Unlike Pavlov, (or Quasimodo), the name Ben Tre probably doesn’t ring a bell, but it should, since it gave rise to one of the most notorious incidents and oft-repeated verbal encapsulations of the Vietnam War. During the Tet offensive in 1968, Peter Arnett, at the time a correspondent with AP, quoted an unnamed United States Major explaining the decision to bomb and shell the town of this name, regardless of civilian casualties: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Worth repeating and italicizing, because it is so stunningly stupid as well as insensitive: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Sadly, the Ben Tre syndrome has been repeating itself, not only in our various foreign entanglements, but even domestically. The moniker is especially warranted when it comes to the Republican budget, which—among other things—is designed to destroy Medicare and the social safety net more generally “in order to save it.” Rarely has there been such blatant and despicable hypocrisy, such a dubious claim of being “cruel only to be kind.”
Most of the Republican congressional “young guns,” “young Turks” (or young jerks, or twirps, or whatever) weren’t even born when Ben Tre was “saved.” Nonetheless, they and their elders-but-no-wisers seem eager to demonstrate that those who don’t know history—or who intentionally misrepresent it—are doomed to repeat it.
For all the horror of what actually happened at Ben Tre, the furor evoked by its “outing” had an upside: exposing the muscle-bound, ethically vacant, and strategically idiotic U.S. Vietnam “policy” at the time.
Silver lining in today’s cloud: It is beginning to look as though the current incarnation of Ben Tre might have a comparable effect on Republican political prospects in 2012. Let’s hope.
And so, as I prepare to depart to lecture at Cambridge University (about biology, not bombs or budgets), I’d like to leave my fellow Americans with the suggestion that we clearly identify this phony savior-syndrome—one that would be laughable if its results weren’t so tragic—and identify the “Ryan plan” for what it is: a Ben Tre Budget, intended to destroy America’s social safety net “in order to save it.”