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May 14, 2004

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The Impact of “Experience” In War and Politics

Dan Skinner

I. John Kerry’s 1971 Testimony

With the 2004 US presidential election approaching, a debate is raging over Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam War experience, and particularly his 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the head of the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In his testimony, Kerry detailed atrocities committed by American soldiers, in an attempt to inject the experiences of soldiers themselves into the national debate over the war. During his testimony, Kerry summarized the tales shared by soldiers at a previous VVAW event in Detroit, in which Vietnam Veterans

told stories that, 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 Ghengis 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.

What was most striking about the political reaction to Kerry’s testimony was not disagreement over his factual claims—those had already and have since been documented in dozens of news reports and books—but rather the extent to which the individual experiences of the soldiers that Kerry relied upon were delegitimized as sources of historical evidence. Recent critiques in The National Review, The New York Post and elsewhere have focused on discrediting this testimony, elevating the status of second-hand press accounts and military studies that are known to have been plagued by massive information-gathering problems. Recent critiques have blurred the important distinction between a universal statement—which would have implicated, for example, all military personnel—and a report of individual experiences, of Kerry himself and the men for whom he spoke. Even though Kerry did not claim that every or even most soldiers had committed these atrocities, his testimony has been refracted by the media as the work of a hero-cum-turncoat-cum-politician whose transformation has stripped him of all credibility.

The confessional nature of Kerry’s testimony was lost on many of his critics, who interpreted his statements as universalistic; if they were universal, they recognized, they too would be implicated. As loyal defenders of sanctioned propaganda, much of the mainstream media reported that Kerry was accusing all soldiers of committing those acts. There seemed no room for the kind of first-hand, personal experience on which Kerry based his testimony. That his testimony was the culmination of prior conferences where these experiences were discussed candidly and at length was ignored by the press.

This rejection of Kerry’s voice is highly ironic since the war in Vietnam is an issue on which, as a soldier, he is perhaps better qualified than any to speak. Moreover, Kerry had little to gain by implicating himself in atrocities. What was ignored by the media was the notion that Kerry’s confessions demonstrate his dedication to some ideal or some belief larger than himself. Kerry had begun from a point of personal experience and attempted, much to the chagrin of his opponents, to reconsider the experience itself as though it might have something to benefit others. Instead, it was rejected as the illegitimate universalization of one man’s experience.

The role of experience was especially interesting in this context since at no point was it suggested that individual responsibility for crimes was the central issue. Instead, Kerry took a route similar to that of Hannah Arendt at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she argued that it was society itself—and not only Eichmann or the Nazis—that should be charged for genocide. For Kerry, the United States, including both its government and its complicit populace, was implicated in the My Lai massacre and Lt. William L. Calley Jr. served as nothing more than a scapegoat.

Kerry’s was not a legal argument, and he sought neither punishment nor accountability. His goal, instead, was to prevent future atrocities. He also called for policy consideration for those who were lost in the repressive and self-propelling structures of war. Instead of condemning individual soldiers, war itself was indicted as the supreme crime that, by its very nature, forced soldiers to commit these terrible acts. Kerry argued, in an unwittingly Foucaultian fashion, that soldiers are merely the vehicles through which atrocities are carried out, given the structures in which they are forced to operate. Kerry’s testimony, in short, was an example of such a vehicle refusing its role as an agent of war.

This problem of experience betrays a tendency in politics to treat personal growth as inherently suspect. Through this prism, Kerry’s later decision to leave what he has described as an increasingly radicalized VVAW can be seen only as political opportunism and positioning. With “flip-flop” the catchword of the day, transformative experiences have been rendered politically impotent and inherently dubious.
Jonathan Schell, writing in The Nation, recently took a step toward distinguishing transformative experiences from “flip-flops.” Transformative experience, he writes, is concerned primarily with a “truth” derived from one person’s experience. It is valid in its own right as an experience, and is not subject to political concerns or interpretation. Transformative experiences also cannot be proved true or false, a point of intersection that they share with performative statements. The charges of “flip-flopping” that have been lodged against Kerry, on the other hand, are political charges. They can be verified by examining Kerry’s words and votes, and rightly deserve a political response since they weigh greatly on the expectations voters can have towards Kerry’s stated policy positions. Political positions, unlike personal transformations, must be accounted for, while transformative experiences are valid in and of themselves. Schell also notes that “truth-telling” resulting from experience is often met with skepticism instead of praise. This is truer still of anti-war positions in American politics.

Although this is not the place to analyze this phenomenon throughout American political history, some general comments should be made. Transformative experience is only considered politically valid so long as the outcome of a transformation conforms to official positions (e.g. the various myths that propel war efforts) within the acceptable bounds of a totalizing discourse. Transformative experiences that fail to do this are rejected as politically motivated “flip-flops” and fail to find resonance within the official narrative of war and acceptable transformative experiences.
Kerry’s testimony met with a similar response. He countered official claims that had framed the Vietnam War as a war in defense of South Vietnam, and commented on the forces that war sets in motion in general. Yet much media today, with a special emphasis on the likely suspects—right-wing talk radio pundits—have proved unwilling to acknowledge Kerry’s main points. They justify this by refuting instead an implicit claim that one man can represent a universal (when in fact a close read of the testimony shows that Kerry did not claim to represent any group beyond those individuals for whom he was authorized to speak), and misquoting and misrepresenting Kerry’s words to make it appear as if he were claiming to represent all Vietnam veterans and attributing the crimes of which he spoke to every individual soldier. Furthermore, the implication that soldiers still on the ground in Vietnam in 1971 as the hearings took place might have been committing such acts even then posed obvious problems for Nixon’s insistence that the United States was in the process of achieving “peace with honor.”

In Notes on Nationalism. George Orwell argues that an important identifying mark of a nationalist is the loss of the ability to think analogically about the actions of the nation. Specifically, through the prism of nationalism, two structurally similar situations will inevitably be seen as incomparable (we are seeing this already in the argument over whether Vietnam is in some way similar to Iraq—many Americans simply will not accept that there may be parallels).

Kerry’s rejection of asymmetrical, nationalist logic was an important and controversial aspect of his testimony, but it also reveals an important lesson facilitated by the experience of war. War thrusts people into conditions that often shatter official dogma while simultaneously forcing soldiers to doubt their own judgment and moral clarity. Oftentimes, being forced into a defensive posture forces soldiers to rely on the myth of the war, perhaps by increasingly objectifying his or her enemy. But in the post-war period, when the soldier combines reflection and experience, a higher order of analogical power is possible.

Kerry’s anger, and his willingness to defy official doctrine, was a response of this sort. His presentation applies effective analogical powers to the situation in Vietnam, many of which contradict the myths that made the war possible in the first place. The most striking example of this is Kerry’s willingness to admit that US soldiers committed crimes, a seemingly obvious point for the non-nationalist but one that has had virtually no resonance in American political culture. What is most interesting about the response to Kerry’s testimony, then, is not that Kerry’s “facts” were rejected, but rather that that his statements were based on the experiences of soldiers themselves who confessed to having committed the crimes. The structure of Kerry’s argument relied on soldiers coming to terms with their own actions, not on accusations leveled by other parties.

Kerry also breeched an important taboo with his claim that the war in Vietnam was “the biggest nothing in history.” According to the tradition of thousands of years of government doctrine, wars are always purposeful—a position taken to ensure that each death is seen as a contribution to a worthy cause. What is most interesting about this stance from the perspective of experience is that all soldiers undoubtedly find purpose in military service at one point or another—if only to justify a situation they were forced into—and yet it is inevitable that the individual’s sense of purpose at the outset of a war will be quite changed by the end. Yet the official stated purpose of the war itself must remain consistent throughout, or else, if revised, it must be re-explained with a supplemental myth that at least falls within the framework of its previous iterations. This, as we have seen in particularly stark terms in the war in Iraq, does not require that the specific reasoning remain the same (e.g. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” vs. the “Liberation of Iraq”), but the purpose itself must be continuously present.

This relatively stable national purpose stands in stark opposition to the individual soldier’s personal transformation. Individual experience, which in its most basic form is intersubjectively produced, must remain open to change. It embodies that which responds to the uncertainty of life—passively and reflectively—with an attempt to understand changing events at its center. Experience can be neither prescribed nor proscribed.

This conflict between individual experience and political rationale has potentially enormous implications. First, within the framework of politics, transformative experiences are required to conform to official positions. Kerry, for example, is not credited for his ability to develop from a soldier willing to die for his nation into a critic of unjust and criminal policies. Instead of praising the value of experience and growth, Kerry’s change is branded as insincere political opportunism and even treason. Instead of being interpreted as a form of growth, it is read backwards as a betrayal of a former ideal. Kerry’s testimony, and the response to it from his opponents, shows that there is no room in American political culture for the naïve, trusting young soldier to grow into the wiser, more experienced statesperson. Official myths require that he or she remain consistent, even if that means remaining undeveloped and naïve.
The treatment of Kerry’s testimony is an example of the vigor with which the voice of the experienced individual can be denied its place as a legitimate source of commentary on political issues, even though it would appear that such individual accounts are in fact the best sources of intelligence. Instead, we see individuals like Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joseph Wilson, and a host of former US generals and policy planners from the Bush administration subjected to concerted character assassination in return for their candid first-hand accounts. This treatment of experienced individuals makes it difficult for lone actors to impact policy, and devalues the role of personal experience on official positions built on non-empirical abstraction.

II. “Mistakes Were [Not] Made” or “War Changed Me”

Like every negative theoretical assertion about politics (such as that certain kinds of individual transformation are taboo), there is another side of the issue. The transformation from soldier to anti-war activist requires the capacity to admit that one was mislead, and that many young people have died because of a mistake in judgment. Of course, in the case of war and Vietnam in particular, these judgments were made by thousands of soldiers on the basis of falsified pretexts, articulated most clearly in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the numerous other official myths detailed in documents like the Pentagon Papers. Those who can stare such mistakes squarely in the eye and allow that knowledge to convert them into a force for good are those qualified to promote what one might call a politics of growth.

Unfortunately, realpolitik political considerations have led virtually every president since Richard Nixon, and even a few who came before him, to engage in the art of deniability, which Charles Baxter has defined as “the almost complete disavowal of intention in relation to bad consequences.” The history of deniability has been well-documented, but what has not been shown is the way in which this feature of the modern presidency embraces a failure to transform, and treats personal experience itself as something only to be contextualized within accepted narratives. This culture of deniability rejects experience as a guide to a politics in a changing, dynamic world. The events of September 11, 2001, and official responses to terrorism in general, illustrate this position well: one does not negotiate when one is under attack, regardless of the wisdom that may be gained or the lives saved. September 11, instead, ossified former policies, as though “bridge burning”—a politics of total commitment to extant policy positions—had become synonymous with American foreign policy itself.
More generally, a discussion of mistakes has become the mark of the tension between commitment to policy positions and transformative experiences. As Kerry noted in 1971, “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, ‘the first President to lose a war.’”

Nixon held that admitting that misguided judgment brought America into Vietnam in the first place would be more detrimental than submitting American soldiers—as vehicles of this policy—to a war of attrition. His policy on Vietnam—like the policies of Kennedy, Johnson, and as is Bush’s position on Iraq today—was characterized by a willingness to trade the lives of individual soldiers for a rhetorical position that denies the positive gains that can be made from admitting mistakes.

In the final analysis, all of these administrations have relied upon the same universal “we” that Kerry has been accused of having relied upon in 1971. CIA Director George Tenet’s comment on April 13, 2004, debatably speaking for the CIA, that “we made mistakes,” echoes Kissinger’s allowance that "…it is quite possible that mistakes were made.”

The combination of the passive voice and the universal, undefined “we” has provided a firm rhetorical buffer behind which government officials can evade personal responsibility. At the same time, it denies the vehicles of its own policies the right to shape their personal experiences into a meaningful position in terms of policy. On the other hand, Kerry, as a representative of an organization and with reference to the prior accounts upon which his 1971 testimony was based, did not leave his pronouns empty. The object of Kerry’s “we” was clearly defined, and his “I” was unmistakable. Kerry’s boldest flouting of official doctrine was in utilizing the political shock that comes from attaching otherwise nebulous notions of atrocity to a well-defined “I,” or an identifiable, repentant “we.” Such a transgression forced officials to acknowledge that, in fact, their policies are not carried out by abstractions but by living, and dying human beings.