Why all is quiet on the American
home front By Sreeram Chaulia
It is now a little over three years
since President George W Bush plunged the United
States into a desultory war against the state and
people of Iraq. Notwithstanding triumphal
declarations of an "end of major combat
operations" in May 2003 by the man who relishes
the tag of "war president", the official body
count of American troop losses in Iraq stands at
2,439 at the time of writing. The Pentagon's tally
of injured soldiers totals 17,869.
These
figures fall way short of losses suffered by the
US during the Vietnam War, thanks to the advanced
technologies in warfare acquired by the world's
most powerful state and the differences in the
types of anti-American resistance experienced in
Vietnam and Iraq.
The Vietnam War cost
38,179 American soldier deaths over a period of
nine years (1965-1973), averaging 4,242 killed per
annum,
and 96,802 armed personnel sustained injuries.
Civilian casualties in Iraq are said to be 39,296.
In Vietnam, they may have exceeded 2 million.
Should the US occupation of Iraq last nine
years, and the current rate of attrition be
sustained, the US would incur 7,317 dead soldiers.
Statistically, Iraq may not be on the way to
becoming an exact sequel to bloody Vietnam, but it
certainly is an open-ended morass in which
demoralized American soldiers confront an
undaunted resistance with no sign from the White
House about when the ordeal will finally end.
Vietnam has become the most painful
metaphor for failed colonial wars of domination.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in
1979 and steadily got entangled in an unwinnable
war, it was dubbed "the Soviet Union's Vietnam".
Fifteen thousand Red Army soldiers were killed in that
10-year war. The US war on Iraq, in view of fewer
troop losses, unanticipated strong resistance
and an invisible exit route, might better
be called a "mini-Vietnam", but not "Vietnam II".
One
big difference when comparing Iraq to Vietnam is
the somewhat quiescent home front in the US
today. Of course, there have been numerous anti-war demonstrations
across the United States, and they
are growing a in size with the cumulative
unpopularity of Bush.
The peace movement
has been active in organizing symbolic protests,
poster campaigns, marches and petitions to
denounce the occupation of Iraq and to recall
US forces. The single largest gathering of
anti-Iraq war Americans took place recently in New
York City, where on April 29, 350,000 citizens hit
the streets chanting slogans and songs of peace
with justice.
As admirable as these
efforts are, they do not match the culture of
dissent and civil disobedience that the
anti-Vietnam War wave epitomized in the early
1970s. It is worth recalling that the coordinated
protests of that era reached such a high decibel
level that president Richard Nixon was forced to
announce a staged military withdrawal from Vietnam
in response to the popular demand.
For all
the rallies that we see today against the Iraq war
in US towns and cities, that puissant
mandate that magically ratifies the notion of
popular sovereignty in a democracy is embryonic,
if not non-existent.
What explains the difference
in anti-war agitation between now and the
rebellious 1970s? Why is Iraq not engendering
a social movement like the one that compelled
politicians to change course in Vietnam? Five
primary factors are interacting in combination to
mute the anti-Iraq war clamor from overturning
Bush's foreign policy.
First, the Iraq
war - understood as the full-scale
US invasion and occupation - is just three years
old. It took about five years of escalating
military intervention on the part of the administration
of president Lyndon Johnson and a
corresponding deterioration of the US economy for
the anti-Vietnam War movement to become
institutionalized and critically massive. Social
movements take time for intensification of
grievances and for thoroughness of mobilization.
If events follow their past course
and there is no US pullout or retrenchment, the
anti-Iraq war unrest should reach its zenith by
2008-09. However, since the US troop
losses do not show signs of matching those in
Vietnam, the relative magnitude of outrage will be
lower in the anti-Iraq war movement even in 2009.
Numbers count for galvanizing
public opinion. The unaffected parts of the US
population will only cross the threshold of
tolerance if the casualty rate dramatically shoots
up in Iraq. Sadly for the peace constituency,
quality of death does not impinge on general
consciousness as much as quantity.
Second, no draft or forced recruitment
to the army operates in the US today as it did
during most of the Vietnam War. Conscription of
youth between the ages of 19 and 25 increased
dramatically from 1964 to provide manpower for the
war. The arbitrary and controversial authority
granted to draft boards by the Johnson
administration increased the risk of induction of
underprivileged and privileged young men and led
to dodging, evasion and, finally, revolt.
Given the increasing reluctance of young
Americans to join the army today, a few are
calling for reinstating mandatory military service
to boost the "generational war on terrorism". As
the crisis of military recruitment snowballs in
the US, the predator state might once again poach
on young American human resources.
In a
highly individualistic society, only the wearer
knows how the shoe pinches. If the liberty to
abstain from war is snatched away from Americans
again, the anti-war movement will not remain
limited to the left wing. If the US Army remains
in Iraq for long and if there is a spillover into
Iran, the necessity for a return to Vietnam-era
drafts may arise, laying the foundation for a
wider-ranging peace movement.
Third, the control
over the mass media that the US establishment
exercises at present is a big hurdle for
peace to turn into a generalized concern among US
citizens. The average Joe and Jane are still
hedging their bets and not openly defying the
"support our troops" jingoism due to the strict
controls on reportage about the excesses being
committed by US forces and the wholesale disintegration
of Iraq in the guise of spreading democracy.
That may change with the recent revelation
that US marines may have killed more than
20 civilians in the town of Haditha.
In 1970, news of the My Lai massacre was
widely reported in the US media and instantly
triggered mass outrage. It punctured the myth that
Vietnam was a just war waged against communist
expansion. In 1971, the New York Times published the
first installment of the Pentagon Papers - a dossier
of criminal acts of indiscriminate
bombings, assassinations and drug trafficking being
carried out by US forces and intelligence agencies
in Vietnam. Such media exposes - braving
governmental threats - were crucial to winning
over the fence-sitters among the American people
in favor of peace.
Aware of the media's
capability and propensity to expose the ugliness
of the Iraq war, the Bush administration left no
stone unturned to co-opt and muzzle it. US
citizens are being kept in an uninformed Orwellian
condition through such mechanisms as "embedded
journalists", the "code of conduct" on reportage
imposed by the former US administrator in Iraq, L
Paul Bremer, and the Department of Defense's
censorship of print and audiovisual media.
As the Cable News Network's Christiane
Amanpour confessed, media powerhouses went along
with draconian state encroachments on their
freedom and even practiced shameful
"self-censorship" to please political masters.
Unless the true face of the US
occupation of Iraq is unveiled to the larger American
public (Abu Ghraib being the tip of the iceberg),
the passion and relentlessness of the anti-Vietnam
War era cannot be realized. To say that
new-age technologies such as the Internet are enough to
overcome weaknesses in the traditional media
misses the point that common Americans do not
search for critical stories on the war on Iraq
without being initially prodded and startled by
newspapers, radio stations and television. In a
media-saturated environment, the Internet is
merely a secondary tool when it comes to politics
and news.
Fourth, the anti-Iraq war movement is
historically handicapped with regard to the anti-Vietnam War
struggle because of the absence of a strong complementary
domestic social-justice issue like civil rights. The
late civil-rights leader Martin Luther King's support for
the anti-Vietnam war cause on moral grounds from
1967 coupled minority rights and the anti-racist
tide to the anti-war sentiment, adding layers
of black-American discontent to the
general disenchantment with militaristic foreign
policy. The maturity and depth that the civil-rights
leaders lent to the anti-war movement in the late
1960s and 1970s was priceless.
While there is no shortage of progressive black and
Hispanic organizations lending their voices to the
anti-Iraq war commotion today, it is a pale
reflection of the mass merger of civil rights and
peace of the Vietnam era. The Bush
administration's inept handling of Hurricane
Katrina and the newly proposed anti-immigrant
legislation that is stirring minorities in the US
contain the potential of adding ballast to the
anti-war movement, provided the right
interconnections are made by organizers and
citizens.
Fifth, the enduring memory of
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks seemingly
justifies the war on Iraq for very large
proportions of the US population. Despite
the fact that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
never colluded, the insinuations made by Bush and
company in the run-up to war in Iraq have stuck in
the minds of uncritical Americans.
Iraq
as a terrorist haven has ironically come true
after the fall of Saddam, offering the US
establishment an ex post facto
propaganda advantage that occupying this
Middle Eastern country is essential for the "war
on terrorism". While the "communist scare" was quite
prevalent when presidents John F Kennedy and Johnson
embroiled the US in Vietnam, there was no discernible
mortal fear US citizens had of directly losing life
and limb from the Soviets, as they have today after
the September 11 attacks.
The security
dilemma that al-Qaeda has posed on the US is
unmatched since World War II. Devastating
terrorist attacks on US soil have generated
an atmosphere where aerial bombing and harsh
counter-insurgency in Iraq are viewed by most
Americans as legitimate self-defense tactics, not
offensive imperialism. Should there be future
terrorist attacks on US territory, this
mentality could get hardwired into the American
psyche, making the task of the peace movement that
much more Herculean.
The only way for the
Iraq war protesters to gain ground is to entrench
new thinking that retaliation (especially directed
at the wrong targets) does not guarantee security,
but worsens it. In other words, they will need to
use the same empirical facts of rising terrorist
threats to the American people to prove that war
on Iraq makes the US less safe.
The US crusade on Iraq has resurrected the
ghosts of Vietnam. Though Iraq is not as
militarily disastrous as Vietnam, it still
qualifies as an imperial misadventure camouflaged
as democratization. Just as bombing neighboring
Laos became a logical military requirement to
sustain the assault on North Vietnam, today's
neo-cons are training their guns on Iraq's
neighbor, Iran.
The carnivorous
logic of war is self-reproductive. What remains to
be seen is whether the mini-Vietnamization of
Iraq can usher in a peace movement within the US
that can reverse the trend of unilateral militarism
by the hegemonic state. A careful consideration
of the five constraining factors on the
anti-Iraq war movement outlined in this essay may
lead to theoretical and strategic reflection among
Americans who desire a peaceful world.
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