"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
The quote is from General William Westmoreland in the Osacr-winning documentary, "Hearts and Minds." As Derrick Jackson, in today's Boston Globe column entitled The Westmoreland mind-set recounts the story, the general was given two opportunities to clean up his statement, but like Al Campanis with Ted Koppel, kept repeating his basically racist views. And in the column Jackson tells us how this makes yet another unfortunate connection between Vietnam and Iraq.
First, about Vienam, Jackson reminds us
The quote was important because it spoke to a military and White House that assumed in Vietnam they would overpower an inferior people. Assumptions of cheap life in the East led to bombing without a conscience by the West, admitting no mistakes along the way.
Then the parallel with Iraq, courtesy of the words of our president, who while he does not say Iraqis or Arabs don't value life still elevates Americans above them:
'We're dealing with an enemy that has no conscience," Bush said on the campaign trail last year. ''Today, if you noticed, there was a car bomb near a school. These people are brutal. They -- they're the exact opposite of Americans. We value life and human dignity. They don't care about life and human dignity. We believe in freedom. They have an ideology of hate. And they're tough, but not as tough as America."
Calling that logic "twisted paternalism," Jackson notes that because we couldn't find WMD we changed the logic of our invasion to saving the Iraqis from Saddam.:
That was ironic, since we have bombed and killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Iraqi civilians to ''save" them. The right wing loves to hound liberals and the left, claiming that they ignored Saddam's prior carnage to his people. But two years after the invasion, the hawks have still not answered why two massacres -- however careful our soldiers tried to be -- make a right.
Jackson goes through some of the totally unsupported statements by Bush and Cheney about WMD. He closes with a powerful final two paragraphs. Remember, in the documentary the director actually filmed Wetsmoreland three times in giving him a chance to clean up his statement - what you read at the top of this entry is the third and most complete statement.
We will never admit it, but our bombs spoke Westmoreland's words. The administration believed Iraqi life was cheap and plentiful enough so the people left standing would not complain about those lowered into the grave. This was best expressed in Cheney's boast the Sunday before the invasion that ''we will be greeted as liberators." That was the same day that Cheney also said the White House believed Saddam had reconstituted nuclear weapons, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said there were none.
Exaggerated claims for war. Bombing the innocent to defeat our opposites. Westmoreland failed in Vietnam, playing the enemy for cheap. Iraq is failing, with Americans discovering how cheaply their president played them. There is yet no director in this remake to yell, ''Cut!"
If all of this were put in a future documentary, will the viewers consider it similar to Westmoreland's statement? What will they think of an administration that acted like this? And what will they think of a nation that reelected such an administration? FInally, is there anything we can do to rectify the situation?