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.''
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