It makes me sick at heart to see how militaristic many people on the ostensible left are these days.
Specifically, I find it wrongheaded in the extreme that virtually everyone on this end of the political spectrum finds a need to excuse -- or, more often, to praise with great reverence -- John McCain's Vietnam experience.
A cursory review of the essential facts in the case would suggest that such reverence for what McCain did in Vietnam is hideously misplaced.
Though we're often told that McCain spent over five years as a POW, one thing we never get is a simple, straightforward explanation of how, specifically, he wound up in that Vietnamese prison in the first place.
In the summer and early autumn of 1967, McCain flew 23 missions over North Vietnam in connection with Operation Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder killed at least 100,000 (estimates vary) North Vietnamese civilians despite U.S. efforts to minimize "collateral damage."
To put that in perspective, North Vietnam's population was then about 17 million. So a proportionately lethal campaign against America (2008 pop. +/- 305 million) would kill roughly 1.8 million U.S. civilians -- about 600 times the number of deaths America suffered in the 9/11 attacks.
McCain's final Rolling Thunder mission in particular was morally problematic. On October 26, 1967, he flew one of 20 planes that attacked the Yen Phu power plant in central Hanoi. The plant had previously been off-limits to U.S. bombers because it was feared that bombing it could cause "collateral damage" -- but the pilots had the go-ahead to drop their bombs anyway. Defenders on the ground shot off one of McCain's plane's wings, after which he parachuted into nearby Truc Bach Lake. He was pulled from the lake, put in prison and, unsurprisingly, treated badly. He responded with behaviors that were very brave -- perhaps even noble.
But was he a "war hero"? McCain went to prison because he a) participated in Operation Rolling Thunder; and, specifically, b) helped bomb a power plant in the middle of a big city. Those actions are not "heroic," they're evil, and their immorality deeply overshadows any nobility that may have followed in prison.
To my mind, the bottom line in this matter is very, very simple: it's not okay to help kill vast numbers of people who have done nothing wrong to you, and it's not okay to destroy their infrastructure. Not even if bad people command you to do those things -- it's not okay.
And let's be clear: John McCain was no 18-year-old draftee. He was a man of 31, and he was part of America's permanent officer class. (His father and grandfather were four-star admirals.) That officer class helped devise the living hell that America inflicted on Southeast Asia.
In 2008 more than ever, hyper-militarized America needs to explore alternatives to the "diplomacy is for appeasers, send more troops" mentality that bred catastrophes in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere.
I don't know if I'm much of a Gandhian, but to the extent I'm not, shame on me. Not only did Gandhi have the moral high ground, as a tactician and strategist he was a nonpareil. He went up against not only many generals, but an empire -- and to great extents prevailed where armed forces never did nor could have. Done properly, nonviolence works.