It
was April 30, 1975. Saigon, the only territory United States and Saigon regime forces ever held with certainty, had fallen to the Vietnamese. The U.S.-invented “nation” of South Vietnam was gone. Vietnam was reunif ied.
In the United States, which manufactured the war, both fatigue and relief were nearly palpable. And as the years passed, those feelings did not die out. Public repugnance toward military adventures was so pronounced that it imposed an unaccustomed military restraint on U.S. officials. Opinion surveys indicated the public wanted arms control negotiations and trade employed instead of war. The feeling became known as the Vietnam syndrome. Who in 1976 would even have imagined that, just 28 years after Vietnam, the United States would plunge into another tar pit of a war in dubious circumstances with uncertain public support? And who would have imagined that the U.S. Congress, press and public would again be taken in by another pack of lies issued by officials once again ignorant of the situation and society into which they wanted to intrude?
RESISTING RESTRAINT Presidents chafed under the restriction of the Vietnam syndrome. In one of the most belligerent speeches ever made by a U.S. presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan in 1980 attacked the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations for yielding to the public abhorrence of further foolish wars—and attributed that repugnance to manipulation of the U.S. public by the Vietnamese, who Reagan still described as “North” Vietnamese: “For too long, we have lived with the ‘Vietnam syndrome.’ Much of that syndrome has been 12
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MARCH 15, 2012
created by the North Vietnamese aggressors who now threaten the peaceful people of Thailand. Over and over they told us for nearly 10 years that we were the aggressors bent on imperialistic conquests.” Presidents kept trying to whittle away at the public’s reluctance, using short wars of overwhelming force against weak opponents like Panama and Grenada. After the Kuwait war, the first President Bush exulted, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
“I tell you the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well on the home front.” Jerry Brown 1992
In California, then former governor Jerry Brown responded that Bush was reading too much into an easy victory: “It may be, as some say, that victory in the Gulf War has put the ghost of Vietnam to rest in the area of military affairs. But I tell you the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well on the home front.” Some officials interpreted the syndrome to fit an administration’s objectives, as when Carter assistant secretary of state Hodding Carter III said in April 1978, “I don’t think they [the public] have written off our international obligations, but they have written off believing there is some simple code they are supposed to adopt.” Some officials seized on every foreign policy crisis—even those caused by the U.S.—to declare the syndrome dead. In June 1980, Philip Geyelin wrote in the Washington Post that officialdom, “heartened by the public response to the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet plunge into Afghanistan,” believed the syndrome “has been laid to rest.” Apparently not, because five years later rightist U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan complained about the “near fatal fever of the Vietnam syndrome which has plagued us for 10 years …” In April 1978, United Press International ran an interpretive article that began, “It’s called ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and it has left a mark on the attitudes of Americans toward their nation’s foreign policy.” In an article by what conservatives call the liberal press, UPI characterized the syndrome as a problem needing solving, rather than as the solution its supporters considered it.
BIPARTISAN RECKLESSNESS Military adventurism is hardly a partisan matter. The generational cycle of preventable and unnecessary wars is fostered by both parties. It’s instructive to recall that in 1998, President Clinton— seeking public support for his proposed war against Iraq—sent teams of high officials around the nation to sell the public on Clinton’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s government was seeking “weapons of mass destruction.” On Feb. 18, 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger conducted a 6,000-person “town meeting” in an Ohio sports arena live on CNN. The officials encountered public hostility and anger toward another war on Iraq, prompting the administration to screen out critics from crowds at succeeding stops but also forcing Clinton to retreat from his plans for war. September 11, of course, changed everything. Officials of the second Bush administration believed the syndrome was gone for good. Chickenhawk officials believed they could extend the post-September 11 mandate beyond the Afghan war to Iraq. (The term chickenhawk was coined by U.S. Rep. and Korean war veteran Andrew Jacobs to describe officials who avoided war themselves but try to send others to war.) Early in the Iraq war there were a lot of folks who drew parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. In the trappings of war, the geography and culture, the parallels really didn’t work. But in the policymaking that led to war, they did. There were leaders who, in order to get the United States into a war, misled both themselves and the nation. There was ignorance of the society and terrain the U.S. invaded. There was an acquiescent press that took its cues from the administration. There were members of Congress who failed to do their duty. And most of all, there was a gullible and passive public that was too unwilling to listen to voices of reason and restraint and too willing to be stirred up and maneuvered by leaders skilled in emotional and chauvinistic manipulation of tragedy. Now again, in the wake of the second Iraq war, there is a revival of public resistance to doing it again. Will we do it again? In a few years, will we forget the Vietnam and Iraq lies and misery and again place U.S. servicepeople in harm’s way on the
same kind of suspicious rationale? Must we keep perpetually re-learning the same lessons? When the Iraq war entered its fourth year in March 2007, this newspaper published the names of every servicemember the nation had lost to that date. In March of most years thereafter, we published an anniversary report of some kind. Now, th Iraq war is supposedly over, and March is here again, so we asked authors, activist, veterans of both war and antiwar: Will we do it again?
MICHAEL ARCHER is author of A Patch of Ground, an account of the siege of Khe Sanh, which he experienced as a Marine Corps radio operator. He is now writing the biography of a childhood friend who fell at Khe Sanh.
by DENNIS MYERS
B R E A K I N G T H E G E N E R AT
