NYT: Coming Soon: Kerry's 'Apocalypse Now'

[mia]

FRANK RICH
Coming Soon: Kerry's 'Apocalypse Now'
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/arts/12RICH.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib

Published: September 12, 2004

LESS than 48 hours after Bill Clinton, speaking from his hospital room, advised the politically ailing John Kerry to start talking less about Vietnam and more about health care, seven American marines were blown up outside Fallujah. So much for the pipedream of changing the subject of this election. Vietnam keeps popping out of America's darkest closet not just because Mr. Kerry conspicuously served there and Mr. Bush conspicuously did not, but because of what's happening half a world away in real time: a televised war in Iraq that resembles its Southeast Asian predecessor in its unpopularity, its fictional provocation and its unknown exit strategy. That war isn't going anywhere by Nov. 2, even as it is sporadically obscured by Florida storm clouds, and its Vietnam undertow isn't going anywhere either. Everyone knows that a Tet offensive, Sunni-style, could yet tilt this election in a direction unknown.

...What stares you in the face is the anguish and grief of men who put their lives in the line of fire for a government that undertook a pointless war, mismanaged it, kept it going out of hubris and then abandoned it. These veterans do not lightheartedly toss away the symbols of their sacrifice in Vietnam; they struggle with tears and violently conflicted emotions as they do so. They are battered men often wearing the ragtag remnants of their uniforms. Their eyes are haunted. They are willing to engage in self-annihilation, eradicating the record of their own heroism in battle, if that's what it takes to prevent their brothers from continuing to die in a doomed mission. Watch this and try not to weep.

...The person who might most benefit from seeing "Going Upriver" is Mr. Kerry himself. "It takes a special courage to speak out against a cause for which you were once prepared to die," Jeffrey Smith, a West Point-trained C.I.A. man of the Kerry-Bush generation, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend. That's the courageous hero of George Butler's film, all but invisible in the cautious candidate running for president with a position on Iraq so full of codicils that one of his top foreign-policy aides, Jamie Rubin, recently misstated it. Even Pat Buchanan articulates the ill effects of the Iraq war on the war on terror more precisely than Mr. Kerry. The Democrat's latest salvo on Iraq — "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" — no more undoes his past self-contradictory remarks on the subject than alliterative Bush slogans like "reformer with results" and "compassionate conservatism" give the president a coherent domestic policy.

Then again, if Mr. Clinton and the other new Kerry advisers are right and health care really turns out to be the most important issue in the election, it may not matter what their man says about Iraq. And if Mr. Bush can really persuade voters that the war in Iraq is World War II redux, he is no more likely to lose reelection in 2004 than F.D.R. was in 1944. But the same Newsweek poll that gave Mr. Bush an 11-point lead last weekend also found that most of these same Americans do not believe that the war in Iraq has made us safer. That's a Vietnam election-year dynamic, no matter how much the president or Mr. Kerry wants to run away from it. It's why the thousandth American casualty in Iraq may weigh more than the fractional fluctuations of the unemployment rate. It's why Fallujah, not Ohio, may prove the swing state to watch.

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1. This is a good read. Thanks. n/t