saudi journalist explaining how many Iraqis and other Arabs are viewing the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq means that it is turning the country over to Iran. Wrong but an accurate show of that very common Middle East way of thinking.
Indeed, this last factor explains the Brotherhood's timing. Note that he says nothing about fighting Egypt's government, which won't hesitate to throw the Brotherhood leaders into prison and even to torture them. Still, the coming leadership transition in Egypt, with the death or retirement of President Husni Mubarak, seems to offer opportunities.
The new harder line coincides with the Brotherhood's announcement that it will run candidates in the November elections, another sign of its confidence and increased militancy. The Brotherhood is not a legal group but the government lets members run in other parties. Its candidates won about 20 percent of the vote in the last elections, especially impressive given the regime's repressive measures. If the Brotherhood intends to defy Egyptian law now there will be confrontations, mass arrests, and perhaps violence.
Most important of all, however, Badi and many others sense weakness on the part of the West, especially the U.S. leaders, and victory for the Islamists.
Even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is warning about such things. Blair comes from the British Labour Party. Many conservatives understand these issues. But the West can never respond successfully without a broader consensus about the nature of the threat and the need for a strong response. Where are Blair's counterparts in the left-of-center forces in North America, the kind of people who played such a critical role in confronting and defeating the previous wave of anti-democratic extremism, Communism?
This new hardline signals
1. Increased internal conflict in Egypt, the start of a decade-long struggle for power in the Arabic-speaking world's most important country.
2. The likelihood that more Brotherhood supporters in the West will turn to violence and fund-raising for terrorism.
3. The true nature of the radical indoctrination--preparing people for future extremism and terrorism--in the mosques and groups they control.
4. A probable upturn in anti-American terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Europe.
In August 1996, al-Qaida declared war on America, the West, Christians and Jews. Nobody important paid much attention to this. Almost exactly five years later, September 11 forced them to notice. Let it be said that in September 2010 the Muslim Brotherhood, a group with one hundred times more activists than al-Qaida, issued its declaration of war. What remains is the history of the future.
Update: A well-informed friend in Egypt just said that while he's been expecting this move by the Brotherhood for some time that I have been the only one who's noticed it outside the country. This is the kind of service I'm trying to give my readers.
* Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict, and Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan), Conflict and Insurgency in the Contemporary Middle East (Routledge), The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition) (Viking-Penguin), the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan), A Chronological History of Terrorism (Sharpe), and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
The Left’s Power of Self-Delusion
Shannon Love
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/16400.htmlThe single most dangerous thing about leftists is their capacity for self-delusion. Most leftists really do believe that they personally know what is best for everyone.
Beyond their personal intellectual and moral hubris, leftists think they know best because they believe themselves to belong to a line of ideological descent which has always been altruistic, benevolent and always proven correct in the long run. The reason they believe that is because leftists know nothing of their own history. Instead, they take a simplified, cartoonish view of their ideological predecessors that can only be described as hagiographic. Any mistakes or evils perpetrated by anyone that leftists identify with are simply written out of leftists’ history.
The cult of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, whose face still shows up on non-ironic t-shirts, as well as the leftist history of the Kent State shootings, shows how this hagiography gets perpetuated.
Here is a representative example of Guevara’s hagiography from the current (as of today) Wikipedia entry for him.
"Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, REVIEWING THE APPEALS and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals,[10] and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism." [emph. added]
Contrast this with eye witness accounts of Guevara’s role[h/t Instapundit] in the mass executions that followed the communist victory in Cuba:
“'When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,' said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, 'you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.' As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work."
Compare the hagiographic Wikipedia entry on the Guevera’s infamous “Motorcycle Diaries” with some of what Guevera actually wrote:
"My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido [surrendered/captured enemy] that falls in my hands!” [bracketed text added]
Guevera’s military tactics were ruthless and vile. In Bolivia, he perfected the strategy of “fighting to the last peasant” by intentionally forcing peasants into the line of fire in order to “radicalize” them. He conducted fighting retreats through peasant villages intending that the following army would destroy the village and kill villagers in pursuit of his forces. Worse, he committed atrocities against military personnel, even killing their families, and then framed innocent peasants for the acts for the sole purpose of drawing down a horrific vengeance down on the innocent peasants. Needless to say, he had no compunctions about killing any peasants in his zone of control who did not kowtow to him.
Guevara was a vicious, megalomaniacal sociopath who wanted to be the next Stalin or Mao. (Indeed, Stalin in his younger days was a figure very much like Guevara.) He overtly and clearly stated his desire to destroy America and to exterminate millions of Americans in the process.
Yet today he is considered to be a figure worthy of admiration by the far (20% most) left in America. Go to any college campus and you will see admiring posters and t-shirts. Even Robert Redford, one of the few leftists who actually spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on charitable causes, made a hagiographic movie about Guevera.
The vast majority of leftists, however, know nothing about the real Guevera. All they know is the hagiography that came straight out the Cold War-era Soviet propaganda mill. Worse, they don’t even bother to question the hagiography at all. If you try to confront them about their mindless adoration, they will reflexively change the subject to some real or imagined evil of non-leftists somewhere in the world’s history. They are emotionally incapable of thinking about Guevera in anything but positive terms.
Richard Cohen’s vile little diatribe attempting to link the Tea Party to the 1970 Kent State shooting is saturated with leftist hagiography. This is his central thesis:
"Bullets had killed those kids, sure — but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were 'worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent.'”
There are two things that are delusional about Cohen’s perspective on Kent State. First, he assumes that the National Guard opened fire because they hated the college students’ ideology and not because they feared violence. Second, he leaves out the fact that the protesters were actually acting like Brownshirts and were protesting in de facto support of totalitarian communist superpowers. Indeed, many of leaders of the Kent State and other protests considered themselves to be communists fighting for world revolution.
In the leftists’ hagiography, the Kent State protesters were completely peaceful. They “performed a sit-in” in college campus buildings and were singing and putting flowers in the barrels of the Guardsmen’s guns when the Guardmen’s ideological hatred of the pure and noble leftists finally overwhelmed the Guardmen’s humanity and they brutally opened fire. All those killed at Kent State are martyrs to the evil of the American right. Therefore, Cohen argues by implication, since the left is so good, wonderful and infallible in all things, anyone who argues with leftists today is just as evil and hate filled as the governor and the Guardsmen were back in 1970.
Unfortunately for Cohen and his hagiography, the shootings at Kent State were preceded by a month of increasing violence. The “peaceful sit-in” of the ROTC building was violent with doors kicked in, desks and filing cabinets destroyed, burned or tossed through windows. ROTC officers and students as well as school officials were physically attacked. All this culminated in a riot the night before the shootings in downtown Kent, that resulted in broken windows, arson, stonings and beatings that overwhelmed the Kent police force. That pattern of increasing violence and destruction, not the governor’s ideological opposition to the protesters’ support of communist goals, caused the governor to call out the National Guard. The violence continued the day of the shootings with rock throwing and shouts of “kill, kill, kill”. The Guardsmen were on edge because of the violence, not the ideology.
Cohen and other leftists always dehumanize non-leftists such as the Guardsmen, turning them into caricatures. In the minds of Cohen et al, the Guardsmen are evil Nazis salivating to kill the pure and noble leftists. In reality, the Guardsmen felt exposed and frightened. They did not have full anti-riot gear or support and could not have withstood the human wave attack of an enraged mob. They were all too aware of how easy it would have been for the mob to overwhelm part or all of the Guard’s line and pull out and beat to death individuals. Worse, they all knew they were tightly bunched together making them an easy target for anyone with a firearm in the crowd or surrounding buildings. Given the previous pattern of escalating violence and the frothing anger directed at them, they had every right to expect they might be attacked with lethal force.
The Kent State shootings should have never happened but the moral onus for the deaths ultimately lies upon those who initiated the violence in the first place. Had the protesters not tried to impose their will on the governance of the university by force, had they not attacked people and destroyed property, the Guard would have not have been called out in the first place and would have never been in a position to overreact and make a mistake.
In the end, the idea that the Guard opened fire out of ideological hatred of all that is good and pure is really just a manifestation of the left’s own narcissism and megalomania. They are so convinced not only of their rectitude but of their critical importance to the world that they convince themselves that they are actually important enough for non-leftists to want to kill them. The thought that the Guard saw them not as world changing revolutionaries but just as spoiled, violent children just doesn’t play into the self-hagiography of the individual leftists.
In the end, the real story of Kent State was that of radical leftists directing violence on their fellow citizens in order to advance and inflate their own egos, and as a side effect to advance the interests of totalitarian, communist superpowers. Their egoism, moral blindness and self-delusion caused them to create circumstances in which lethal mistakes where probable. That is the reason, and the only reason, that five people died at Kent State.
Why are leftists so prone to self-delusion? Why are they so ready to believe that they themselves and their predecessors never make any mistakes?
Firstly, leftists always want quick and easy answers to problems like poverty which have dogged humanity since the dawn of history. They don’t want to hear that such problems can’t be really “solved” but simply mitigated or improved slightly. They would prefer to be sold the fantasy of a quick and easy fix whose implementation is blocked only by the selfishness and outright evil of non-leftists.
Secondly, leftists have powerful need to view themselves as intellectually and morally superior to everyone else. They have the need to see themselves as the heroic protagonist in the story of the modern world. Since they use the same methodology today to arrive at their justifications as did the leftists of the past, they must create a narrative in which the leftists of the past were always proven correct and infallible.
To this end, every event, every history, every fact is shaped and bent by the aggregation of the emotional need of millions of leftists to view themselves as infallible, crusading heroes. This emotional need creates a niche in the free market of ideas which the professional intellectuals of the far left are all too glad to fill with stories of leftwing hagiography. After a few generations, what started as an emotion-driven market niche evolves into a distinct subculture whose tenets become unquestionable. It becomes a secular religion whose tenets are unquestionable and where virtue becomes defined as believing in those self-same tenets.
Guevara must have been a hero because most contemporary leftists believe he was too much like them not to be. If Guevara was a villain, what does that say about them? Likewise, if the protesters of Kent State were selfish, arrogant and gullible what does that say about leftists today who mimic their positions in contemporary context?
Why don’t leftists ever recognize their fantasies as self-serving delusions? I believe it is because most leftists, and certainly the professional intellectual leftists who fabricate and sell those fantasies for money and prestige, live in a nonempirical world. Empiricism is the final test of any idea. This is the fundamental idea of science but it holds true in all fields of human endeavor. An idea must manifest in a physical form and interact with the material world before its truth can be truly verified. Business people have ideas of businesses all the time but the only real test of the idea is to create the business and see if it thrives. Generals create weapons, tactics and doctrines only to see them all disintegrate when real war breaks out. Engineers build objects and machines that must work.
Leftists, however, live in a world isolated from physical consequence. They pay no material consequence for the failure of the ideas. It is not as if any of the leaders of the Kent State rioters ever ended up with hands bound, kneeling in the mud of a Cambodian rice paddy waiting for a raped and brainwashed 12 year old to suffocate them by wrapping a plastic bag tightly over their heads. No radical leftwing radical professor of the era lost his job for failing to predict the psychotic nature of the Khmer Rouge or the consequences of the horrific rule of Cambodia. No American leftists has ever paid a serious material consequence for any error, no matter how sweeping. It is always someone else who pays.
It was the Kulaks, Ukrainians, idealistic communists and others who paid the price for Stalin, not the legions of western leftists who ignored his crimes and cheered him on. It was the Chinese peasants who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and not the college student with the “Mao more than ever” t-shirt. Less dramatically, it is the poor of America who suffered from crime, permanent joblessness and the disintegration of families because of leftists’ policies, not the ivory-tower intellectuals who created those policies.
In the specific case of Indochina, the “peace” movement failed catastrophically to bring peace to anyone. The people of Indochina suffered horribly. However, since the “peace” movement ended with the far left dominant in American politics and culture, American leftists see it as a great victory and seek to recreate it at every opportunity. Why shouldn’t they? They personally or collectively don’t expect to pay any material consequence for their selfishness and self-absorption.
This isolation from physical consequence lets leftists swim through life in a haze of self-delusion. Without physical consequence, absolutely everything in their lives become just a fictional story. This is why leftists are so keen on the idea that everything is a “narrative”. In their world, everything is just a narrative.
The left’s specific narrative explains everything for them because the market forces in the free market of ideas evolved a story custom-fitted to feed the left’s own emotional needs. In this custom-fitted narrative, they are virtual super beings, free of the moral and intellectual failings of lesser beings and therefore always correct and always deserving of power and dominion over lesser beings for the good of all. Who wouldn’t like to buy such a flattering image of themselves?
Non-leftists are saved from delusion only because the material world impinges on those of us who live and work outside of the ivory tower. We can’t believe anything we want, because we have to make things function. We pay a heavy and immediate price for our self-delusions.
But perhaps the era of the left’s isolation from physical consequence has ended. During the Vietnam era, the military they despised protected them from the communists they lionized, but today’s military cannot protect them from the terrorists who filter across borders. It is not inconceivable that the left’s de facto support of various terrorists may someday literally blow up in their faces. The vitality and uniqueness of America once protected them from the consequences of their economic ideas (such as runaway unions), but today America is not so vital nor so unique and must fight for its place in the world economy. As a result, leftwing-dominated areas of the country are imploding economically. The poor and marginalized are growing weary of promises of betterment that never arrive. They have begun to try and escape the fantasy by seeking non-leftist solutions like voucher schools.
The left will either grow up and leave the world of childish fantasy or fade into history. Until then people like Richard Cohen can sit on our collective cultural couch in nothing but their underwear and their Che t-shirts, eating Cheerios while watching yet another episode of “Leftist Hagiography Today” on the TV.
The rest of us can do nothing but shake our heads as we pass by on the way out the door to another day of real work and real consequences.
Not A Massacre But A Mistake
New evidence indicates source of gunshots that triggered shootings
By Robert F. Turner
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/12/not-a-massacre-but-a-mistake/High-tech forensic audio analysis last week of a recently discovered audiotape of the May 4, 1970, anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University may shed new light on the genesis of the tragedy that shut down colleges and universities across America. During a campus confrontation, Ohio National Guardsmen fired into rock-throwing student protesters, killing four - two of them mere passers-by - and wounding nine others. The incident is of more than historical interest because the "Kent State massacre" played a major role in undermining U.S. support for the Indochina war and thus facilitated a far greater human tragedy.
The audiotape reveals that shortly before the guardsmen began firing, protesters may have surrounded and threatened the life of a young man named Terry Norman (a Kent State student, like many of the guardsmen) who was taking photographs for law enforcement agencies.
According to Friday's Cleveland Plain Dealer, the tape captured the command "Retreat!" As the guardsmen moved back up Blanket Hill, pursued by rock-throwing protesters, photographer Norman was left behind - apparently too busy taking pictures to realize the guardsmen were pulling back - and quickly was in the midst of angry protesters.
The tape captures one voice saying: "They got somebody," and a few seconds later, male voices shout: "Kill him!" Kill him!" There is then the sound of a .38 caliber revolver shot, followed by a female voice: "Whack that [expletive]!" Three more handgun shots ring out at about five-second intervals, and soon thereafter - in just 13 tragic seconds - 29 of the 77 guardsmen fire a total of 67 rifle shots that are to help seal the fate of the non-communist people of Indochina.
Mr. Norman later admitted carrying a .38 Special revolver because his life had been threatened repeatedly during earlier protests, and a TV reporter at the scene stated he saw Mr. Norman hand the weapon to a police officer and say, "I was afraid they were going to kill me, so I took out my revolver, and I fired it into the air and into the ground."
The tape doesn't have all of the answers. But the Ohio National Guard adjutant general later alleged there had been "sniper fire" at the guardsmen, and many of the guardsmen later testified they had been in fear for their lives.
By way of background, the guard had been mobilized following violent protests against President Nixon's "illegal" decision to send American troops into Cambodia to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries, from which communist forces had been crossing regularly into South Vietnam to attack U.S. troops and the South Vietnamese. Over a period of four days, bonfires were built in Kent streets, beer bottles and rocks were thrown at passing vehicles and through storefront windows, and more than 1,000 students surrounded the ROTC building, cheering as it burned.
Responding police and firemen were pelted with rocks and bottles, and fire hoses were slashed. Gov. James Rhodes called out the guard to restore order.
Though a Gallup Poll reported 58 percent of Americans blamed the protesters and just 11 percent blamed the guard, the Kent State incident was a great and inexcusable tragedy no matter who was primarily to blame. But its consequences in the years that followed proved far more catastrophic.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the angry students - as so often was the case throughout the war - had their facts wrong. Going into Cambodia was not "illegal." Like South Vietnam, Cambodia was one of the "protocol states" the United States had solemnly pledged to defend against communist aggression when the Senate in 1955 consented to the ratification of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization agreement with but a single dissenting vote. Cambodia, like South Vietnam, was similarly incorporated by reference in the 1964 statute, by which 99.6 percent of Congress authorized the use of military force to carry out our SEATO obligations.
The hated Richard M. Nixon had nothing to do with the Kent State shootings by frightened guardsmen. For the benefit of younger readers, in those days, joining the National Guard was one of the safest legal ways to avoid service in a war zone. And rather than "widening" the war, the Cambodian incursion was a tremendous victory that largely broke the back of communist forces in the Mekong Delta. (I was there at the time.)
But the angry protests made it very difficult for any but the most courageous legislators to continue supporting the war, and in May 1973, Congress enacted a new statute - of very dubious constitutionality - making it illegal for the president to spend money on U.S. military involvement in "hostilities" anywhere in Indochina. As Yale's distinguished diplomatic historian and professor John Lewis Gaddis observed a few years back in Foreign Affairs, "Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict." Sadly, under pressure from the "peace movement," Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Reassured by the American Congress, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong declared that the Americans would not come back "even if we offered them candy," so North Vietnam sent virtually its entire army to conquer its neighbors behind columns of Soviet-made tanks in flagrant acts of conventional armed international aggression.
The student protesters who may have believed they were struggling to end the suffering in Indochina were sadly mistaken. During the three years following the communist conquests of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, more people died violently than had been killed in combat during the previous 14 years throughout Indochina. According to the Yale University Cambodian Genocide Project, in tiny Cambodia alone, more than 20 percent of the population - an estimated 1.7 million human beings - lost their lives. A 2003 story on the Cambodian "killing fields" in National Geographic Today captured a snapshot of this tragedy by noting that, to save bullets, small children were murdered by being battered against trees.
It didn't have to happen.
Robert F. Turner served twice in Vietnam as an Army officer. He is author or editor of several books on the Vietnam War and has taught seminars on the war for more than 20 years at the University of Virginia.
Author
Logged
