It’s sure getting hard to please the American Legion these days, or at least its national commander, Thomas Cadmus.
The Legion, which has 2.7 million members, held its national convention last week in Honolulu. There, Cadmus said that “Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm’s way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies.”
Note that Article III, Section 3, of the federal Constitution states that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Thus Commander Cadmus comes across quite clearly. If you join a public protest against the war in Iraq, you’re committing treason.
He will allow you to oppose the war, though.
“No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it,” he explained, “but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials than by public media events to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies.”
So, you can write your senator and representative and remain an American in good standing. Just stay away from those “public media events.”
That raises an interesting question. How much influence do these “public media events” have on the battlefield? Are soldiers demoralized when Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year, camps outside the Bush ranch near Crawford, Texas, and asks for an audience with the president?
Are American soldiers heartened when pro-war citizens gather nearby and raise a banner that says “God Bless our President”? Aren’t these both “public media events” that probably wouldn’t be happening if no cameras were present? Does Cadmus want both sides to content themselves with writing their elected officials?
Most of this traces back to Vietnam, of course, and various theories of why we lost. One view is that it was a military defeat, plain and simple. Robert McNamara, one of the architects of that war, wrote years afterward that he had calculated, as early as 1966, that the United States could not interdict enough supplies and manpower to keep the Viet Cong from eventually winning. In other words, an American military victory was never possible there.
Another view is that the U.S. could have won militarily, but lost its will to persevere. In that version, the Viet Cong were basically whipped when they threw everything they had into the Tet offensive of early 1968. The sight of Viet Cong in downtown Saigon was not significant militarily, the argument goes, but when Americans saw it on TV, support for the war faded away, so the Tet campaign was a great propaganda coup.
The problem with that view is that if Tet was a propaganda coup, it sure took a long time to take effect. Two years after Tet, there were still a quarter of a million American soldiers in Vietnam. More than seven years passed before the last American soldiers left Vietnam as the North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon.
Public opposition to a war is not a product of the modern media age. More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian dramatist Aristophanes opposed his city-state’s wars in plays like “The Birds” and “Lysistrata.” King George III of England faced strong parliamentary opposition, sometimes expressed in the press of the realm, to his government’s efforts to subdue certain rebellious colonies in North America, but his government pursued the war for five years.
During our Civil War, there weren’t just anti-war protesters in the North who wanted to let the South depart in peace. There were 50,000 people engaged in a savage three-day anti-draft riot in New York City during the summer of 1863. Yet the North carried on, and the morale of Union soldiers did not suffer even as the casualties mounted during Grant’s invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1864.
So it’s hard to see just why American Legion Commander Cadmus is so worried that he equates public statements with treason that endangers our country. As far as I’m concerned, the “enemies of America” are those people who would deprive us of our rights as Americans – and we have the right to state our views to the public at large, not just our elected officials, no matter what Commander Cadmus thinks.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
