The Dust of Life

Posted by Sappho on October 13th, 2019 filed in Music, News and Commentary

Miss Saigon is playing this week at Segerstrom in Orange County. I have never seen it, and am not planning to see this show. Instead I’ve heard the soundtrack, have seen the opera on which it was based, Madame Butterfly, and the movie M. Butterfly, which takes the Madame Butterfly story in an entirely different direction. But it has been on my mind this week, in particular the song “Bui Doi“.

They’re called Bui-Doi
The dust of life
Conceived in Hell
And born in strife
They are the living reminder of all the good we failed to do
We can’t forget
Must not forget
That they are all our children, too

“Bui Doi,” Miss Saigon

Let’s say the obvious. First, it’s not clear that the Vietnamese term term “bui doi” referred to Amerasian children before the musical Miss Saigon came out in 1989. Second, as you might expect from a musical that, rather than turning the Madame Butterfly story upside down as the movie M. Butterfly does, does a straightforward update of the Madame Butterfly character, Miss Saigon is controversial as well as popular, drawing criticism for its handling of race.

But I don’t feel I can add anything to discussion of the racial themes of a show I’ve never seen. It’s the soundtrack that I’ve heard, and I can only work with that soundtrack, not the full visual impact of what you may see of Kim onstage.

And, besides, this post isn’t, exactly, meant to be about Miss Saigon, but rather about something else.

#BREAKING: Kurdish Human right activist & The secretary-general of the Future Syria Party,Ms #Hervin_Khalaf ,has been raped & then stoned to death by #Turkey backed Jihadists near #Hasakah during Turkey’s ethnic cleansing operation against #Kurds in Syria. @brett_mcgurk #amnesty

Botin Kurdistani Twitter account

A week ago, following a phone call between Erdogan and Trump, Trump announced that US troops in northeast Syria would be getting out of the way, clearing the way for an assault by our NATO ally Turkey, and “essentially abandoning Kurdish fighters who fought alongside American forces in the yearslong battle to defeat Islamic State militants. “

It was a move that, in one sense, perhaps should not have come as a surprise. Trump had attempted the same move nearly a year ago, in December 2018, prompting the resignation of Jim Mattis and of Brett McGurk, and vigorous push back from Congress. For a time it seemed he had dropped the idea, but now he has revived it, and with a lack of warning to allies and to the Pentagon that makes life easier for Erdogan (who got to take the Kurds by surprise) and for Trump (who got to move before others in the government could organize resistance), but worse, obviously, for the Kurds, and also, apparently, for our Special Forces in the area, some of whom wound up getting shelled by Turkish forces.

It’s a move that feels, at the same time, brand new and very old.

Brand new, in that just before we got word of our change in policy toward the Kurds, we learned that Trump had held back military aid approved by Congress for Ukraine, to provide himself with leverage to get a country at war with Russia to announce an investigation into Biden and his son. This request was relayed outside of the normal government channels for requesting investigations: the announcement, itself, would have been the win, an act by Ukraine to dirty up a potential election rival of Trump, with the real reason for the announcement to be hidden. Have we ever seen a partner who sacrificed as much the Kurds abandoned so suddenly by a President who gave us so much reason to believe that he acts in his own interest, and not the interest of the country?

And very old: I first learned of the Kurds when I was in high school, when, in the wake of a peace deal ending the Iran/Iraq War, a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq lost international assistance and collapsed. This week, we have seen articles reminding us of how often the Kurds have been let down.

WAHAB: The Iraqi-Kurdish Peshmerga was instrumental not only in the fight against ISIS but even 2003 – the northern front to the invasion of Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein was from Kurdistan and was in coordination, cooperation with the Kurdish Peshmerga. But if you’re going for the – down to memory lane, in 1990, when President Bush 41 asked the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, the Kurds responded to that. And unfortunately, once Saddam Hussein’s tanks rolled into Kurdistan, the U.S. just stood by, and that resulted in a massive exodus of Kurds to the mountain.

And you can also go all the way back to 1971, 1974, where the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq were fighting Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the United States was arming them and supporting them in order to dissuade Saddam Hussein from falling into the Soviet orbit at the time. But of course, when Saddam Hussein finally came through, that support was lifted.

To lead the great military power of the world is to hear that you are failing if you do not use our great army to stop some danger or wrong. (“America can stop this. If they choose,” a Bosnian said to me when I was in Croatia in 1992.) And it’s to bear the responsibility for what our bombs do, if you do act. Assuming you’re not a pacifist (and no one who gets elected President has been), and that you have a conscience (as our current President does not), it must be a daunting choice. Simply by being so big, we have the ability to do great harm.

America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Toynbee’s United Kingdom, in its turn, had been that great big dog. And my grandfather, who fought in the war that’s known in Greece as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, was once on the side that was picked up and then dropped by great powers. Great powers weary enough of the long trench warfare of WWI to be happy to accept Greece’s willingness to occupy the Ottoman Empire, and also weary enough of war not to want to continue to support Greece once Kemal Ataturk rallied Turkey. A war that would prove a disaster for Greeks who had lived for so many centuries in Asia Minor.

The musical Miss Saigon was famously inspired, not just by the opera Madame Butterfly, but by the Fall of Saigon helicopter photo of US helicopters taking people out of Saigon when Saigon fell to the Vietcong.

It’s that photo that makes for the shift between its soundtrack and that of Madame Butterfly. Kim, in the soundtrack, comes off as much that same character as Chio-Chio-San in Madame Butterfly. But Pinkerton/Sharpless have shifted when transformed into Chris/John. I think the change comes from making the peacetime naval officer Pinkerton into the combat veteran Chris. Once he becomes a combat veteran, Chris is himself, in his way, “the living reminder of all the good we failed to do,” and the writer can’t bring himself to make Chris as callously bad a character as Pinkerton. Where Pinkerton knows damn well from the start that he’s going to abandon Chio-Chio-San, Chris gets to be more naive and conflicted. Where American consul Sharpless is an audience viewpoint character who protests Pinkerton’s actions but is unable to stop events from running their lethal course, combat veteran John drives the plot with his noble intentions (“We can’t forget, must not forget, that they are all our children too.”)

It’s a photo that’s seared into the memory of all of us who were alive at the time of the Vietnam War (even those who, like me, were children during that war). But it’s not the only photo seared into our memory. There’s another: the photo of a naked nine-year-old girl screaming in pain after a napalm attack.

By the time the US left Vietnam, that war was, to the many who had come to oppose it: a pointless overseas war that took too many of our young men (“And it’s one, two, three, four, what are we fighting for? To be truthful I don’t give a damn, about the people of Vietnam.”), a war into which we had been led with false promises about how easy it would be (“Lyndon Johnson told the nation, have no fear of escalation, I am trying everyone to please. And though it isn’t really war, I’m sending 50 thousand more, to help save Vietnam from Vietnamese.”), and a realization that our country was doing wrong (“Why do we call them enemy? This struggling people we’re bombing across the sea?”).

Now, too, many are tired of endless war. It’s a sentiment to which Trump appeals, as he pulls some troops out of part of Syria, while failing to deliver on that sentiment as he sends a much larger number of troops to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia pays us in money, you see, and the Kurds only paid in blood.

And yet there’s a difference between the Fall of Saigon and last week’s events. When the US finally evacuated from Vietnam, we left behind, inevitably, some who had fought by our side, who might suffer at the hands of the Vietcong. But we also organized the largest helicopter evacuation in history, to remove, not just Americans, but tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who had been associated with the southern regime.

We make no such effort, now, to protect any of the Kurdish peshmerga who fought alongside US soldiers against ISIS.

WAHAB: This time is particularly different because in the past, it would be the United States helping the Kurds with small guns, perhaps with medical assistance, with some political assistance. And then when the politics changes, it would withdraw that assistance.

This time around is different. American soldiers and Kurdish soldiers fought side by side, bled side by side in Syria, defeating a common enemy together. Friendships and camaraderie is built between those fighters and U.S. military personnel.

And what the Syrian Kurds ask in return is not statehood or independence or a seat at the United Nations. They only ask that the U.S. military sticks around because that flag is powerful enough to deter a Turkish invasion. And Mr. Trump’s decision was to remove that American flag and failing at protecting the Kurdish friends and deterring the Turkish invading army.

A Look At The History Of The U.S. Alliance With The Kurds NPR

And so people post video of Kurdish women soldiers dancing to celebrate defeating ISIS militants in Raqqa. Now abandoned to Turkey. Reminders, one might say, of all the good we failed to do. Or perhaps, more harshly, of the harm we actually did.

This time, we’re not John, but Pinkerton.