Harry Targ
In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “The Iraq
Syndrome,” …. I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the
notions that “the United States should take unilateral military action to
correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that
present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring
democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the
world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is
necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only
very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are
naive and decadent wimps.” Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United
States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes
even showing signs of humility.” John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, March
28, 2011: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67681/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome-revisited
David Halberstam reported in his important book,
“The Best and the Brightest,” that President Roosevelt directed his State
Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward
Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were
possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore
the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the
French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected
Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in
their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were
defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and
fought a murderous war until the collapse of the US South Vietnamese puppet
regime in 1975.
Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina,
competing political forces emerged after the World War on the Korean
Peninsula. With the Soviet Union and
China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime
created by it in the South a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued
in 1950 which continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice,
not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.
Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling
data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam,
discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in
support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at
every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to
be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of
soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.
Polling data from the period since the onset of the
Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam.
In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war making declined as the length
of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave
the Presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally round the
flag phenomena prevailed. But then resistance grew.
Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam
War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what
foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term
these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be
the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished
to initiate.
President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save
its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would
have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of
Jonas Savimbi of UNITA. To overcome the resistance to launching what could
become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity
conflict,” convert operations that would minimize what the American people could
learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan
did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s
globalism, militarism, and interventionism was somewhat constrained by the fear
of public outrage.
President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a
six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was
needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such
action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War 1 because
casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press
conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February, 1991, Bush proclaimed
that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”
Clinton knew better. He limited direct US military
action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets
in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” , bombed Serbia in a defense of
Kosovo in 1999 and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states”
throughout his eight years in office.
It was President George Walker Bush who launched
long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush
administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11
terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the
development of a warfare state. As Mueller has suggested an “Iraq Syndrome” had
surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were
headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and
disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq,
was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of
thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.
As we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the
launching of the Iraq War in March, 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are
talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any
options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea. Meanwhile the
United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge”
rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the
African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin
America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.
The American people must escalate commitment to its
“syndromes” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism.
Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over
conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do
to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global
society.
