Looking back with the luxury of time

One of the few advantages to growing old is the opportunity this presents to realize that the events we watch unfolding in real time will someday be a history that folks will evaluate, argue over, and likely rewrite time and again to suit their new realities. I remember my own internal debate when the start of the second Gulf War rolled around, and I thought the timing was all wrong. I figured we’d need to fight that war at some point, for Saddam would eventually do something to us that even the worst of America’s critics couldn’t excuse. Only then would going to war have been the “right” thing to do.

But nobody ever gets credit for a preemptive strike, because if successful, the ever-vocal critics will always claim it was unnecessary. I knew that anyone who could recite, “It’s Bush’s Fault” would never agree with his decision to start that war, even though they would be the first in line to condemn the man when Saddam did finally attack us. Their criticism was the only completely predictable element at the time.

I remember most of these same arguments during my generation’s war, Viet Nam. We thought we had it all figured out, back then. We got our information from some pretty reliable sources, and all of that information told us the war was wrong, that our country was wrong, and certainly that the men sent there to fight were really, really wrong. So I had it all worked out. America was unequivocally wrong to fight that war.

Some time passed before I realized that the information I had used to form my opinion on that war was a bit slanted, because the pretty reliable sources I relied upon were reliable only to the degree that they always criticized this country. They were not reliably correct, but merely consistent in their opinion.

In the four decades subsequent to that war, I’ve noted other opinion, and viewed previously unavailable information, and I’ve also had time to think. For myself.

For example, that photo of the crying Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, walking naked down the dirt lane, black smoke plume behind, that Pulitzer Prize photo taken in 1972, has resurfaced for its 40^th anniversary. We all remember that photo for it was the personification of all that America did during that war that was wrong. That photo of that little girl proved that America was the bad guys and everything America did was bad. And the pretty reliable sources all proclaimed this, and we took their clue and criticized our country.

The story that follows that photo evolved over the decades. Now we know that Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the nine year old girl injured in that attack was treated for about a year in a South Vietnamese hospital before returning to her home village. After the communist takeover, she wanted to go to school to become a doctor, but the government wanted her for propaganda purposes so they forced her to quit school and recite their monologues for the cameras.

Later, she traveled to Cuba to continue her education. She now relates talking with the photographer who took that photo while she was in Cuba, and she describes how careful she needed to be because the government was always listening, and she feared punishment.

She married, and while flying from Moscow back to Cuba, she fled the plane during a refueling stop in Canada and asked for asylum. She later became a Canadian citizen.

So the poster child for the enemies of America finally was able to flee communism and sought freedom in the West. And those nasty Americans, who fought that war to try to stop the spread of communism around the world, to help people like Phan Thi Kim Phuc find freedom, still face the criticism of those would like to see more people living under communism. All of this makes perfect sense, looking back on the history.

I have stated that we shall not have a true picture of the value or harm of the second Gulf War until decades have passed. Those who have led the criticism of Bush’s conduct of the war, the liberal professors, mass media, and deceitful politicians who would sell out anyone to keep themselves in office, are the same pretty reliable sources of information they were back during Nam. If we are listening to them now, we won’t much like what our nation does in that region. But what will we learn in the next 40 years about this latest attempt to preserve our freedom? Might be, this country could turn out to be “right” after all.