Lt. Kerry Cartoon

Last week I drew a cartoon critical of John Kerry’s repeated reliance on his service during the Vietnam War in his campaign. In a crusade that proves blinders aren’t the exclusive domain of the right, many Democrats have written me to remind me–as if I didn’t know!–that defeating George W. Bush is so important that all patriotic Americans must unite to defeat him. And again: duh.

Look, I’m going to vote for Kerry. And I’m urging others to do so. But Kerry’s vote for the war in Iraq makes him vulnerable to the charge that he was following the polls more than his principles when he cast that vote. And his continued trumpeting of his bravery during Vietnam–a war he came to oppose later than most other Americans–makes it seem like he doesn’t understand one simple fact.

That fact is that there is nothing honorable about having served in Vietnam. The United States murdered more than a million Vietnamese in a harebrained attempt to prop up a corrupt puppet regime fighting a proxy war. U.S. troops, as Kerry testified after the fact, committed countless war crimes and atrocities against innocent people. The war was shit; fighting bravely and gallantly in a shit war doesn’t erase that.

It would be far more effective for Kerry to say that Iraq is a mistake similar to Vietnam, and that he was mistaken to support both.