.
You know, probably the main reason me and a lot of other people now old enough for AARP were “prematurely anti-Shock’n’Awe” is that we remembered what happened when America decided to get involved in an (unwinnable) war with a distant (much less powerful) nation for vague Realpolitickal excuses. I googled ‘Vietnam Syndrome”; the second entry was the Urban Dictionary:
A view held largely by American conservatives that the “loss” of the Vietnam War has created an American public biased against any type of American military conflict.
They argue that bad memories of the Vietnam War (scandals, protests, riots, images of killed/wounded soldiers and civilians, etc.) have caused the American people to distrust any type of war at all. As a result, it is argued, any attempt by the United States to engage in a military conflict will be viewed by the American people as “another Vietnam.”
The third entry was Marvin Kalb at the Brookings Institute, just this January:
It had never really left—what was widely referred to as the “Vietnam syndrome”–but it has now returned unmistakably, certain to exercise a major influence on American foreign policy during President Barack Obama’s second term in office. It is the belief, born of brutal experience during the Vietnam War, that never again will the United States gradually tiptoe into questionable wars without a clearcut objective, overwhelming military force, an endgame strategy and, most important, the support of Congress and the American people. In today’s world of terrorist threat and guerrilla war, the Vietnam syndrome means, if nothing else, a fundamental reluctance to commit American military power anywhere in the world, unless it is absolutely necessary to protect the national interests of the country. The Vietnam syndrome is a giant step away from hard-edged policies, such as President George W. Bush’s adventurous plunge into Iraq in 2003, and toward softer-edged policies, such as President Obama has pursued in his measured anti-Qaddafi approach to the Libyan revolution and his careful, arms-length-away attitude to the complicated mess in Syria….
Why the flying fuck would this be a bad idea? Because not throwing American lives away, not destroying foreign nations and distant people, not wasting trillions of dollars desperately needed for more productive uses, not being willing to “pick up some crappy little country and throw it against a wall just to prove we’re serious” will threaten Michael Ledeen’s self-perceived manliness?
Could we just pass a law guaranteeing every neocon a free lifetime supply of boner pills, and spend the remaining two trillion dollars on rebuilding stuff (here at home, and in the rest of the world) rather than breaking more shit?
.
.
dollared
This. A thousand times this.
And fuck every fucking neocon ever.
Redshirt
In fact, the free boner pills would probably solve most problems, not just foreign policy.
If there was one group to profile, it would be white American males.
Suffern ACE
But we want to be men of action. Waiting around for situations where there are clear objectives is letting circumstances dictate your actions. How can we prove we are free if we wait for others to act? We are men of action.
cckids
@Redshirt:
Jesus, someone think of their poor wives! Sounds like Hell to me.
PS, I sent a very late reply to you in the post below with the other Dixie Chicks song, referencing another of their songs, called “Truth No. 2”, here is a sample lyric. It rings very true, in light of the Iraq adventures:
You don’t like the sound of the truth
Coming from my mouth
You say that I lack the proof
Well baby that might be so
I might get to the end of my life
Find out everyone was lying
I don’t think that I’m afraid anymore
Say that I would rather die trying
MikeJ
To be fair, a lot of that two trillion was spent here. All those bullets and missiles were bought here, and it was a sort of Keynesian stimulus.[1] Of course it would have been better if we had rebuilt bridges or put in high speed rail, something durable.
[1] An added bonus was driving up the price of ammo, meaning our own domestic gun nuts had to pay more. The Iraq invasion functioned as a tax on ammo.
Nemo_N
But then what are we supposed to do to look like mature, sober-minded realists and bash other people as naive? Compare taste in TV shows?
? Martin
Hitler. The argument goes that someone should have invaded Germany in 38 and none of that would have happened, but FDR couldn’t land on an aircraft carrier with a codpiece and so we did that other thing instead.
It’s bullshit – mostly because the world is an infinitely smaller place today than in 1933. But that’s the argument.
Pinkamena Panic
@dollared:
First, eeeeeeeewwwwwwww.
Second, lots of them are dead, so double eeeeeeeewwwwwwww.
dollared
@Pinkamena Panic: Sorry for the inadvertent image. How about “with a frozen 36″ Usinger’s Summer Sausage”?
Batocchio
Thanks, Anne Laurie, especially for that fantastic title.
Yutsano
@cckids:
Adjusted fer accuracy.
@dollared: Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good sausage.
Oh and dunno if you heard but potential meet-up around Memorial Day. Details pending but most likely at Ivar’s unless another venue is chosen.
dance around in your bones
Seems like some people learned all the wrong lessons from Vietnam.
I guess that’s what happens when they live in Bizarro World.
Cognitive dissonance, motherfucker! Do you speak it?
Yutsano
@dance around in your bones:
We no speako Americano.
dance around in your bones
@Yutsano:
Well, for people who claim to be such good ‘Murkans, they better learn to speak Americano.
Otherwise they should just self-deport. ASAP.
There goes my BP again! Gah.
NotMax
Still a pithy encapsulation of oh so much related to the topic is John McCutcheon’s song, Not Me.
Yutsano
@dance around in your bones: They’re not worth the stress. Or the spike in blood pressure. I see changes coming to this country the way they always do: slowly and tortuously and aggravatingly slow. But it’s happening.
SG
It’s worth noting that Kalb’s checklist for consideration of war is taken directly from The Powell Doctrine:
Of course, Colin Powell ignored his own damned Doctrine when he pimped the war for Bush and Cheney at the U.N., thus capping his habit of confusing his oath to defend the Constitution with a loyalty oath to Dear Leader. It had always worked so well for his career path before.
dance around in your bones
Gawd, that Travelin’ Soldier song always gives me the goosebumps, especially the martial drumbeat at the end. You just know how that soldier is coming home.
@Anne Laurie – this was a stellar post. I know you have your critics and nasty trolls, but I always like your posts and the thought you put into them. Thank you.
@Yutsano: You’re right, but my body just reacts. Gah.
Must control body and BP. Breathe and relax!
dance around in your bones
@NotMax: Good song. And, yes, on topic!
…..aaaand I seem to be the only one awake around here which means I prolly ought to go the fuck to sleep.
Redshirt
I’ve been dreaming too much lately. It’s tiring!
Thor Heyerdahl
Narcissistic reposting from the thread below
https://balloon-juice.com/2013/03/20/late-night-open-thread-115/#comment-4300110
Fred
Just imagine we had sent all those soldiers and money to Afganistan with hammers and saws to build schools and hospitals. America would be proclaimed the friend of Alah and be greeted with candy and flowers.
Maybe it’s not quite that simple but almost.
David Koch
What do we give the female neo-cons/warmongers like Rice and Hillary?
Liquid
Fifteen minutes later
We had our first taste of whiskey
There was uncles giving lectures
On ancient irish history
The men all started telling jokes
And the women they got frisky
By five o’clock in the evening
Every bastard there was pissed
Liquid
Heretics, the lot a you. Damn you Saitek! Daaaaaammmmnnn Yooooouuuu!!!!
BArry
“Could we just pass a law guaranteeing every neocon a free lifetime supply of boner pills, and spend the remaining two trillion dollars on rebuilding stuff (here at home, and in the rest of the world) rather than breaking more shit?”
How about the next time they get their nards in an uproar, we just parachute them naked into the ‘crappy little country’ in question, and let them fight their way out.
And if they don’t make it, well, it’s a win-win.
Ramalama
Our clear cut objective was what, again? Remove Saddam? Get Al-Qaida? bin Laden? Liberate Iraqis? Free elections? Free up Iraqi oil for teh Market? Keep Iran from expanding influence?
Still trying to define my syndrome.
debbie
The “Vietnam Syndrome” is the notion that it’s criminal for the U.S. government to lie to its citizens in order to support a losing cause or illegal and immoral actions.
Zirgar
I may be wrong here, but I don’t remember there being a massive anti-war sentiment when it came to Afghanistan. I think everything was pretty clear going in, what we were trying to do and how we were trying to go about doing it. So, I don’t think the American people are against war per se, we’re just against all the bullshit wars.
Suffern ACE
@Ramalama: well, the reasons were secret and the objectives were classified. You may have missed that fact during all of the boisterous tiptoeing our leaders were doing.
Suffern ACE
@Zirgar: yep. You know, I can think of several wars where, yeah, I wouldn’t spend a lot if time worrying. However, just because I’d be hoping the country would honor its commitment to South Korea, doesn’t mean I hope we start a war there sooner rather than later.
Comrade Dread
@cckids: Neocons are primarily Republicans, so they’re wives would be safe. Pity their poor girlfriends and the airport police who would have to deal with the spike in wide stances.
Cris (without an H)
I always thought the real Vietnam syndrome was the Powell doctrine. Vietnam didn’t teach the Joint Chiefs, the Presidents, and much of the public to “distrust any type of war at all,” it merely filled them with the urge to get back in the ring and win the next one.
That’s why both Desert Storm and the Iraq Invasion saw the proliferation of the yellow ribbon: the public felt so guilty about the myth of hippies spitting on soldiers, we desperately wanted another chance, where this time we would remember to say “welcome home.”
cmorenc
@dollared:
No…we’ll require them to not only be in the front of the initial assault combat brigade of any war they propose ginning up, but to stay there and be assigned to patrol the most dangerous towns being contested by insurgents. Let’s see Douglas Feith, Bill Kristol, Dick Chickenhawk Cheney, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz start coming home with badly damaged bodies and psychotic nightmares and shitstains in their pants.
Jado
look, not to put too fine a point on it, but…the boner pills just don’t FEEL the same.
It’s like wearing a rubber – you just don’t get the same level of feeling with a boner pill that you do when you invade some desert country with those oil fields and little stone age villages.
Oh, GOD, the little villages..they get us so “up”, if you know what I mean, especially when the bullets are punching through the horrible little mud bricks and the tanks are just rolling right over the straw roofs, with dust and those stupid camel blankets just shredded on the ground.
And then the bodies. Oooooo, the bodies… All those little brown bodies with the head scarves and the turbans…
I, uh…I have to visit the, uh, the bathroom for a minute. I’ll be right back. (Oh, god, Iran has minarets…I love minarets after the missiles hit)
El Cid
The next time an administration screams about the new Hitler or whatever, all the same types of people who were eager to trust the nation’s leaders and support and promote the invasion of Iraq and condemn all the dissenters will do it all over again, protestations of lessons learned notwithstanding.
El Cid
@SG: Anyone who thinks the ‘Powell doctrine’ was a deep and sophisticated policy insight perhaps should be likewise impressed at advice such as ‘Never bring an electrical appliance such as a toaster into the water with you when you bathe.’
PurpleGirl
A friend’s brother fought in Vietnam and came home physically and emotionally wounded. And the war killed him in the end — the doctors think he got the Hep C that killed him 20-odd years later from a blood transfusion in Vietnam.
cmorenc: Let’s have a bunch of those neocons get hep C and not know for 20-odd years they have it and then find out when it too late to cure it.
balconesfault
Because the other good reasons to put our troops in harms way are … ?
maya
@Zirgar: Partially right. But, there was quite a bit of trepidation at the beginning when our Afghan adventure began with only carpet bombing and letting the Northern Alliance,(remember them?) do the on-ground fighting for us first. There was the notion that US troops wouldn’t have to do much – saved for the main ring in Iraq, as it turned out.
dmbeaster
At the time, I reconciled the war bloodlust as a byproduct of 911. Americans do have a habit of overreacting stupidly – kinda like the folks who wanted to kill all sharks after Jaws came out.
But the real point is that the leadership exploited that emotion to sell a fraudulent war. There is no forgiving that. Never forget.
Omnes Omnibus
The big concern I have about Vietnam Syndrome is the way it tends to work out in practical terms. One finds people saying “During Vietnam, Group A did x. I am in today’s Group A and I don’t want things to turn out like Vietnam; therefore, I will do not-x.”
As far as getting into a war goes, the best theory of when and how I have seen is Just War Theory. It is not perfect; when one talks about something as horrible as war, a perfect theory is guaranteed to be flawed. Basically, JWT requires that all six of the following conditions be met before war can be justified:
Source.
It is truly hard to satisfy all six. Just wars are rare.
ThresherK
@dance around in your bones: Music and wartime is always a fascinating mix of emotions.
WWI was full of marches.
In the 1920s we got radio and electrical recording; in the 1930s Bing Crosby taught us all how to sing into a microphone. Not surprisingly WWII’s best songs were very personal and low-key: Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, The Last Time I Saw Paris, They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.
Vietnam: What can one say? I’m too young to remember, and wonder if the movie soundtracks are accurate. But the schism between the servicemen and the State Dept was made for rock and roll.
Jump to the last decade: I love the “cut off their nose to spite their face” quality of the country music establishment who just up and threw away “Travelin’ Soldier”, cos I think it’s the best song (of some commercial success) to come out of this whole mess.
NotMax
@ThresherK
Couple of other WWII hits: Der Fuehrer’s Face and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.
ThresherK
@NotMax: Yeah, but except as window dressing, say in the background of a movie to remind modern audiences what “total war” felt like, we hardly hear “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. After V-E day, its time had pretty much passed, right?
The tagline “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” is succinct and also pretty universal, which sorta goes to the idea of less specific means more shelf life. Did the song invent the line or vice versa?
(See “Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” as another one of the songs demonstrating the limits of martial gung-ho music from the era.)
canuckistani
@NotMax: From what I can gather, the belligerent songs were pushed from above in an effort to keep up the fighting spirit. The ones that the people actually wanted to listen to were the sad and sentimental ones.
Just as a for instance, notice how White Christmas, We’ll Meet Again and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree are still in the public conciousness, but the more-propaganda-y stuff is largely forgotten.
@ThresherK – damn my slow typing fingers!
ThresherK
@canuckistani: Oh, geez, thanx. How could I forget White Christmas? Of course: So personal it didn’t even mention the war. So much “show” it didn’t have to even “tell”.
(And you beat me to it, so good on ya.)
dance around in your bones
@ThresherK:
This is a song that for some reason I can sing to this day (and no, I’m not THAT old) from WW1.
Keep The Home Fires Burning
I must have heard my grandad sing it, or maybe on the TV machine.
I’d have to let the actual Vietnam vets on this blog talk about what music was important to them, but I grew up in that era and the antiwar protest songs like this were quite important to me. And all the other good stuff, too numerous to go into.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ThresherK:
“We’ll meet again” has a very soothing lullaby melody; when my kids were little I used to sing that song to them at bedtime to help them go to sleep. Of course that was before they were old enough to watch the movie Dr. Strangelove all the way through to the credits at the end.
Another Halocene Human
@MikeJ: If you look at real wages &cet, it wasn’t a particularly effective stimulus.
I remember some figures that came out a couple of years ago. Investments in education really stood out against other kinds of stimulus.
I would bet that bullet making is not labor intensive, just resource intensive, so it probably caused some environmental and social harm but didn’t really deliver on good-paying jobs and it CERTAINLY didn’t create infrastructure that leads to sustained economic health.
Roads, bridges, and rail are not the bestest of stimulus either (they’re okay) but good projects (not idiocy like a new mixing bowl that costs $1B and “shaves 30s off your commute” which is just welfare for the cronied up gangs that control road project bids) are really, really important to ensure regions have an economic future.
(It’s also why many rural places clamor for subsidized rail or airplane access. Of course the question of whether that region needs “saving” is all a matter of perspective. It would be nice if we could rationally decide what needs Amtrak and what needs rural air shuttle buckos but that’s kind of tough when plutocrats control the game.)
Another Halocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: And #6 destroys a lot of #1. Better imprison all the sociologists and criminologists…
Another Halocene Human
@Zirgar: I may be wrong here, but I don’t remember there being a massive anti-war sentiment when it came to Afghanistan.
There wasn’t. A ton of so-called liberals were for it because the Taliban sucks. (The Taliban that the Admin had been cheering for defeating the Northern Alliance and making a pipeline deal with them months before.)
I was very opposed to Afghanistan, specifically to a ground invasion because I felt it would give Bin Laden the opportunity to escape during the confusion. I was correct. Hell, I think it was engineered for this purpose. Bush wasn’t going to start executing his Saudi buddies.
I think everything was pretty clear going in, what we were trying to do and how we were trying to go about doing it.
I completely disagree. Nobody knows what the objective was even now which is why it’s so difficult to leave.
ThresherK
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@canuckistani
Recommended reading on White Christmas
Recommended listening from someone who knows how to put a song across.
dance around in your bones
@ThresherK:
Fortunate Son
Ok, I’ve been lost in a YouTube hole w/Vietnam era songs.
Another Halocene Human
@Fred: Remember when all those people gave money to a con man that was supposedly to build schools for girls?
ThresherK
@dance around in your bones: Being too young to know about Vietnam firsthand, that is the song which I remember hearing first, and then finding out what it meant later. I wonder if generationally I fell through the cracks: Post boomer, pre-Reaganite.
dance around in your bones
@ThresherK: You’re a crack baby! ;)
Gretchen
Thanks for this, Anne Laurie. Traveling Soldier always makes me cry. The macho-men who make the policy don’t have to dry the tears of those who lose loved ones.
I too am subject to Vietnam Syndrome. I was 18 the first year the college draft deferment was no more. Congress wrapped that war up right quick when their own boys could no longer get college deferments (see: Dick Cheney), and were subject to the draft if the war kept on. It was ok for other people’s kids to fight it, but outrageous for their own.
Jay C
IIJM, or does Marvin Kalb’s “analysis” of “Vietnam Syndrome” contain a self-contradicting formulations? To wit:
Umm, Marvin? The Vietnam War had wound down 40 fncking years before Dubya’s Desert Debacle got started; why are you writing as if it is some sort of recent development, rather than a pattern of military/foreign policy which had been operative for decades before the Iraq invasion?
ACAICT, this sounds like just more instant-revisionist BS (still) trying to polish up the turd of Bush 43’s botched neocon neo-imperialist fantasy disaster (WTF? “Adventurous plunge”? Going on the high-slide at a water park is an adventurous plunge – involving the US in a bloody, expensive, badly-managed and probably ultimately futile war? Maybe a little more than that….
Maude
Fortunate Son. CCR.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Talk about proving the exact opposite of the point you were trying to make. If this is the best Brookings can do for a foreign policy expert they should just close up shop.
SG
@El Cid: If you’re implying that I think the Powell Doctrine was anything more than self-serving cynicism rather than the bare minimum of due diligence, you misread my comment. As usual, the military and political calculations for war omit any mention of the moral cost. The Iraq War, like the Vietnam War, was a moral abomination aside from its utterly disastrous strategic and tactical blundering.
My point was that Powell couldn’t even sustain any commitment to his own flimsy Doctrine when he was called on to pimp the Iraq invasion at the U.N.
mclaren
Anne was much smarter than I was. Confession time: I was one of those idiots who actually believed Saddam had WMDs. In my defense, all I can say is that Saddam’s behavior made absolutely no sense if he didn’t have WMDs. Why the hell would he refuse to admit UN weapons inspectors if he didn’t have the WMDs?
Well, I was a complete fucking idiot. I was a moron. Because I forgot that out here in the real world, nobody’s behavior makes any fucking sense.
EVER.
dance around in your bones
@mclaren:
Oh, mclaren – Saddam DID let UN weapons inspectors back into the country!
It was Bush who ordered them out to get his war on. I’m sure you know this now.
I think Saddam blustered like crazy to look strong and like a tough guy to his people. I mean, pretending to have nuclear weapons is almost as good as actually having them, no?
TAPX486
Yep, I remember being suckered by the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’. At least LBJ and his band of merry warriors had the small fig leaf that the USSR and China really were major world powers with nuclear weapons. Vietnam might not have been a threat but we were 2 years past the Cuban Missile crisis and three years past American and Soviet tanks gun barrel to gun barrel at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin.
El Cid
Remember, if we could have killed all those millions of Southeast Asians but it not cost so many American lives, and other inconveniences, there would have been no ‘Vietnam Syndrome’.
It’s not about whether or not a war is “just,” it’s about whether or not a war stirs up so much discomfort among the U.S. population that political and military elites find it inconvenient the next time they’d like to make war.
Foreign policy disasters are about what they cost us, not what they cost those at the receiving end of the war.
El Cid
@SG: Right, I’m just saying that the very notion that in this country someone (Powell, pundits, etc) can state such trivialities as some sort of ‘philosophy of proper war’ and it be treated with gravitas simply indicates the political infantility of our culture.
Platonicspoof
A couple of books:
The above quote is from an article at Tomdispatch by Nick Turse, author of
Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
based on ten years of archival research and on interviews with people in Vietnam and in the U.S.