American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  At least half the public was still unconvinced, despite the sensational story about the murdered babies. There might have been even less support had the public known that the incubator story was phony. It was told by “Nayirah,” an anonymous fifteen-year-old girl who claimed to witness the atrocity. She testified in front of a congressional caucus, and the media broadcast it with no corroborating evidence or investigation of the witness. Even Amnesty International was taken in. Only much later, after the war, was the story questioned, and nothing could be found to support it. “Nayirah” turned out to be the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was prepared by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. The Kuwaiti monarchy spent almost $12 million on public relations to convince U.S. citizens to support the war, perhaps the largest foreign propaganda campaign ever launched on U.S. soil. Even so, all the Hitler analogies and incubator stories had failed to gain more than half the country’s support for war.

  Secretary of State Baker was so frustrated he contradicted President Bush and said that oil was the primary reason the United States should go to war and that it was a good one. “The economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the Gulf and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline,” Baker asserted. “To bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs. If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s jobs.”

  But many average citizens were still not convinced, especially with pundits suggesting that a war against Iraq might kill 10,000–50,000 Americans. That sounded very much like “another Vietnam” and Bush became obsessed with wiping away that negative association. During a December 1990 press conference, he referred to Vietnam three times in the space of seven sentences: “We are not looking at another Vietnam. . . . This is not another Vietnam. . . . It is not going to be another Vietnam.”

  That whistling-in-the-dark defensiveness was hardly reassuring. But Bush and the Pentagon made smarter use of the Vietnam legacy by pandering to the postwar myth that soldiers in Vietnam had been held back from victory by all kinds of political restraints. This war would be different, Bush promised. U.S. soldiers would not have to fight “with one hand tied behind their back.” Both the government and the public would give them all the “support” they needed. In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration launched a major “support our troops” campaign. The not-so-subtle message was that anyone who did not support the impending war did not support the troops. Suddenly the nation was wrapped in yellow ribbons, just as it had been during the Iran hostage crisis, and “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers appeared on millions of cars and trucks.

  The success of Desert Storm, and the media’s cheerleading coverage, effectively buried the prewar doubts and divisions. Polls showed massive support for what appeared on TV screens as the cleanest, most precise, most bloodless war ever fought. The Pentagon kept the media busy with a constant stream of video pictures showing sophisticated jets and attack helicopters launch computer-guided missiles into convoys and buildings. Commentators gushed over the technological wonder of war. CBS’s Jim Stewart summarized the war’s opening as “two days of almost picture-perfect assaults.”

  The Pentagon’s management of the media effectively screened out most of the upsetting images of human destruction. But not all—when a U.S. missile killed some three hundred civilians in a Baghdad shelter, viewers saw images of the wounded, dead, and grieving survivors. Yet these grim shots did little to counter the mostly celebratory coverage, and there was not much public concern about civilian casualties. According to one poll, only 13 percent believed the U.S. military should be more careful to avoid civilian casualties. The major media frequently praised the military for doing everything possible to avoid “collateral damage” and criticized Iraq for putting civilians in harm’s way and then exaggerating civilian losses. As Bruce Morton intoned on CBS, “If Saddam Hussein can . . . convince the world that women and children are the targets of the air campaign, then he will have won a battle, his only one so far.”

  One way the media ignored Iraqi casualties was to speak as if there were only one enemy—Saddam Hussein. “How long will it take to defeat Saddam Hussein?” TV journalists asked. “How badly are we hurting him?” To answer such questions, each network hired retired military brass to instruct the nation on U.S. tactics and military success. The idea of interviewing critics of the war was virtually unthinkable. Tom Brokaw unwittingly exposed the lack of balanced coverage when he interviewed a retired army colonel and then turned to a retired navy admiral with the words “the Fairness Doctrine is in play here tonight.” Fairness simply meant including representatives from two military services.

  A survey of 878 on-air sources during the first two weeks of the war found that only one represented a peace group. When antiwar voices were heard, it was typically only the distant chants of outdoor protesters, not the in-studio commentary of critics given time to make their case.

  But Bush was right about one thing—Iraq was not “another Vietnam.” In Vietnam, Americans fought for more than a decade; in Iraq, for less than seven weeks (six of them with air strikes only); in Vietnam, 58,000 Americans died; in Iraq, fewer than 300; in Vietnam, the U.S.-backed regime collapsed; in Iraq, the Kuwaiti monarchy was successfully restored; in Vietnam, the public turned decisively against the war and the media followed suit; in Iraq, the media waved the flag and the public rallied around it.

  Bush was jubilant over the contrast. The triumph in Iraq, he insisted, had driven off the ghosts of defeat and division still haunting the post-Vietnam American landscape. In fact, Bush sounded as if that was the war’s greatest achievement: “It’s a proud day for America—and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” A day later he said, “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.”

  The celebration proved strikingly short-lived. Most Americans forgot the war as quickly as a made-for-TV movie, which it closely resembled for those who watched it at a safe distance and did not know anyone deployed in the gulf. And the postwar news soon turned negative—Hussein was still in power, brutally repressing Shia and Kurdish rebellions, and the United States was still stuck in a recession despite the fact that the price of oil had settled back down after spiking during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

  Nor did the “specter” of Vietnam remain buried. It continued to pop up like a multiheaded poltergeist. Despite the heroes’ welcome given returning Gulf War veterans, many of them came home with problems reminiscent of the widespread traumas associated with Vietnam veterans. Eventually more than a third of the 700,000 new veterans were said to suffer from Gulf War syndrome—with chronic symptoms including fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, diarrhea, rashes, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Nor did the Persian Gulf victory erase the doubts many Americans still felt toward U.S. military intervention overseas. Throughout the decade, wherever the United States committed forces, or thought about doing so—in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo—the same old debates reemerged: Was the objective achievable, were the ends just, the mission widely supported, the costs tolerable? And always the more negative version of the question: Would the United States mire itself in a long, fruitless, bloody war, and do far more harm than good? Would this be “another Vietnam”? Wariness about intervention—particularly for missions regarded by the Pentagon and policymakers as “humanitarian”—led to a foreign policy of inconsistent stops and starts. Missions were either aborted quickly when they turned dangerous (Somalia), delayed until they became less risky (Haiti), avoided altogether (Rwanda), or begun, almost exclusively with air strikes, well after many people had already been killed (Bosnia and Kosovo).

  Perhaps the most debated foreign policy question of the era was what, if anything, the United States should do to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia (1992–1995). Both the Bush and Clinton administrati
ons (Republican and Democratic) decried the “tragic” loss of life, but balked at major military intervention until it had continued for almost three years. “We got no dog in this hunt,” explained Bush’s secretary of state James Baker. The man who had identified an “economic lifeline” in Iraq and Kuwait (read: oil pipeline) apparently saw no vital resources in the Balkans. The standard defense of U.S. inaction in Bosnia was to label it a “civil war” created by ancient ethnic hostilities and inflamed by bitterly nationalistic tyrants on all sides. As horrible as it was, many said, no outsider could resolve the barbarism unleashed by the dissolution of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War.

  Though there was certainly bitter hostility on all sides, as the bloodbath unfolded it became ever more apparent that one side was doing almost all of the killing—the Serbs. According to a 1995 CIA report, Serb forces were responsible for 90 percent of the war crimes in the region and were engaged in a “conscious, coherent, and systematic” campaign to drive out Bosnian Muslims through “murder, torture, and imprisonment.”

  The Clinton administration considered intervention, and there were forceful voices demanding it. At the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, on April 22, 1993, Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of Hitler’s Final Solution, recalled the world’s indifference to the plight of Jews during World War II, how officials throughout the world understood that millions were perishing in death camps but the “last remnant of Eastern European Jewry” was “not even warned of the impending doom,” and the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto were not “given any support, not even any encouragement.” At the end, Wiesel addressed Clinton directly: “I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall [and] cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! . . . Something, anything must be done.”

  The Clinton administration was divided. UN ambassador Madeleine Albright made a case for air strikes against Serbian targets. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was opposed. After one of their many debates on the subject, Albright said to the general: “What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?” Neither party in Congress favored bombing. The most common criticism was that it risked American lives, had little chance of working, and might be the first step toward a Vietnam-like quagmire. As Senator John McCain put it, “I will not place the lives of young Americans . . . at risk without having a plan that has every possibility of succeeding.” For him, the whole thing had the “hauntingly familiar ring” of Vietnam. “That’s the way we got our fist into a tar baby that took us many years to get out of and twenty years to recover from.”

  In the fall of 1993, the United States received an object lesson in how humanitarian interventions could turn bloody—in Somalia. President Bush, near the end of his presidency, had agreed to join a UN relief effort to deliver food to that famine-stricken country. He was encouraged by military chief Colin Powell. Although Powell stridently opposed intervention in Bosnia, he agreed to send 25,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, in part to demonstrate to the incoming Democratic administration of Bill Clinton that the military still had a vital role to play in the world and there should be no thought of dramatically cutting military spending. But Somalia was afflicted by civil war as well as famine. Warlords competed to steal food and supplies. By the time Clinton was president, in 1993, the U.S. military in Somalia was increasingly engaged in military as well as humanitarian duty, especially once it tried to defeat the army of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the warlord it regarded as the most threatening. It was a classic instance of “mission creep,” the tendency of military responsibilities and objectives to expand once forces have been deployed.

  On October 3, 1993, Aidid’s forces pinned down a U.S. unit in Mogadishu, and eighteen Americans lost their lives. U.S. forces killed some one thousand Somalis, but what dominated coverage in the United States was the sight of one of the dead Americans being dragged through the streets. A video of the scene was shown on TV in the United States, shocking a nation that was barely aware that U.S. troops were even in Somalia. Clinton quickly decided to pull the plug and withdraw.

  The debacle in Somalia—later the subject of a popular book and film called Black Hawk Down—certainly contributed to the ongoing hesitancy to act more aggressively in other humanitarian interventions that might prove deadly. However, by 1995, evidence of genocide in Bosnia was too great to ignore. That summer, General Ratko Mladic led the Serbian massacre of more than 8,000 people in Srebrenica, most of them men and boys. It was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II. By then some 200,000 people had been killed, tens of thousands of women raped, and about two million people driven from their homes. The United States approved a billion-dollar sale of weapons and supplies through a private contractor to anti-Serbian forces. Their effective resistance, along with intensified NATO air strikes against Serbia, pushed President Slobodan Milosevic to accept a settlement (the Dayton Accords).

  The most extreme genocide in the 1990s came in Rwanda, where the ruling Hutus carried out a systematic slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Most of the killing took place in April and early May 1994. President Clinton did nothing to stop it. His unwillingness to act upon the oft-quoted lesson of the Holocaust—“never again”—was hardly unprecedented. As Samantha Power points out in A Problem from Hell, “nonintervention in the face of genocide” has been the “consistent policy” of the United States. “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.” So U.S. inaction in Rwanda was not simply a product of the Vietnam syndrome or a reflection of post–Cold War apathy toward global problems, but a common pattern that stretches back to the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I.

  Yet the memory of Vietnam did provide a language and rationale for looking away from the unspeakable evidence that hundreds of thousands of Africans were being hacked to death with machetes. As was true throughout the period 1975–2001, policymakers were intensely concerned about the potential loss of American troops. Just as the battle in Mogadishu raised fears that Somalia could become “another Vietnam,” President Clinton was concerned that Rwanda could become “another Somalia.” On May 4, after hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had already been murdered, President Clinton was asked about the genocide (a term the administration avoided using): “Lesson number one is, don’t go into one of these things and say, as the U.S. said when we started in Somalia, ‘Maybe we’ll be done in a month because it’s a humanitarian crisis.’”

  Since neither the media, Congress, nor the public pushed hard for intervention to stop the butchery, the Clinton administration felt no obligation to take the lead. Inaction was justified as the unavoidable response to public apathy. When a small delegation from Human Rights Watch visited the White House to plead for intervention, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake said: “If you want to make this move, you will have to change public opinion. You must make more noise.”

  When the slaughter was over, the United States finally dispatched troops to help refugees streaming from Rwanda. Ironically, the bulk of those refugees were Hutus—the group that had perpetrated the genocide. They were fleeing the country because Tutsi rebels under Paul Kagame had finally ended the genocide and seized the government. American troops were on the ground delivering food and medicine to the Hutu refugees. Even then, U.S. leaders were obsessed with preventing U.S. casualties. “Let me be clear,” Clinton said on July 29, 1994. “Any deployment of United States troops inside Rwanda would be for the immediate and sole purpose of humanitarian relief, not for peacekeeping. Mission creep is not a problem here.” Special Forces captain Dave Duffy echoed the president. “We’re here to help,” Duffy said, “but not at any cost to the American soldiers.”

  In the quarter century after the Vietnam War, American casualties were indeed kept
low, despite numerous military interventions. Yet in those same years the foreign body count soared. Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops and civilians were killed by U.S.-sponsored military interventions, either directly by American troops or by proxy. Untold others died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. Public opposition to U.S. policy was frequently found in public opinion polls but was not powerful enough to challenge the fundamental priorities of America’s civilian and military commanders.

  The most important priority of all was to maintain U.S. military supremacy throughout the globe. To bolster that commitment, every administration expressed its faith in American exceptionalism. U.S. global power was justified because it would be used only as a force for good. That was the unquestioned creed of the nation’s leaders. President Clinton’s second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, described her faith in American exceptionalism most succinctly: “We are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall. We see further.”

  If U.S. policies caused suffering, or failed to stop it, they were defended as necessary or well intentioned. The worst that could be conceded is that they were sometimes based on incomplete information. That was the gist of Clinton’s hedged apology to Rwanda. “All over the world,” he said, “there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

  No such regret was expressed in response to the horrible humanitarian crisis created by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s. According to a study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, as many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died as a result of the Security Council sanctions pushed by the United States. In 1996, on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright about the sanctions: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright’s response: “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”