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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Beware the Iraqi
boomerang By Ira Chernus
The Iraq syndrome is headed America's way.
Perhaps it's already here.
A clear and
growing majority of Americans now tell pollsters
that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake, that
it's a bad idea to "surge" more troops into
Baghdad, that the US needs a definite timeline for
removing all its troops.
The nation seems
to be remembering a lesson of the Vietnam
War: the
US can't get security by sending military power
abroad. Every time the US tries to control another
country by force of arms, it only ends up more
troubled and less secure.
But the Iraq
syndrome is a two-edged sword, and there is no
telling which way it will cut in the end.
Remember the "Vietnam syndrome", which
made its appearance soon after the actual war
ended in defeat. It did restrain the US appetite
for military interventions overseas - but only
briefly. By the late 1970s, it had already begun
to boomerang. Conservatives denounced the syndrome
as evidence of a paralyzing, Vietnam-induced
surrender to national weakness. Their cries of
alarm stimulated broad public support for an
endless military buildup and, of course, yet more
imperial interventions.
The very idea of
such a "syndrome" implied that what the Vietnam
War had devastated was not so much the Vietnamese
or their ruined land as the traumatized American
psyche. As a concept, it served to mask, if not
obliterate, many of the realities of the actual
war. It also suggested that there was something
pathological in a postwar fear of taking US arms
and aims abroad, that the US had indeed become (in
the late president Richard Nixon's famous phrase)
a "pitiful, helpless giant", a basket case.
Ronald Reagan played all these notes
skillfully enough to become president of the US.
The desire to "cure" the Vietnam syndrome became a
springboard to unabashed, militant nationalism and
a broad rightward turn in the life of the United
States.
Iraq - both the war and the
"syndrome" to come - could easily evoke a similar
set of urges: to evade a painful reality and
ignore the lessons it should teach the US. The
thought that Americans are simply a collective
neurotic head-case when it comes to the use of
force could help sow similar seeds of insecurity
that might - after a pause - again push US
politics and culture back to a glorification of
military power and imperial intervention as
instruments of choice for seeking "security".
Ambivalence in the land In
current polling data about the war in Iraq, there
are obvious reasons for hope, but also
less-noticed warning signs. In a December PIPA
(Program on International Policy Attitudes) poll,
for instance, three-quarters of the public favored
"withdrawing almost all US troops by early 2008",
and fully 62% of Republicans agreed. Even in the
south, 64% of Americans now disapprove of
President George W Bush's "handling" of the war. A
recent USA Today poll finds 60% against sending
more troops to Iraq. But the exact same number
wants Congress to fund those new troops they don't
approve of dispatching Iraq-ward.
In that
USA Today poll, a remarkable 63% of Americans
favor "a timetable for withdrawing all US troops
from Iraq by the end of next year", putting them
way ahead of the Democratic Party Washington
consensus on what to do. Yet in a Washington
Post/American Broadcasting Co poll released this
week, while 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth
fighting, only 45% want to set a deadline of all
US troops out within a year, and only the same
minority number would move to reduce funding for
the war.
The latest CBS (Columbia
Broadcasting System) News poll reveals that more
than 70% of Americans believe the situation is now
going "badly". But fully half say the US is still
"likely to succeed in Iraq" and 43% do not want US
troops in Iraq removed or even reduced now. A new
Associated Press/Ipsos poll asks people what words
they'd use for their feelings about the war. While
81% are "worried", 51% remain "hopeful". (That
poll also asks how many Iraqi civilians have died
in nearly four years of war. The median "best
guess" is a woefully uninformed 9,890.)
Beneath the ever-shifting polling figures,
the only constant is an ambivalence that haunts
the land. Politicians, legendary for leading from
the rear, are waiting to see which way any coming
gale might blow. While many now follow their
constituents and speak out against the war, most
of them are carefully positioning themselves to go
with the flow of a militaristic backlash, should
it emerge.
And history tells us a backlash
is a real possibility. Just as in the early stages
of the Vietnam War, a large majority of Americans
were not opposed to the Iraq intervention or the
occupation that followed. When Saddam Hussein's
regime was overthrown, some three-quarters of the
US public approved President Bush's war.
With Iraq, as with Vietnam, the nation did
not go sour on the venture until it became
frustratingly clear that the US could not win -
and American deaths began to rise. Bush's ratings
have fallen steadily not because he took the US
into war under false pretenses, but because he
failed to deliver the expected triumph. Going to
war without winning just doesn't fit the country's
national self-image, what Tom Engelhardt (of
Tomdispatch.com) has called the United States'
"victory culture".
Victory culture assumes
that the United States is bound to win in the end
- that, in fact, it deserves to win because its
motives are less self-interested than those of
other nations. The US may sometimes fight a war
ineptly or incompetently, but it always means well
at heart. It wants democracy, prosperity, peace
and stability - not just for itself but for
everyone.
And in victory culture, the US
kills only because others are out to ambush and
kill it. It is by definition the victim, the
innocent, never the perpetrator. That whitewashes
its motives, whatever they may actually be.
To go on believing that the US is
virtuous, it must go on seeing itself as
profoundly insecure, as beset by enemies, as
invariably simply defending itself out there on
the planetary frontiers of an aggressive,
dangerous world; out there on what Bush -
referring to remote regions of Pakistan - called
"wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West".
The stories the Bush administration has
been spinning in these years to justify its war,
and possibly a future assault on Iran as well, are
built on the twin pillars of virtue and
insecurity. While the
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