DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The smog of war By Tom Engelhardt
Take off your hat.
Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the
Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam
Syndrome, are finally heading for their American
grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted
burial in history. Last words - both eulogies and
curses - have been offered too many times to
mention, and yet no American administration found
the silver bullet that would put that war away for
keeps.
President Richard Nixon tried to
get rid of it while it was still going on by
"Vietnamizing" it. Seven years after it ended in
1975, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the
dustbin of history, hailing it as "a noble cause".
Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium
into a "syndrome", an unhealthy aversion to war-making
believed to afflict the
American people to their core.
A decade
later, after the US military smashed Saddam
Hussein's army in Kuwait in the first Gulf War,
George H W Bush exulted that the country had
finally "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for
all". As it turned out, despite the organization
of massive "victory parades" at home to prove that
this hadn't been Vietnam redux, that war kicked
back. Another decade passed and there were H W's
son W and his advisors planning the invasion of
Iraq through a haze of Vietnam-constrained
obsessions.
W's top officials and the
Pentagon would actually organize the public
relations aspect of that invasion and the
occupation that followed as a Vietnam opposite's
game - no "body counts" to turn off the public,
plenty of embedded reporters so that journalists
couldn't roam free and (as in Vietnam) harm the
war effort, and so on.
The one thing they
weren't going to do was lose another war the way
Vietnam had been lost. Yet they managed once again
to bog the US military down in disaster on the
Eurasian mainland, could barely manage to win a
heart or a mind, and even began issuing body
counts of the enemy dead.
"We don't do
body counts," General Tommy Franks, Afghan war
commander, had insisted in 2001, and as late as
November 2006, the president was still expressing
his irritation about Iraq to a group of
conservative news columnists this way: "We don't
get to say that - a thousand of the enemy killed
or whatever the number was. It's happening. You
just don't know it." The problem, he explained,
was: "We have made a conscious effort not to be a
body count team" (a la Vietnam). And then those
body counts began appearing.
Somehow, over
the endless years, no matter what any American
president tried, The War - that war - and its
doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of defeat so
deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to
fully take it in, refused to depart town. They
were the ghosts on the battlements of American
life, representing - despite the application of
firepower of a historic nature - a defeat by a
small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it
simply couldn't be shaken, nor its "lessons"
learned.
National security advisor Henry
Kissinger was typical at the time in dismissing
North Vietnam in disgust as "a little fourth rate
power", just as chairman of the joint chiefs
Admiral Thomas Moorer would term it "a third-rate
country with a population of less than two
counties in one of the 50 states of the United
States". All of which made its victory, in some
sense, beyond comprehension.
A
titleholder for pure, long-term
futility That was then. This is now and,
though the frustration must seem familiar,
Washington has gotten itself into a situation on
the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing
that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In
fact, if you hadn't noticed - and weirdly enough
no one has - that former war finally seems to have
all but vanished.
If you care to pick a
moment when it first headed for the exits, when we
all should have registered something new in
American consciousness, it would undoubtedly have
been mid-2010 when the media decided that the
Afghan war, then eight-and-a-half years old, had
superseded Vietnam as "the longest war" in US
history. Today, that claim has become commonplace,
even though it remains historically dubious (which
may be why it's significant).
Afghanistan
is, in fact, only longer than Vietnam if you
decide to date the start of the American war there
to 1964, when congress passed the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution (in place of an actual declaration of
war), or 1965, when American "combat troops" first
arrived in South Vietnam.
By then,
however, there were already 16,000 armed American
"advisors" there, Green Berets fighting there,
American helicopters flying there. It would be far
more reasonable to date America's war in Vietnam
to 1961, the year of its first official
battlefield casualty and the moment when the John
F Kennedy administration sent in 3,000 military
advisors to join the 900 already there from the
Dwight D Eisenhower years. (The date of the first
American death on the Vietnam Wall, however, is
1956, and the first American military man to die
in Vietnam - an American lieutenant colonel
mistaken by Vietnamese guerrillas for a French
officer - was killed in Saigon in 1945.)
Massive US support for the French version
of the Vietnam War in the early 1950s could drive
that date back further. Similarly, if you wanted
to add in America's first Afghan war, the Central
Intelligence Agency-financed anti-Soviet war of
the mujahideen from 1980 to 1989, you might once
again have a "longest war" competition.
The essential problem in dating wars these
days is that we no longer declare them, so they
just tend to creep up on us. In addition, because
undeclared war has melded into something like
permanent war on the American scene, we might well
be setting records every day on the Eurasian
mainland - if, for instance, you care to include
the first Gulf War and the continued military
actions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq which, after
2001, blended into the Bush administration's "war
on terror", its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001,
and then Iraq (again), in 2003.
For those
who want a definitive "longest", however, the
latest news is promising. Barack Obama
administration negotiations with Afghan President
Hamid Karzai's government are reportedly close to
complete. The two sides are expected to arrive at
a "strategic partnership" agreement leaving US
forces (trainers, advisors, special operations
troops and undoubtedly scads of private
contractors) ensconced on bases in Afghanistan
well beyond 2014. If such official desire becomes
reality, then the Vietnam record might indeed be
at an end.
What's important, however,
isn't which war holds the record, but that media
urge in 2010 to anoint Afghanistan the titleholder
for pure long-term futility. In retrospect, that
represented a changing-of-the-guard moment.
Now, skip ahead almost two years and
consider what's missing in action today. After
all, dealing with the Afghan war in
Vietnam-analogy terms right now would be like
lining up ducks at a shooting gallery.
Just take a run through the essential
Vietnam War checklist: there's "quagmire"
(check!); dropping the idea of winning "hearts and
minds" (check!); the fact that we've entered the
"Afghanization" phase of the war, with endless
rosy prognostications about, followed by grim
reports on, the training of the Afghan army to
replace US combat troops (check!).
There
are those sagging public opinion polls about the
war, dropping steadily into late-Vietnam territory
(check!); the continued insistence of American
military officials that "progress" is being made
in the face of disaster and disintegration (not
quite "light at the end of the tunnel" territory,
but nonetheless a check! for sure).
There
are those bomb-able, or in our era drone-able,
"sanctuaries" across the border (check!); American
massacre stories, most recently a one-man version
of My Lai (check!); a prickly leader who irritates
his American counterparts and is seen as an
obstacle to success (check!), and so on - and on
and on.
While the Afghan war has always
had its many non-Vietnam aspects - geographical,
historical, geopolitical and in terms of
casualties - anyone could have had a Vietnam field
day with the present situation. At almost any
previous moment in the past decades, many
undoubtedly would have, and yet what's striking is
that this time around no one has. Unlike any
administration since the Nixon years, nobody in
Obama's crowd now seems to have Vietnam
obsessively on the brain.
What was taken
as the last significant reference to the war from
a major official came from Bush holdover secretary
of defense Robert Gates. In February 2011, four
months before he left the Pentagon, Gates gave a
"farewell" address at West Point in which he told
the cadets, "[I]n my opinion, any future defense
secretary who advises the president to again send
a big American land army into Asia or into the
Middle East or Africa should 'have his head
examined', as General MacArthur so delicately put
it."
This, press reports incorrectly
claimed, was that general's Vietnam advice for
Kennedy in 1961. (The statement Gates quoted,
however, was made in 1950 after the North Koreans
invaded South Korea.)
A Vietnam analogy
memorial Since then, Washington generally
seems to have dropped Vietnam through the memory
hole. Well-connected pundits seldom mention its
example any more. Critics have generally stopped
using it to anathematize the ongoing war in
Afghanistan. In a wasteland of growing disasters,
that war now seems to have gained full recognition
as a quagmire in its own right. No help needed.
And yet I did find one recent exception to
the general rule. Let me offer it here as my own
memorial to the Vietnam analogy.
Recently
in a news briefing, US war commander in
Afghanistan General John Allen tried to offer
context for a phenomenon that seems close to
unique in modern history. (You might have to go
back to the Sepoy Rebellion in British India of
the 19th century to find its like.)
Afghan
"allies" in police or army uniforms have been
continually blasting away American and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization soldiers they live
and work with - something now common enough to
have its own military term: "green on blue"
violence.
In doing so, Allen made a
passing comment that might be thought of as the
last Vietnam War analogy of our era. "I think it
is a characteristic of counter-insurgencies that
we've experienced before," he said. "We
experienced these in Iraq. We experienced them in
Vietnam ... It is a characteristic of this kind of
warfare."
How appropriate that, almost 40
years later, the general, who was still attending
the US Naval Academy when Vietnam ended, evidently
remembers that war about as accurately as he might
recall the war of 1812.
In fact,
Vietnamese allies did not regularly, or even
rarely, turn their guns on their American allies.
In the far more "fratricidal" acts of that era,
what might then have been termed "khaki on khaki"
violence, the "Afghans" of the moment were
American troops who reasonably regularly committed
acts of violence - called "fragging" for the
fragmentation grenades of the period - against
their own officers.
("Word of the deaths
of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or
in bivouacs of certain units," wrote Marine
historian Colonel Robert Heinl, Jr, in 1971. "In
one such division ... fraggings during 1971 have
been authoritatively estimated to be running about
one a week.")
Still, credit must be given.
Increasingly poorly remembered, Vietnam is now one
for the ages. After so many years, Afghanistan has
finally emerged as a quagmire beholden to no other
war. What an achievement! Our moment, Afghanistan
included, has proven so extreme, so disastrous,
that it's finally put the unquiet ghost of Vietnam
in its grave. And here's the miracle: it has all
happened without anyone in Washington grasping the
essence of that now-ancient defeat, or
understanding a thing.
The "lessons of
Vietnam", fruitlessly discussed for five decades,
taught Washington so little that it remains
trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian
mainland, continues to pursue a military-first
policy globally that might even surprise American
leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet
into a "free fire zone", and considers military
power its major asset, a first not a last resort,
and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its
national treasure.
After Vietnam, the US
at least took a few years to lick its wounds. Now,
it just ramps up the latest military flavor of the
month - at the moment, special operations forces
and drones - elsewhere.
Call it not the
fog, but the smog of war.
And in case you
haven't noticed, the vans are already on the
block. The Afghan Syndrome is moving into the
neighborhood and the welcome wagons are out.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American
Empire Project and the author of The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became
Obama's as well as The
End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation
Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The
United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has
just been published. Click here to catch Timothy
MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Engelhardt reflects on one theme from his new
book, the unnatural growth of the US. national
security state, or click here
to watch him discuss another, the way
post-Cold-War Washington chose "the Soviet Path,"
at the Nation magazine's website.
(Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on
Facebook.)
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