By Tom Engelhardt
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The Afghan Syndrome
After Vietnam, there is a new syndrome on the block
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.
Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing [2]” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried
to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause [3].” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium
into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion [4] to war-making believed to afflict the American
people to their core.
A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in
Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted [5] that the country had finally “kicked the
Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” As it turned out, despite the organization
of massive “victory parades [6]” 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 [7] 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 U.S. 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.
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
8½ years old, had superseded Vietnam as “the longest war [11]” in U.S. 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 [12] (in
place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when American “combat
troops” first arrived [13] in South Vietnam. By then, however,
there were already 16,000 [14] 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 [15] and the moment
when the Kennedy administration sent in [16] 3,000 military advisors to join the 900
already there from the 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 [17].)
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 [19] against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which, after
2001, blended into the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, its invasion
of Afghanistan, and then, of course, Iraq (again).
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 [24] of the war, with
endless rosy
prognostications [25] about,
followed by grim reports [26] on, the training of the Afghan army to replace
U.S. combat troops (check!).
There are those sagging public opinion polls [27] about the war, dropping steadily into
late-Vietnam territory (check!); the continued insistence of American military
officials that “progress” [28] is being made in the face of disaster and
disintegration (not quite “light at the end of
the tunnel [29]” 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 [30], most recently a one-man version [31] of My Lai (check!); a prickly leader [32] 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 last 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 [33] 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 [34], was that general’s Vietnam advice for President
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 [35], 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,
U.S. 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 nineteenth century to
find its like.) Afghan “allies” in police or army uniforms have been
continually blasting away [36] American and NATO 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 [37] of our era. “I
think it is a characteristic of counterinsurgencies 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 [38] the U.S. 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” [39] 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[40] Marine historian Col. 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 [41],” and considers military power its major asset,
a first [42] not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate
place to burn [43] its national treasure.
After Vietnam, the U.S. at least took a few years to lick its
wounds. Now, it just ramps up [44] the latest military flavor of the month — at
the moment, special operations
forces [45] and drones [46] – elsewhere.
Call it not the fog, but the smog of war.
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.
Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing [2]” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried
to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause [3].” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium
into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion [4] to war-making believed to afflict the American
people to their core.
A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in
Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted [5] that the country had finally “kicked the
Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” As it turned out, despite the organization
of massive “victory parades [6]” 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 [7] 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 U.S. 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.
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
8½ years old, had superseded Vietnam as “the longest war [11]” in U.S. 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 [12] (in
place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when American “combat
troops” first arrived [13] in South Vietnam. By then, however,
there were already 16,000 [14] 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 [15] and the moment
when the Kennedy administration sent in [16] 3,000 military advisors to join the 900
already there from the 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 [17].)
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 [19] against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which, after
2001, blended into the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, its invasion
of Afghanistan, and then, of course, Iraq (again).
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 [24] of the war, with
endless rosy
prognostications [25] about,
followed by grim reports [26] on, the training of the Afghan army to replace
U.S. combat troops (check!).
There are those sagging public opinion polls [27] about the war, dropping steadily into
late-Vietnam territory (check!); the continued insistence of American military
officials that “progress” [28] is being made in the face of disaster and
disintegration (not quite “light at the end of
the tunnel [29]” 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 [30], most recently a one-man version [31] of My Lai (check!); a prickly leader [32] 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 last 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 [33] 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 [34], was that general’s Vietnam advice for President
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 [35], 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,
U.S. 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 nineteenth century to
find its like.) Afghan “allies” in police or army uniforms have been
continually blasting away [36] American and NATO 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 [37] of our era. “I
think it is a characteristic of counterinsurgencies 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 [38] the U.S. 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” [39] 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[40] Marine historian Col. 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 [41],” and considers military power its major asset,
a first [42] not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate
place to burn [43] its national treasure.
After Vietnam, the U.S. at least took a few years to lick its
wounds. Now, it just ramps up [44] the latest military flavor of the month — at
the moment, special operations
forces [45] and drones [46] – elsewhere.
Call it not the fog, but the smog of war.
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