Unless We Acknowledge The Past Essay Example for Free

Unless We Acknowledge The Past Essay In 1967, facing divided military councils and serious domestic opposition to the Vietnam War, the Defense Department commissioned a team of analysts to prepare a secret study of how the United States became involved in the war. The study was intended to give America’s leaders an authoritative, objective account of the war. Parts of the secret study were leaked to the New York Times in 1971, and the newspaper began publishing reports based on these materials. The government sued to enjoin publication, but the United States Supreme Court ruled that the publication could proceed. The New York Times then published a series of articles with supporting documents, which it later issued in book form as The Pentagon Papers. The remarkable feature of The Pentagon Papers is its objectivity. Those who prepared the original study had unlimited access to government documents. Their goal was objectivity. Their work was to be secret, so that they were free of concerns about playing to a public audience. That the government sought to bar publication lent an added imprimatur of candor to the report. In their articles, the New York Times reporters strove for a similarly objective style. Chapter 5 of The Pentagon Papers shows that at a critical juncture, America’s leaders lied to the nation. In 1964, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater promised to get tough with communism. Seeking re-election, President Lyndon Johnson campaigned as a moderate. 1 The Pentagon Papers show that Johnson was secretly widening the war in Vietnam throughout 1964. To do this, he ordered an increasing range of assaults against North Vietnam. When the North Vietnamese finally responded by attacking American destroyers off their coast, Johnson blasted these attacks as â€Å"unprovoked. † He asked Congress for a joint resolution approving increased American participation in the war. A supine Congress complied. With the publication of The Pentagon Papers, Congress would discover how completely it was misled. (Sheehan) Meanwhile, America plunged ahead, fighting in a country where it soldiers were racially unlike the indigenous people, did not speak the native language, and misunderstood the culture. The Los Angeles Times recently reported another coverup. Stories beginning August 6, 2006, reported that the American military knew of killings of civilians in Vietnam, and concealed this information for nearly 40 years. These included several massacre of civilians. Servicemen reported these during the war, only to have the military throw up smoke screens of denial. As in The Pentagon Papers, the Los Angeles Times articles are based on a recently disclosed secret archive detailing attacks on civilians. These documents show that the military frequently issued denials it knew were untruthful, wrongly impugned the credibility of those who reported atrocities, and otherwise strove to maintain secrecy. Again, the credibility of the documents is boosted by the government’s stubborn efforts to keep them secret. One story in the L. A. Times recounts how a young soldier watched as American soldiers carried out gruesome orders to â€Å"kill anything that moves. † (Turse) There was no evidence that any of the nineteen Vietnamese who were killed were combatants or that they resisted the Americans in any way. Confronted with the reports that these soldiers told, the Army suppressed the truth for nearly forty years. (Turse) The United States is now at war in Iraq. As in Vietnam, this is a war of occupation, fighting insurgents from within the indigenous population. American forces are racially distinct from the native peoples. They do not speak the language. They are unschooled in the culture. Already there are reports of killings of Iraqi civilians. Responding, a retired General who helped assemble the secret archive, John H. Johns, supports the disclosure of the incidents in Vietnam in light of alleged incidents in Iraq, saying . We cant change current practices unless we acknowledge the past.