Posted on 17-10-2002

Goodbye to the Vietnam Syndrome
By RICK PERLSTEIN, NYT, 15 Oct02 (Photos shows cover of Rick's book "Before
the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus")

I recently returned to live in the Chicago neighborhood where I went to
college over a decade ago, during the first President Bush's crusade
against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was different then: I remember the
passionate handbills clogging university cork boards; my proud
participation in antiwar demonstrations on campus; and, most dramatically,
the civil disobedience, as when militants desperate to change the debate
over war in Iraq snarled traffic downtown by lying in front of cars on the
busiest streets.

These days at the University of Chicago I can't even find a dissenting
flyer. And while activists elsewhere have begun to organize students
against the 2002 Iraq crusade, they are doing so a full four months after
President Bush's West Point address made "preventive war" against Iraq seem
all but inevitable.

So should the president conclude that, with even college campuses fairly
quiet, he needn't fear an engaged public getting in the way of his war on
Iraq? That would be a mistake, because the absence of marching bodies does
not indicate enthusiasm for war. Protest is occurring by other means. Why,
after all, take to the streets? You're likely to have more effect sending a
strongly worded letter to a senator in one of the country's toss-up races
than by lying down in front of a car.

It's a strange state of affairs, and not just for that small minority given
to attending antiwar rallies. Yes, the president had his way, finally, with
Congress. But the foreign policy establishment seems distinctly uneasy
about war with Iraq. The military establishment is not necessarily any more
enthusiastic; Gen. Anthony Zinni, President Bush's own sometime Mideast
envoy, has spoken repeatedly against invasion and in favor of containment.
The Central Intelligence Agency has let its coolness to the invasion idea
become known.

Of all the changes to follow on the Sept. 11 tragedy, this openness must be
the least anticipated. An entire set of political assumptions about how
military force gets debated in America has been upset. Something's
happening here. Everyone talks about the Vietnam syndrome, referring partly
to the American public's undue shyness about projecting military might
abroad. This malady has always carried with it a corollary affliction among
Democrats. At least since they nominated a Southern Navy man, Jimmy Carter,
who began the defense buildup famously extended by Ronald Reagan, the
Democrats, stereotyped as the peace party, have stepped over themselves to
demonstrate they are not afraid of a little militarism.

Which is to say: the national post-Vietnam psychological complex enforced a
certain triviality inappropriate to the gravest questions a nation can
face. On one side, "standing tall" meant embracing heroic campaigns to
rescue hapless medical students in Grenada or drive a former C.I.A. asset,
Manuel Noriega, from his lair with loud rock music. On the other side,
panicked Democrats stood nearly mute lest they be buried by hawkish pundits
for inhabiting the ghost of George McGovern — or else they posed driving
tanks.

It all came to a head with our intervention into Iraq in 1991. There was a
Congressional debate, to be sure, and a very close authorizing vote on the
use of force. But that debate felt unreal to us protesters. We were
demonstrating in favor of reasoned debate and against the debate we were
witnessing, one drenched in a neurosis that made every discussion about
military force a referendum on national virility. We wanted a debate on the
issues. We felt unable to force one. And so we marched.

But our very presence in the streets, in a final turn of the
social-psychological screw, ended up implicating us, too, in the
post-Vietnam neurosis. For by then the resolution had passed, our troops
had been committed to battle and those interested in a soft coercion toward
unanimity could point to us as a fifth column. Such was the perversity in
the American way of debating war, further inhibiting the kind of mature
consideration of war and peace we sought to inspire.

The fear in the cry of "Vietnam syndrome" was a real one, I think, and
primal: what if, when American national security — real, physical,
"homeland" security, not just the security of our regional arrangements or
our access to oil — was truly threatened and we were somehow too enervated
to defend ourselves? On Sept. 11 just such an attack was visited upon us.
And though many people doubted, and still do, the effectiveness of the
national mobilization in response, no one doubted our will to respond.

That cleared away a lot of the nonsense. I wonder whether it will ever
again be possible for a president to rouse the nation to support any war
unless the threat is far more than an abstraction. I wonder whether a
president will be able to sell military action without the kind of reasoned
political debate we would ideally demand of any political issue.

And that, it seems to me, is what we lately have been getting.

It has happened with startling rapidity. Last winter, when Tom Daschle
ventured some mild criticisms of President Bush's foreign policy, his
patriotism was impugned.

By this summer, John Kerry suffered no such baiting, and his criticisms
were much stronger. A few weeks later came measured demurrals from Brent
Scowcroft and James Baker, and warnings to Democrats from their political
consultants of bad consequences for a headlong embrace of intervention. At
the end of August the administration acknowledged the political necessity
of a congressional resolution (they still deny its legal necessity); and
after that plans began in earnest to court United Nations support.

Since then varieties of antiwar expression, even in mainstream political
quarters, have become profligate: from the unsentimental strategic
calculations of realists like the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer
to the strict-constructionist Constitutional arguments of Senator Robert
Byrd. Questions of war and peace are being debated as they should have been
debated all along, and as they haven't been debated since Lyndon Johnson
escalated Vietnam with doctored reports of a 1964 attack in the Gulf of
Tonkin. And there's no reason to expect the debate will end just because of
Congress's deferential vote last week.

Which does no good for George W. Bush. So long as he could frame the issue
as anything but political — in Manichean terms more appropriate to the war
on terror than our present Iraq predicament — the president had the upper
hand. Now when he tries that language he appears to be reading from an
outdated script. For sending troops into battle is no longer a function of
the post-Vietnam culture wars. Now it seems you have to make your case, all
along the line. Mirabile dictu. Long may this last.

Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the
Unmaking of the American Consensus.''