By Charles Hurt
What a delightful change of pace it has been this past week listening to Secretary of State John F. Kerry accuse someone other than U.S. soldiers of committing atrocities against innocent civilians, women and children during war.
His animated recitation of chemical weapons use by Syrian strongman Bashar Assad
— high dudgeon we are told by his staff that he personally penned on
his iPad — brings to mind the first time the Secretary of Insufferable
Wind-Baggery shed light unto the world of heinous crimes against
mankind.
“Not isolated incidents,” he told a congressional
committee in 1972. “But crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the
full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
He was not, of course, talking about the Assad regime. Not about Ho Chi Minh or even about what the Viet Cong was doing at that very moment to U.S. soldiers held in prisoner-of-war camps.
No, he claims he was talking about what he had heard U.S. troops were doing to innocent women, children and civilians in Vietnam. Troops he had served alongside. Troops he returned safely home from — only to betray in the most despicable way.
“They
told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut
off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and
turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at
civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot
cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the
countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war,
and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied
bombing power of this country,” Mr. Kerry told the congressional committee.
Again,
this was all hearsay — so, not even admissible in traffic court — but,
hey, the cameras were rolling, and he was in the spotlight. You’ve got
to perform when your time comes if you want to get ahead.
A lot of people still remember Mr. Kerry’s
traitorous testimony, especially American prisoners of war sitting in
squalid dungeons, starving and trying to recover from their last
beatings. They remember the testimony because that is what their VC
captors played over the loud speakers in the concentration camps.
His effete, drawn-out pronunciation of “Genghis Khan” was what stuck in their heads even decades later.
For those soldiers, their belief in a just cause was their only succor. And Mr. Kerry stripped from them that last reason to stay alive. But no worries, Mr. Kerry
had a glittering future ahead of him, squiring around wealthy women and
establishing a political career that would allow him to talk endlessly
into microphones as much as he wanted.
Now, to be fair to the
Secretary of Insufferable Wind-Baggery, U.S. soldiers are not the only
other people he has accused of committing mass atrocities.
He also accused Iraqi madman Saddam Hussein.
“I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force — if necessary — to disarm Saddam Hussein
because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction
in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security,” he grandly
orated in the run-up to the Iraq War.
“Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein,” he eloquated a few months later. “He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime.”
That
impassioned fervor lasted well, it lasted until the next election, in
which he found it to his professional benefit to oppose the war in Iraq.
Remember, on the campaign trail he boasted how he had actually been for
the war before he was against the war.
Not only was that yet
another easy betrayal of U.S. soldiers, it also turned out to be really
bad politics. But it is all worth keeping in mind as Mr. Kerry marshals his splenetic ardor in his latest crusade against atrocities that may or may not last through the next election.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.
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