Negotiation, not in bad faith, but between bad parties

Abraham Heschel laments, "Driven by our tendency to suspect social change, by our tendency to measure other peoples' values by our own standards, we have no communication with the people of Vietnam, nor have we sought to relate ourselves to their political understanding." (Heschel, "Moral Outrage...," 54) Robert McAfee Brown writes that one of the vital roles of the church in times of war is "maintaining lines of communication between nations in times of war." (Brown, "Appeal...," 62) And Brown makes concrete suggestions as to how the credibility of such communication may be established. (Brown, "Appeal...," 90-95)

This is all well and good, but suppose neither side likes anything the other could possibly say? Worse, suppose both sides are downright unpleasant? Amanda Porterfield does a nice job of summarizing the (broadly) personalist convictions that might have given some religious Americans confidence that it could all be worked out at the negotiating table. But American renunciation of brutality would not have been the end of brutality in Vietnam: although surely exaggerated in the American press, nevertheless a significant number of war crimes were perpetrated by Vietcong irregulars and North Vietnamese regulars that were, similar to American war crimes, "unauthorized" only in the official record. My point here is not to downplay the seriousness of American war crimes with the hollow, morally trivial rejoinder, "But everybody does it!" My point is that the diplomatic solution proposed by Brown and the general attitude adopted by Heschel presume that Americans constituted the overwhelming majority of violent, ruthless people in Vietnam. It's worth saying that had that actually been true, the war would likely have been a resounding American and South Vietnamese victory, even as it would have been a perhaps greater moral defeat for the United States.