By Gerald S. Rellick
We generally assume there is a consensus among Americans that the Vietnam War was a hopelessly misguided venture from the start. We have for the record Robert McNamara’s mea culpa telling us that he and the other driving forces behind the Vietnam war failed to understand the most fundamental dynamic of that conflict--that North Vietnam was not part of a larger monolithic communist effort, but rather, was a divided country engaged in an intense nationalistic fight for unity and independence from colonial rule.
But there is another interpretation of what happened in Vietnam. To right wing hawks it was a failure of American will. They saw in Vietnam only defeat and humiliation. They wanted the U.S to expand the war into the North with ground troops, and some even proposed using nuclear weapons. It reflected an incredibly infantile, never-say-die fantasy of macho America. America’s failure in Vietnam, vastly more political than military, was viewed as “a double defeat of the Right,” as the Carnegie Endowment’s Anatol Lieven writes:
In Vietnam, unprecedented military defeat coincided with the appearance of a modern culture which traditionalist Americans found alien, immoral and hateful beyond description. As was widely remarked at the time of Newt Gingrich's attempted ‘Republican Revolution’ of the mid-1990s, one way of looking at the hardline Republicans--especially from the Religious Right--is to see them as motivated by a classical nationalist desire for a return to a Golden Age, in their case the pre-Vietnam days of the 1950s.
After the Soviet Union fell and America entered what has been called its “unipolar moment,” there emerged in 1992 a remarkable policy document that called for a bold reassertion of America’s military dominance in world affairs. This policy, crafted principally by Paul Wolfowitz and later to become known as “Project for a New American Century,” was quickly rejected by the first president Bush as dangerously reckless. Through eight years of Clinton rule the Neo-cons bided their time and never let the dust settle on their proposal for American hegemony.
Then 9/11 altered everything. The enormity of this event on the American psyche cannot be overestimated. The Neo-cons got their Gulf of Tonkin--but this time in spades and without the ambiguity about what had occurred. Just as fear and national humiliation were the raw material for the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich following the German defeat in WWI, so the Bush Neo-cons exploited 9/11 to mobilize support for their long-cherished cause.
There were some small details to get out of the way--the Taliban government and the al Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan--but the real target, as we now know, was always Iraq.
Unlike with an earlier, wiser president Bush, the son, George W., embraced the Neo-con philosophy. More significantly the son’s vision went even beyond the Neo-con domain of geopolitics. For Bush the Neo-cons were thinking small. As he said with conviction in his recent press conference, referring to the war in Iraq, “Freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world…. And, as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to carry out the Lord's mission.”
We learn from Bob Woodward’s new book, Plan of Attack, that the Bush decision making process in going to war was hardly a “process” in any normal sense of the word. The CIA was intimidated. Facts were irrelevant. Diplomacy was scorned. Allies were rebuked. Internal debate was stifled. And Colin Powell, the last hope for sanity, surrendered.
Remarkably, the younger Bush admitted to Woodward that he never consulted his father. The elder Bush was not just any former president, but one who had gone down the same tricky road with Saddam Hussein, Iraq, and all the Middle East ramifications 12 years earlier--and ironically, with counsel from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. According to Woodward, Bush said, “He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.” And then he said, 'There's a higher Father that I appeal to. And so, George W. Bush, a man lacking in analytical acumen, disdainful of “pointy-headed intellectuals,” but always certain of his divine mission, directed that the United States begin the next Christian Crusade.
What we see then are two arrogant and reckless worldviews--one growing out of cold war remnants and the wreckage of Vietnam, the other rooted in one man’s Messianic impulse--coalescing with the tragedy of 9/11 to make the “perfect storm,” the nightmare of Iraq that no sane person could ever have envisioned, even after 9/11.
Polls tell us half the country still supports Bush’s war in Iraq, despite the evident misrepresentation and deceit, despite the enormous financial cost, despite the turmoil in relations with critical allies, and despite the tragic and senseless loss of precious American lives, now headed for 750.
How can this be? Perhaps we should not be surprised. One of the more disturbing statistics to come out of Vietnam was that even at the war’s end, with the American death toll at 58,000, and Vietnamese dead estimated at 2 to 3 million, more than half the country still supported the war--insane as that seems to us now.
So who are these people today who support George Bush’s personal war? Their support, as reflected in polls that the White House monitors closely, only embolden Bush on his mission from God. We have a right to ask these people to stand and be known to us. Let them step forward and explain how they can cheer on our troops with a kind of juvenile glee as these young men and women surrender their lives daily in the sinkhole of chaos and death that has become Iraq. Let them send their sons and daughters to fight for Bush’s holy war. Ante up, America. It’s time for some shared sacrifice. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker puts the matter in good perspective:
Reading biographical profiles of dead American soldiers, I am struck, always, by their ages--22 or 19 or 24. For most, childhood is all they get; their lives end even as their adulthood begins… Rare are children of those policy-makers who decided this war was necessary. Only one senator--Tim Johnson (D-S.D.)--had a son or daughter in the enlisted ranks. No more than five members of Congress have children in the military…. It is unconscionable that this republic could be so cavalier about duty and sacrifice, sending its poorer sons and daughters off to defend liberty for the rest of us…. It is a peculiar war on terror that requires so little sacrifice from most Americans.
The evidence mounts every day that George Bush’s mind is not connected to the realities that the rest of us see and experience every day. As Molly Ivins put it recently, “There are moments of cognitive dissonance in listening to President Bush, when you realize that what he is saying simply does not accord with any known version of reality.” The disconnect, the denial, indeed, the delusions, of Bushworld--so evident in his press conference and his 3½ hour interview with Bob Woodward--force us to view this president as supremely dangerous to American security and global stability, particularly with a Republican controlled congress that refuses to confront their party’s leader.
Let there be no mistake: Iraq is George Bush’s war. In contrast, America’s war against international terrorism requires patient, thoughtful and consensus-building leadership. With terrorists able to move easily cross porous international borders, it requires sound intelligence--including the cerebral type--and close cooperation with foreign governments and their intelligence services, something difficult to achieve when Bush-America’s policies and intentions are now so universally distrusted. Add to this the heavy investment of American military resources in Iraq, and it is difficult to imagine that America is safer today than it was a year ago.
Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked as a scientist in the military space sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. You can email Gerald at Rellick@interventionmag.com. Posted Wednesday 28, 2004