Vietnam Syndrome
If I may make a bold observation, I feel like the American right's thinking on national security policy is being deeply distorted by an obsessive overreaction to the Vietnam War. See, for example, Cliff May's theory that "We lost in Vietnam because we didn’t have the will and the skills to prevail" and that now we will "either develop the will – and the military and intelligence skills — to defeat the enemy we now face on the battlefield in Iraq, or we retreat not just from Iraq but from anyplace our enemies don’t want us." This is really a bizarre reading of history.
In the first instance, as a read of what happened in Vietnam it involves dropping all context and making it seem as if there was something unusual about an economically and militarily superior outside power finding itself unable to subdue a reasonably popular nationalist movement. In point of fact, what we got was an entirely typical result. That sort of thing happens all the time from England in America and Ireland, to France in Algeria, to Portugal in Angola, etc., etc., etc. The track record of success in such endeavors is extremely poor and the winning examples tend to involve the application of extreme brutality -- viz. the United States in the Indian Wars (and, I assume, Australia against the Aborigines), Saddam Hussein against the Kurds, the Sudanese government's current efforts in Darfur, etc. One imagines that something similar -- slow-and-steady extermination of the Sunni Arab population unless and until they entirely submit to Shiite/Kurdish domination -- would "work" in Iraq or that we could have killed the entire population of Vietnam had we been so inclined.
But we lack the "will" to employ such measures for the perfectly good reason that it would be sick and immoral, the gains totally out of proportion to the devastation thereby caused. In circumstances when victory was regarded as absolutely crucial -- the Second World War, for example -- the United States was not especially hesitant to deploy large-scale killing of civilians as a tactic but, thankfully, we haven't yet reached the point where anyone's explicitly advocating that for Iraq.
Which brings us to the other part of May's post, his neo-domino theory of the Iraq War. This sort of consideration was, obviously, widely cited as an argument in favor of indefinitely prolonging the Vietnam War. In empirical reality, however, whatever "dominos" fell as a result of that war didn't extend beyond Vietnam's immediate neighbors and there's good reason to think that America's continuation of the war itself rather than our decision to eventually end it was the primary source of the problems in countries adjacent to Vietnam.
May asks, "why wouldn’t the same strategy and tactics lead to victory for the Islamo-fascists in Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere?"
It's a slightly odd question. I assume the reason we don't have 100,000 troops on the ground in the Northwest Frontier Province poking around for terrorists is precisely because the same strategy and tactics would work in Pakistan. The Pakistani government would be sapped of legitimacy, there would be popular resistance to our presence, and soon enough our forces would find themselves in an untenable situation. The good news is that Osama bin Laden can't actually just conjure up mass support for revolutionary violence wherever he pleases anymore than the Soviet Union could.
I'd love to engage in a "Vietnam syndrome" discussion. Unfortunately, Cliff May's silly little rant doesn't have enough historical or intellectual content to offer itself as a jumping-off point.
June 14, 2006 12:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, go ahead and start, I'd be quite interested in what you have to say about it.
June 14, 2006 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a "reactor" -- nuclear, sometimes -- and don't start things. :-) Oh, hell; here goes -- as a start, only.
For the reactionary right the "Vietnam syndrome" is of interest, because it believes that nations have such a thing as "honor" rather than "practical interests." [Note May's barely disguised charge that the US abandoned, perfidiously, its Vietnamese friends and that were we to abandon our Iraq adventure, our future will be one of cowering behind concrete barriers.]
Thus, the reactionary right is deaf to Matt's practical, utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. For them, "national honor" is a unitary absolute ("You can't be a little pregnant"), and once it is challenged -- brown skinned people objecting to being occupied, for example -- no sacrifice of ours or of those brown skinned folks can be too much.
June 14, 2006 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
We do have national honor in the sense that it is besmirched e.g. when our soldiers or other agents torture captives. I would recast Ellen's point as about dominance or machismo: "we" lose face when poor people of color defy us, say by refusing to living under a colonial regime. The RWer is humiliated at acquiescing to such insolence, and needs those insolent people blasted and burned.
June 14, 2006 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
We hear this yarn from the Cliff May types a lot. We did try very hard to win the hearts and minds of the Indochinese - but we were doomed to fail when we turned our back on the Viet Mihn, which is why they turned to the Soviet Union and the PRC. Of course, there is one variation of CliffMayism that is likely to be true in a sick sort of way. Some of the neocons would not mind if we wiped out the local population algother so their "investor class" (Kudlow cruise ship buddies) could just take over the land for themselves. Thankfully, American policy has not gotten to that neocon extreme - YET!
June 14, 2006 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
"See, for example, Cliff May's theory that "We lost in Vietnam because we didn’t have the will and the skills to prevail" and that now we will "either develop the will – and the military and intelligence skills — to defeat the enemy we now face on the battlefield in Iraq, or we retreat not just from Iraq but from anyplace our enemies don’t want us." This is really a bizarre reading of history."
Well, he's right - except, of course, where he's wrong - and that is in believing that this outcome would be a "Bad Thing."
In fact, the US NEEDS to retreat from anyplace our "enemies" don't want us - because in all probability we don't belong there in the first place - which is why they are our "enemies".
The function of the US military is to make sure our REAL enemies don't set foot on US soil - period. Anything else is "empire building."
And we don't need to be invading other countries to prevent them from "invading" us - even if anybody else on the planet had the wherewithal TO invade us, which as it stands is nearly impossible.
ICBMs (and SRBMs from subs) with nuclear warheads are about the only threat we need to be concerned about militarily for this country. Just about every other military technology is either not available to anybody else or wouldn't be that big of a threat to the US if it was used against us. Which means the ONLY two countries who are ANY kind of potential "threat" to the US are China and Russia - unless we expect England, France and Germany to suddenly turn hostile. And both China and Russia are WAY behind the US in strategic weapons (Russia less so than China - Russia is still a "credible" threat.)
All this crap about "we have to be in Central Asia to outflank Russia" and "we have to be in Korea and Taiwan to outflank China" and "we have to be EVERYWHERE to outflank terrorists" is so much horseshit.
We don't need a single US military base outside the continental United States in order to deal with our ACTUAL enemies - not as long as we have carrier battle groups to project military power anywhere in the world.
As for Vietnam, we didn't know what we were doing there and we don't know what we're doing in Iraq. The US military mind is not capable of learning to defeat insurgents. A small handful of US military personnel ARE so capable, but they don't run anything and never will because the military establishment will not allow that to happen.
The military establishment is all about taking bribes to make contracts for expensive, useless hardware and pursuing a career path of ever greater rank, medals and perks. Almost no one in it has any interest or skills in actually doing the job they are committed to do - protect the US Constitution.
In fact, most of the militaries in the world are oriented around that mindset - of personal and political power vs defending their actual country. Which is why you have endless military coups and the like in dozens of countries.
So, yes, the US will ALWAYS lose every insurgency it creates or confronts. It can't do anything else but lose except when it confronts another conventional military which is much weaker than itself.
June 14, 2006 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like the way Ellen thinks.
Of course, I think the "Green Zone" and forts (shades of the Old West)are a bit of cowering behind concrete barriers.
I also think "cost-benefit analysis" is basic to warfare. Open discussion of it most definitely is not, which is a relatively sane reason for a "democracy" to be choosy before going to war, as fairness and balance are tossed every which way domestically as well as abroad - where one has no business being, frankly.
June 14, 2006 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
You could summarize the whole right-wing response to immigration the same way: what it boils down to for Dobbs et al isn't the fig leaf of negative economic impact, it's that the brown chaps have sullied our honor. Hence, of course it's worth "whatever it takes" (those are key words: whenever that phrase is used, be very suspect) to build a wall or deploy the full might of our military or whatever.
Yeah, it's probably a leap to point out that the Confederacy was a bastion of fetishizing "honor" and that they ordered their economic life along irrational, retrograde lines. There's gotta be more going on here than historical coincidence.
June 14, 2006 10:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not much of a blog reader, are you?
June 15, 2006 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL, digamma, LOL. Right on.
"You say I'm a dreamer. We're two of a kind. Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"
June 15, 2006 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink