"Forrest Piper" <
880yardbo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:696be913-ddb2-40c3...@h4g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
> Most of the blind and obedient "successful" in society today, have
> either become much too used to helping themselves with the blood and
> sweat of others,
Smog of War, Please Meet the 'Afghan Syndrome'
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175527/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_smog_of_war/
take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam
War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for
their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in
history. Last words - both eulogies and curses - have been offered too many
times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet
that would put that war away for keeps.
Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by
'Vietnamizing' it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise
it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as 'a noble cause.' Instead, it
morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a 'syndrome,' an unhealthy
aversion to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their
core.
A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein's army in
Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted that the country had
finally 'kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.' As it turned out,
despite the organization of massive 'victory parades' at home to prove that
this hadn't been Vietnam redux, that war kicked back. Another decade passed
and there were H.W.'s son W. and his advisors planning the invasion of Iraq
through a haze of Vietnam-constrained obsessions.
W.'s top officials and the Pentagon would actually organize the public
relations aspect of that invasion and the occupation that followed as a
Vietnam opposite's game - no 'body counts' to turn off the public, plenty of
embedded reporters so that journalists couldn't roam free and (as in
Vietnam) harm the war effort, and so on. The one thing they weren't going to
do was lose another war the way Vietnam had been lost. Yet they managed once
again to bog the U.S. military down in disaster on the Eurasian mainland,
could barely manage to win a heart or a mind, and even began issuing body
counts of the enemy dead.
'We don't do body counts,' General Tommy Franks, Afghan War commander, had
insisted in 2001, and as late as November 2006, the president was still
expressing his irritation about Iraq to a group of conservative news
columnists this way: 'We don't get to say that - a thousand of the enemy
killed or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it.'
The problem, he explained, was: 'We have made a conscious effort not to be a
body count team' (à la Vietnam). And then, of course, those body counts
began appearing.
Somehow, over the endless years, no matter what any American president
tried, The War - that war - and its doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of
defeat so deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to fully take it in,
refused to depart town. They were the ghosts on the battlements of American
life, representing - despite the application of firepower of a historic
nature - a defeat by a small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it simply
couldn't be shaken, nor its 'lessons' learned.
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was typical at the time in
dismissing North Vietnam in disgust as 'a little fourth rate power,' just as
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Thomas Moorer would term it 'a
third-rate country with a population of less than two counties in one of the
50 states of the United States.' All of which made its victory, in some
sense, beyond comprehension.
A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility
That was then. This is now and, though the frustration must seem familiar,
Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so
vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In
fact, if you hadn't noticed - and weirdly enough no one has - that former
war finally seems to have all but vanished.
If you care to pick a moment when it first headed for the exits, when we all
should have registered something new in American consciousness, it would
undoubtedly have been mid-2010 when the media decided that the Afghan War,
then 8½ years old, had superseded Vietnam as 'the longest war' in U.S.
history. Today, that claim has become commonplace, even though it remains
historically dubious (which may be why it's significant).
Afghanistan is, in fact, only longer than Vietnam if you decide to date the
start of the American war there to 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin
Gulf Resolution (in place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when
American 'combat troops' first arrived in South Vietnam. By then, however,
there were already 16,000 armed American 'advisors' there, Green Berets
fighting there, American helicopters flying there. It would be far more
reasonable to date America's war in Vietnam to 1961, the year of its first
official battlefield casualty and the moment when the Kennedy administration
sent in 3,000 military advisors to join the 900 already there from the
Eisenhower years. (The date of the first American death on the Vietnam Wall,
however, is 1956, and the first American military man to die in Vietnam - an
American lieutenant colonel mistaken by Vietnamese guerrillas for a French
officer - was killed in Saigon in 1945.)
Of course, massive U.S. support for the French version of the Vietnam War in
the early 1950s could drive that date back further. Similarly, if you wanted
to add in America's first Afghan War, the CIA-financed anti-Soviet war of
the mujahideen from 1980 to 1989, you might once again have a 'longest war'
competition.
The essential problem in dating wars these days is that we no longer declare
them, so they just tend to creep up on us. In addition, because undeclared
war has melded into something like permanent war on the American scene, we
might well be setting records every day on the Eurasian mainland - if, for
instance, you care to include the First Gulf War and the continued military
actions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq which, after 2001, blended into the
Bush administration's Global War on Terror, its invasion of Afghanistan, and
then, of course, Iraq (again).
For those who want a definitive 'longest,' however, the latest news is
promising. Obama administration negotiations with Afghan President Hamid
Karzai's government are reportedly close to complete. The two sides are
expected to arrive at a 'strategic partnership' agreement leaving U.S.
forces (trainers, advisors, special operations troops, and undoubtedly scads
of private contractors) ensconced on bases in Afghanistan well beyond 2014.
If such official desire becomes reality, then the Vietnam record might
indeed be at an end.
What's important, however, isn't which war holds the record, but that media
urge in 2010 to anoint Afghanistan the titleholder for pure long-term
futility. In retrospect, that represented a changing-of-the-guard moment.
Now, skip ahead almost two years and consider what's missing in action
today. After all, dealing with the Afghan War in Vietnam-analogy terms right
now would be like lining up ducks at a shooting gallery. Just take a run
through the essential Vietnam War checklist: there's 'quagmire' (check!);
dropping the idea of winning 'hearts and minds' (check!); the fact that
we've entered the 'Afghanization' phase of the war, with endless rosy
prognostications about, followed by grim reports on, the training of the
Afghan army to replace U.S. combat troops (check!).
There are those sagging public opinion polls about the war, dropping
steadily into late-Vietnam territory (check!); the continued insistence of
American military officials that 'progress' is being made in the face of
disaster and disintegration (not quite 'light at the end of the tunnel'
territory, but nonetheless a check! for sure).
There are those bomb-able, or in our era drone-able, 'sanctuaries' across
the border (check!); American massacre stories, most recently a one-man
version of My Lai (check!); a prickly leader who irritates his American
counterparts and is seen as an obstacle to success (check!), and so on - and
on and on.
While the Afghan War has always had its many non-Vietnam aspects -
geographical, historical, geopolitical, and in terms of casualties - anyone
could have had a Vietnam field day with the present situation. At almost any
previous moment in the last decades, many undoubtedly would have, and yet
what's striking is that this time around no one has. Unlike any
administration since the Nixon years, nobody in Obama's crowd now seems to
have Vietnam obsessively on the brain.
What was taken as the last significant reference to the war from a major
official came from Bush holdover Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In
February 2011, four months before he left the Pentagon, Gates gave a
'farewell' address at West Point in which he told the cadets, '[I]n my
opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again
send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa
should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.'
This, press reports incorrectly claimed, was that general's Vietnam advice
for President Kennedy in 1961. (The statement Gates quoted, however, was
made in 1950 after the North Koreans invaded South Korea.)
A Vietnam Analogy Memorial
Since then, Washington generally seems to have dropped Vietnam through the
memory hole. Well-connected pundits seldom mention its example any more.
Critics have generally stopped using it to anathematize the ongoing war in
Afghanistan. In a wasteland of growing disasters, that war now seems to have
gained full recognition as a quagmire in its own right. No help needed.