By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | March 20, 2013
Cooperation over conflict: We need to expand the ‘Iraq Syndrome.’
As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of
the launching of the Iraq War, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about
increasing U.S. military involvement abroad.
‘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
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 U.S. South Vietnamese puppet
regime in 1975.
Paralleling the struggle for power in
Indochina, competing political forces emerged on the Korean Peninsula after the
World War. 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 and 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 phenomenon 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,” covert 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 were 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 I 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 U.S.
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 10-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.
US Militarism, the Ukraine War, and the Rise
of China Today
Andrew Bacevich on Democracy Now, March 22, 2023
discusses the wars in Iraq and Ukraine, reflecting on the declining relative
power of the United States and the refusal of its leaders to recognize how the
world is changing, and that the US is no longer the hegemonic power. For
Bacevich, the Iraq War was seen by the Bush Administration, mostly the
neoconservative advisors to the President, as a way to show the world after 9/11
that the US was still “the indispensable nation.” Bacevich says this was then and is now a
dangerous misunderstanding of world power. He ends the interview by arguing
that those millions who protested against making war against Iraq at the
anti-war rallies around the world on February 15, 2003 were correct and the
foreign policy elite were wrong.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/22/andrew_bacevich_ukraine_china_russia
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