Over the course of the longest war in American history, the people of Afghanistan had been terrorized by everything from cluster-bombing to house-to-house raids to arbitrary detention and torture to drone strikes on wedding parties. By the time President Joe Biden finally withdrew US forces in 2021, twenty years of brutalization by the US occupiers had so deeply alienated the population that the government we’d been propping up literally couldn’t survive for a week without US backing. American soldiers were still being taken to the airport when the government fell.
The war was not only a failure but was marked by innumerable atrocities. US soldiers were well known to use racist and dehumanizing language when describing Afghan civilians — “hajis,” “towelheads” and even “sand ni***rs” — making it easier to kill them without remorse. But Trump thinks the problem was that we were just too “politically correct” about war tactics in Afghanistan.
Over the course of the war in Vietnam, the United States dropped an estimated 388,000 tons of napalm, which literally burns its victims alive, on North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”) guerrillas in South Vietnam hid out in jungles, so there was a conscious and explicit attempt to destroy those hiding places with Agent Orange and other defoliants, causing generations of birth defects. Entire villages were routinely destroyed so guerrillas wouldn’t find food and shelter there, with their inhabitants herded against their will to “strategic hamlets.”
When Richard Nixon decided to expand the war by invading Cambodia, his instructions to the Air Force, infamously relayed by his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to his deputy Alexander Haig in a recorded call, were, “Anything that flies on anything that moves.” After a trip decades later, the late Anthony Bourdain said that, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
Like US soldiers in Afghanistan, soldiers imagined Vietnamese people as subhumans, enabling merciless bloodshed without the interference of conscience. One Vietnam veteran wrote a poem about this decidedly politically incorrect practice: “We were taught to call them gook / slope, slant, and worse / because it’s easier to kill / that way, easier to sleep at night / if you’ve merely crushed a roach / under your boot heel.”
The official Vietnamese estimate for the number of deaths in the war, counting both civilians and military, is over three million. Even if that’s an overestimate and the real number is, say, half of that, then “only” a million and a half people died in a country of thirty-six million. That’s a staggering number. It’s a death toll that defies Donald Trump’s characterization of the military as overly restrained.
Trump seems to think that Nixon and Kissinger were hamstrung by “politically correct” hesitations about using whatever level of force would lead to an easy victory. So what does he think that level of force would have been? How many more hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm should have been poured on Southeast Asian peasants? Should we have nuked Hanoi? And what exactly should George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump himself (who was president for four years of the Afghanistan War) have done to that long-suffering country that they weren’t already doing?
Some conservatives and contrarian commentators have said they support Trump because he supposedly believes in a more tempered foreign policy and rejects the “neocon” wing of his party. Here, though, we have Trump arguing that the classic examples of bloody unwinnable quagmires were winnable after all — if only the United States had used a bit less restraint. If Nixon and Bush hadn’t been such gentle, sensitive, politically correct figures, unwilling to commit the really serious war crimes, there would be US-aligned governments in power in Vietnam and Afghanistan today.
I wish Russia had woke too.