The Imperial City

The Vietnam Obsession

The only big-deal U.S. protest rallies happened before the invasion, and even though approval of the war and Bush have sunk about as low as they can go, no angry masses are taking to the streets, as they did in growing numbers from 1967 through 1970. When Ted Koppel read the names of all the dead U.S. troops on Nightline, people hardly would have noticed if not for the right-wing kerfuffle—nothing like when Walter Cronkite said on the air in 1968 that “we are mired in stalemate,” or the extraordinary 1969 issue of Life with a photo of each of the 241 Americans killed during one week in Vietnam, which made my Republican mother sob at our kitchen table.

The scale of death is crucially different. Twenty-four Iraqis died in Haditha, while at My Lai several hundred civilians were murdered. In Iraq, between eight and nineteen Americans are dying each week; the very deadliest weeks are equivalent to only one bad day in Vietnam. We had 543,000 troops in Vietnam at the war’s peak, four times as many as we have in Iraq now. And, of course, during Vietnam, 2 million Americans were conscripted. Rumsfeld and Cheney may have believed sincerely we could do the job in Iraq with a small American force, but both worked under Nixon and surely brought to this war their own strain of phobic Vietnam Syndrome: If you keep it all-volunteer and the casualties low, and never increase troop levels, public opinion won’t get crazily out of hand.

And in a way that the sixties were precisely not, this is also an Age of Whatever. Thus the Iraq war, even if it ends badly, will cause no great disillusionment about America’s heroic white-hat nobility—you can’t lose your virginity twice. For the past 30 or 35 years, Americans have adjusted their regard for government (and every other institution) to discount for mixed motives, moral ambiguity, dissembling, necessary dirty deeds. I do think this administration’s blinkered incompetence is shocking and will be punished. But unless I’m missing something, the war has energized no youthquake or countercultural awakening.

Iraq is showing us that Vietnam and its ramifications, like so much that happened during the sixties and early seventies, were an anomaly. Instead, the present war is going down more or less like our other biggish, elective, imperial wars in the Third World, which occur every half-century pretty much on the dot—in Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, and now Iraq. About 2,500 Americans have been killed in Iraq, and 8,400 seriously wounded. During the Mexican War, 1,733 were killed in action, and 4,152 wounded; in the Philippines, 4,234 died and 2,818 were wounded. Although the casualty rates in Korea were worse than the worst of Vietnam, neither Korea nor those two earlier wars dramatically mobilized the home front, traumatized the nation, or transformed our culture and politics. All three have slipped down the memory hole of our ahistorical popular imagination.

Like Iraq, Mexico was a preemptive invasion with national economic interests at stake. The Philippines was a counterinsurgency. And the Korean War was our first massive military counterpunch of the Cold War—just as the invasion of Iraq came at the commencement of our new twilight struggle against an aggressive, ascendant ideology inimical to our own. And for much of the Korean War, more Americans than not thought U.S. involvement had been a mistake. Korea is cautionary as well, since although we didn’t lose—as we might not in Iraq—53 years later we’re in a standoff against a nuclear-armed Kim Jong Il. These twilight struggles last a long, long time.

When the Pew pollsters ask Americans if “Iraq will turn out to be another Vietnam,” people split evenly—that is, half of independents but most Democrats and nearly no Republicans say yes. But I’ll bet if a Democrat is elected president, and Iraq is still going badly, a lot of those Republicans will find their pro-war faith and this-isn’t-Vietnam optimism evaporating. So, if today’s Democrats are right, is 2006 the equivalent of early 1966, when 2,500 Americans had been killed in Vietnam—and 56,000 more were still to die? No way. Or is it now 1968, with half of Americans (or more) having decided the war was misbegotten and lost faith in a president from Texas—and the American fighting and dying still only half done? Surely it’s much later than that, with the cut-and-walk phase imminent: 2008 will be like 1972, when we had only 24,000 troops left in Vietnam, and the Republican presidential candidate won.

Another Vietnam? If only. In fact, if during the next three decades Iraq itself follows a course something like that of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—that is, if it becomes an authoritarian country run by our nominal enemies yet stable, peaceful, prosperous, and apparently happy—we should count ourselves extremely fortunate indeed.

E-mail: emailandersen@aol.com.