When US troops left Vietnam unceremoniously on April 30, 1975, it was widely perceived to be a killer blow to American self-confidence and self-belief. It was America’s first major military defeat on the world stage.
America depicted its entrance into Vietnam as an attempt to make the world safe for democracy and to checkmate the domino effect of countries falling one by one to the relentless march of Communism. Vietnam for Americans back home turned out to be an endless trauma, as nightly TV coverage provided news of battles fought and body counts of US military casualties (understated, as revealed after the war), student anti-war demonstrations which increased in intensity after the shooting deaths at Kent State University, and draft-dodging by young men reluctant to go to Vietnam (which later dogged the careers of Clinton and now G.W. Bush).
The body bags of the dead came to many American towns, and the political price to President Johnson was catastrophic. Today, Vietnam casts its long shadow on Election 2004 and on the principals, Bush and Kerry, one having evaded Vietnam by serving with the National Guard at home and the other having fought in Vietnam, receiving military honors and three Purple Heart medals for wounds suffered in combat.
Vietnam also casts its lengthening shadow on the Iraq imbroglio with its imagery of a quagmire in a conflict which the US military seems unlikely to win and even more difficult to walk away from. (Bush is not willing to follow the lead of Charles de Gaulle who had the courage and wisdom to recognize French folly in Algeria and withdraw, exposing himself to public disdain and to dodging bullets from the secret OAS army).
Like Vietnam, the Iraq war was projected as a clean and swift victory. But what appeared easy on paper turned out to be much more complex in reality.
When Bush Sr. launched his assault on Iraq during 1990-91, he said it was not going to be Vietnam. Such were the hopes of Desert Storm circa 1991. Writing then for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, edited by the redoubtable Richard Curtiss, this scribe predicted that Desert Storm would eventually end up as Desert Trap. Bush, Jr. reopened the door last year and the trap was set.
Robert Oakley, former US ambassador to Pakistan, recently recalled to The Washington Post that in Vietnam, President Johnson had pushed through a new constitution and elected government for that country in the hope that it would generate greater popular support there and in America. It didn’t work. Oakley noted the similarities of Vietnam with Iraq, and American hopes that an elected government in Baghdad will take “some of the onus off of us, changing perceptions” in the United States and elsewhere. In reality, he said, “it’s not so easy … we can’t escape that the United States is going to be in charge ... and we’re still going to be the target.”
History reveals that those who launch military adventures are often a prey to their own fatal decisions borne out of hubris, not listening to others, and not giving sufficient space to a contrary point of view. Pakistani President Ayub Khan said as much when he related to his biographer Altaf Gauhar that, in the run-up to the September 1965 war with India, he should have set up a counter-syndicate to challenge and test the validity and viability of conventional wisdom which advocated and oversold the benefits of a forward military policy with India while glossing over its side-effects.
When Bush Jr. pursued his Iraq misadventure he was egged on by his coterie of pro-Israeli neo-con policy-making cabal who did a job of hard-sell on a gullible President lacking sufficient depth of understanding of the nuances of the MidEast. Both he and the American people are paying for it now. The loud voices within, especially those of bereaved mothers of fallen US soldiers, ensure that the shadow of Vietnam over Iraq remains.
