The recent revelations about former Democratic senator Robert Kerrey's role in a Navy SEALs massacre of civilians in a village in Vietnam highlight the character of imperialist war against working people the world over. Brutality. There is no innocence on this question among the superwealthy rulers of the United States, their servants in the Democratic or Republican Party, or the military brass.
The U.S. military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam, among the millions of Vietnamese killed in the war--because, to the U.S. rulers, they were the enemy. Washington sought to militarily crush a popular revolutionary struggle by the Vietnamese people, north and south, who were determined to free their nation from imperialist domination. They were finally victorious on April 30, 1975, when liberation fighters gained complete control of the southern part of their country--a victory for working people worldwide.
To working people in the United States, the enemy is not our fellow workers and farmers in Vietnam--the enemy of humanity is in Washington.
Kerrey was an officer in the Navy's special forces division. He admits they operated under "unwritten rules" that gave them a green light to "kill if you thought that would be better.... We were instructed to take no prisoners." These assassination squads, like other of the military special forces units, are glorified by bourgeois politicians and the media. But the actions of "Kerrey's Raiders" more accurately sum up how they are used to terrorize those whom Washington views as its enemies.
Many backing Kerrey blame what happened on the "fog" of war. But this is precisely why war conventions have been adopted and formally agreed to by Washington. They prohibit murder of civilians, mistreatment of prisoners, and other "unfortunate" consequences of modern warfare.
The brutality of Washington's war on Vietnam was not a case of "excesses" but inherent in the class character of U.S. imperialism's government and its armed forces, in particular the officer corps.
The Militant has been featuring a series on the victory by the Cuban people against the U.S.-organized mercenary invasion in April 1961 and the examples of what revolutionary Cuba's internationalist support to freedom struggles around the world has accomplished. Not one Cuban leader has stated what Sen. John McCain, an air force pilot during the Vietnam War, said: "All of us involved in wars do things we're proud of and things we're not so proud of."
Cuban internationalist volunteers, a total of 300,000, did not commit any massacres during their decade-long defense of Angola in the 1970s and '80s. The few isolated instances of abuse of the local population were harshly punished. This is because the Cuban armed forces have a different class character than the imperialist army and serve to advance, rather than roll back, the march of humanity.
The publicity and debate around the Kerrey revelations have as much to do with today and tomorrow as the past. From the invasion of Panama in 1989, to the 1990-91 U.S.-led slaughter of Iraqi people, to the bombing of Yugoslavia aimed at working people, the U.S. rulers are increasingly driven to use military power to pursue their interests. Far from winning the Cold War, Washington is pressed to push and probe, expand its military power, to confront and eventually seek to violently uproot the historic conquests of working people who overturned capitalism in Russia, China, and other workers states. The antimissile system being pursued by Washington, a system that would give it a nuclear first-strike capacity, is a centerpiece of this drive.
The U.S. rulers' brutality toward workers and farmers around the globe is an extension of their brutality toward working people at home, especially oppressed nationalities. This is true of police executions of workers on the street, the wider use of the death penalty, and the deaths of workers on the job as a result of the bosses' profit-driven speedup.
The Vietnam exposures demonstrate what the U.S. ruling class has in store for workers, farmers, and youth who resist the devastating consequences of the world crisis of capitalism and Washington's drive to reassert its place as the final empire. Out of the resistance of working people--evident in the strikes, rallies, and demonstrations covered in just this issue of the Militant--it is possible to begin to build a revolutionary leadership capable of leading workers and farmers to take power out of the hands of the warmakers in Washington.