The
Future of Freedom Foundation| The
Future of Freedom Foundation |
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November
12, 2007 It would be easy to criticize McCain for politically exploiting his five-and-half years of suffering as a captive of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. But there's a more important point to be made. Had McCain simply attacked Clinton's attempt at pork-barrel spending -- the museum is set to open next year in Bethel, New York -- that would have been fine (although McCain, too, has some pork-barreling on his record). Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to support any kind of museum. But McCain had much more on his mind than presidential ambition and protection of the taxpayers. He was making a point about war and dissent. And here's where he gets it very wrong. McCain says he was unable to make Woodstock because he was "tied up." How so? Was he kidnapped while sleeping in his own bed and carried off to the Hanoi Hilton? No, he was a naval pilot flying an A-4 Skyhawk near Hanoi. The A-4 is an attack aircraft. Wikipedia says it was "the Navy's primary light bomber over ... North Vietnam during the early years of the Vietnam War." It was used to drop some of the first and last bombs on that country during the long war, which is estimated to have killed two million Vietnamese. On October 26, 1967, anti-aircraft fire brought down McCain's plane. He was beaten by a mob, then taken as a POW and tortured and permanently disabled during his long captivity. While McCain undoubtedly suffered beyond imagination, the full context of his situation needs to be maintained. In the eyes of the North Vietnamese -- and by any objective standard -- McCain was the aggressor. He was dropping bombs on their country -- about 8,000 miles from his home. He and his defenders would respond that he was serving his country and protecting Americans' freedom. He wasn't. North Vietnam never attacked the American people. The public was told it had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, but the U.S. government knew that was not true. And in any case, U.S. naval forces were gathering intelligence in behalf of the South Vietnamese government, with whom the North Vietnamese were at war. The U.S. navy was hardly minding its own business. McCain, then, was not protecting the American people. In fact, he was interfering in a civil war, and was protecting a repressive, corrupt South Vietnamese government and an American president (Johnson) who knew that Americans and Vietnamese were dying in a futile U.S. intervention. McCain's self-righteous excuse for missing Woodstock is tissue-thin. What about the folks who were able to attend Woodstock? (Lots of Republican war hawks, such as President Bush and Vice President Cheney, were available, but apparently did not attend.) It's safe to say that everybody at Woodstock was against the war in Vietnam and the draft that was sending young guys over to kill and risk being killed. If that crowd had had its way, the war wouldn't have been fought. The people attending cheered to songs such as this one by Country Joe and the Fish: Well,
come on mothers throughout the land, Thus, if the Woodstock war position had prevailed, McCain wouldn't have been dropping bombs on Hanoi and wouldn't have been shot down, imprisoned, and tortured. Moreover, as one blogger speculates, had it not been for the anti-war movement, McCain might have been executed rather than eventually released by the North Vietnamese.
Gary D. Barnett is president of Barnett Financial Services, Inc., in Missoula, Montana Tibor Machan is a Hoover research fellow, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, holds the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at Chapman University’s Argyros School of B and E and is a research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and Hoover Institution (Stanford). He is an advisor to Freedom Communications. His most recent book is Libertarianism Defended, (Ashgate, 2006).
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association."
Scott McPherson is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Samuel Bostaph is head of the economics department at the University of Dallas and an academic advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation
Anthony Gregory is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, January 2006) and Terrorism & Tyranny (Palgrave, 2003), and is policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation
Benedict LaRosa is a historian and writer and serves as a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation
Bart Frazier is program director at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email. |
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