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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Seven years in
hell By Tom Engelhardt
On August 22, breaking into his Crawford
vacation, President George W Bush addressed the
national convention of the Veterans of Foreign
Wars, giving what is already known as his "Vietnam
speech". That day, Bush, who, as early as 2003 had
sworn that his war on Iraq would "decidedly not be
Vietnam", took the full-frontal plunge into the
still-flowing current of the Big Muddy, fervently
embracing Vietnam analogy-land. You could
almost feel his relief (and
that of his neo-conservative speechwriters).
In that mud-wrestle of a speech, he
invoked "one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam ...
that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by
millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would
add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat
people', 're-education camps' and 'killing
fields'." The man who had so carefully sat out the
Vietnam War now proclaimed that Americans never
should have left that land.
As he's done
with so much else, he also linked the Vietnam War
by an act of verbal ju-jitsu to al-Qaeda
and the attacks of September 11, 2001. September
11, too, turned out to be part of the "price" we'd
paid for succumbing to "the allure of retreat" and
withdrawing way back when. ("In an interview with
a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks,"
intoned the president, "Osama bin Laden declared
that 'the American people had risen against their
government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the
same today'.")
Whatever brief respite his
August embrace of Vietnam may have given him in
the polls, it involved a larger concession on the
administration's part. Like its predecessors, the
Bush administration and its neo-con supporters
simply couldn't kick the "Vietnam syndrome" - much
as they struggled to do so - any more than a moth
could avoid the flame. Now, they found themselves
locked in a desperate, hopeless attempt to use
Vietnam to recapture the hearts and minds of the
American people.
Entering the dead zone
It's possible to track this losing
struggle with the Vietnam analogy over these past
years. Take one issue - the body count - on which
we know something about administration Vietnam
thinking. For Americans of the Vietnam era, a
centuries-old "victory culture" - in which triumph
on some distant frontier against evil enemies was
considered an American birthright - still held
sway. In Vietnam, when it nonetheless became clear
that the promised frontier victory was, for the
second time in little more than a decade, nowhere
in sight, American military and civilian officials
tried to compensate.
One problem they
faced was that the very definition of victory in
war - the taking of terrain, the advance into
hostile territory that signaled the crushing of
enemy resistance - had ceased to mean anything in
Vietnam. In a guerrilla war in which, as American
grunts regularly complained, you couldn't tell
friends from enemies, no less hold a hostile
countryside, something else had to substitute for
the landing at D-Day, the advance on Berlin, the
island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. And so the
"whiz kids" of defense secretary Robert McNamara's
Pentagon and the military high command developed a
substitute numerology of victory.
Everything was to be counted and the
copious statistics of success were to flow
endlessly up the chain of command and back to
Washington, proof positive that "progress" was
being made. The numbers looked convincing indeed.
In fact, to believe loss possible in Vietnam, when
by any measure of success - from dead enemy and
captured weapons to cleared roads and pacified
villages - Americans had such a decisive
advantage, seemed nothing short of madness.
Yet, to accept the figures pouring in
daily from soldiers, advisors and bureaucrats was
to defy the logic of one's senses. To make the
endlessly unraveling situation in Vietnam madder
still, the impending defeat did not seem to be a
military one. Those who directed the war (as well
as the right-wing in the post-war years) regularly
claimed, for instance, that not a single
significant battle had been lost to the Vietnamese
enemy.
Sometimes it seemed that Americans
in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of
measuring success. There were, for instance, the
18 indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each
meant to calibrate the "progress" of
"pacification" in South Vietnam's 2,300 villages
and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on
"rural security" and "development".
Then
there were the many indices of the Measurement of
Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in
slide form, including "strength trends of the
opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in
sorties ... enemy base areas neutralized", and so
on. And don't forget that there were figures by
the bushel-load on every form of destruction
rained down on the Vietnamese enemy - sorties
flown, tonnage dropped, "truck kills", you name
it. The efforts that went into creating numerical
equivalents for death were endless.
For
visiting congressional delegations, the commander
of US forces, General William Westmoreland, had
his "attrition charts", multicolored bar graphs
illustrating various "trends" in death and
destruction. Commanders in the field had their own
sophisticated ways to codify "kill ratios"; while,
on the ground, where, in dangerous circumstances,
the actual counting had to be done, all of this
translated, far more crudely, into the MGR, or, as
the grunts sometimes said, the "Mere Gook Rule" -
"If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC
[Vietcong]." In other words, when pressure came
down for the "body count", any body would do.
Back in the US, much of the frustration
that had gathered in the face of mounting years of
claimed progress and evident failure would focus
on the "body count" of enemy dead, announced in
late afternoon US military press briefings in the
South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh
City. For the element of the fantastic in those
briefings (and the figures proffered), they came
to be known among reporters as "the five o'clock
follies".
In a war in which D-Day-like
landings were uncontested publicity events and
"conquered" territory might be abandoned within
days, the killing of the enemy initially seemed
nothing to be ashamed of and an obvious indicator
of "progress" - a classic word then and now.
(Witness the upcoming General David Petraeus
"progress report" to Congress.) As time went on,
however, as success refused to make an appearance,
despite the claims that it was just around some
corner, and as "defeat", a word no one cared to
use, crept into consciousness (while American
officials like national security adviser Henry
Kissinger privately fulminated about the
impossibility of losing a war to "a little
fourth-rate power"), those dead bodies decoupled
from the idea of victory. They began to seem like
a grim count of something else entirely - of,
depending on your position at that moment,
frustration, futility, brutality, tragedy, defeat.
The body count took on a grim life of its
own. Detached from reality, yet producing the most
horrific of realities - and, among increasing
numbers of Americans, a sense of shame - it
morphed into something like a never-ending
Catch-22 of carnage. In this way, as the bodies
piling up looked ever more like so many
slaughtered peasants in a "fourth-rate" land,
successive American administrations entered the
dead zone.
Of course, if the statistics of
slaughter had been accepted by all sides (then or
now) as the ruling logic of the struggle, the
United States would have won the war any day from
the mid-1960s on (or, in the present case, from
March 2003 on). Instead, by the sacrifice of
untold numbers of lives, the enemy somehow
succeeded in capturing the only set of numbers
worth having - the numbers of weeks, months, years
that the fighting went on.
Return of
the body count Little wonder then that, in
the beginning, the Bush administration was eager
to avoid the body count, along with body bags and
those disintegrative images of the Vietnam war
dead coming home in full daylight in sight of
television cameras; that it was eager, in fact, to
avoid every aspect of a thoroughly discredited
war. But here's the irony: from the moment the
Afghan war began in 2001, no one had the Vietnam
analogy more programmatically on the brain than
the Bush team.
In this, they were no
exception to the rule. Ever since the 1970s, the
Pentagon and various administrations had been
playing a conscious opposites game with what they
imagined as Vietnam's
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