The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

Prologue: 2010

In the previous chapter on “Edward Said and American Studies”, I argued that the new Orientalism characteristic of U.S. neo-imperialism draws upon a “Vietnam Effect”, in which foreign policy issues are incorporated into domestic U.S. issues in ways that distract us from the specific concerns of foreign peoples and states affected by our policies. The Vietnam War and thus the “Vietnam Effect” were consequences of Cold-War ideology. Although the Cold War focused attention on conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the battles for global superiority were fought on the peripheries of Europe and North America, especially in the “Orient” that in the nineteenth-century European imaginary stretched from the Middle to the Near and Far East. U.S. fears that the “dominoes” would “fall” to Soviet and Chinese control in Southeast Asia if we did not assume the colonial legacy of the French in “Indochina” were based on the post-World War II foreign policy view that Asia was a principal battleground in the Cold War.

Christina Klein argues in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 that U.S. foreign policies and popular culture worked together to produce an imaginary Orient, which was both a projection of U.S. desires and a domestication of global problems, especially in Asia. What began as a U.S. dream of a “global imaginary of integration” is ironically shattered by the ideological production of Cold War Orientalism, so that “the foreign policies and middlebrow culture of the 1940s and 1950s culminated not only in the Vietnam War but also in John Woo”. [39] We created the historical and transnational conditions that led not only to our disastrous foreign and military policies in Vietnam but also that produced a counter-narrative, exemplified for Klein in the career of John Woo, the Hong Kong film director who incorporates traditional Hollywood motifs in films like Hard Boiled (1992) and has influenced significantly U.S. films by such directors as Quentin Tarantino. [40] However fantastic its origins, U.S. Orientalism produced real effects that every day become more difficult to distinguish from our own national identity. In long historical terms, we should understand such U.S. Orientalism as shaped by globalization and Cold-War balance-of-power politics, but one of the clearest examples of how it works ideologically is what is known in popular culture as “the Vietnam Effect”.

Popularized first in the late 1970s to refer to poor military and foreign policy decisions by the U.S. in the conduct of the War, the “Vietnam Effect”, sometimes alternatively termed the “Vietnam Syndrome”, referred to the defeatist mentality caused by our first loss in a major military conflict. Conservatives argued that Vietnam was a war we “won” on the “battlefield”, but “lost” in the mass media, domestic politics, and the Paris Peace Talks. The “liberal media” supported the strong anti-war movement, crises in the Executive branch—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election in 1968, Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal in 1971—and concessions to the North Vietnamese in the Paris Peace talks had reversed our military successes. Other interpretations suggested that we were never close to “winning” our extension of the French colonial war against the Vietnamese, failing to understand the determination of the North Vietnamese Army and the insurrection by the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. Even in strictly military terms, we had merely reacted to enemy actions, rarely taking initiative and never really “winning hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese civilians caught between warring adversaries. Traditional military tactics of territorial control failed and were replaced with equally unsuccessful “body counts” of enemy dead, which when broadcast on the evening news only fueled anti-war sentiments. From a conservative perspective, the “Vietnam Syndrome” was our defeatism in the aftermath of losing the War; in the liberal view, the “Vietnam Effect” was a consequence of our Cold War-era neo-imperialism.

What follows is a historically specific interpretation of the “Vietnam Effect” first delivered on February 12, 1991 as a speech at an anti-war demonstration organized by the students and other activists at the University of California, Irvine. “Why the War in the Persian Gulf Is Another Vietnam” was given less than a month after the U.S. aerial bombardment of Iraqi military positions began the Persian Gulf War on January 16, 1991 and eleven days before U.S. ground forces would begin their military action in Kuwait on February 23, 1991. Much has changed in U.S. foreign policy and cultural attitudes, especially toward the Middle East and Arabs and Islamic peoples globally since 1991, but the historical aspect of this essay remains important for two reasons. First, it was not intended initially as a scholarly essay, but as part of political activism. Delivered to a modest audience on a Saturday night in the Emerald Bay auditorium of the University of California, Irvine Student Center, the talk was one of several preceded by a recording of Gore Vidal criticizing President George H. W. Bush for his decision to invade Iraq. Second, while I continued to participate in local anti-war demonstrations, I also urged my colleagues on the national level to use our scholarly means to protest the Persian Gulf War. As a member of the Editorial Collective of Cultural Critique, I urged Editor Donna Przbylowicz and Associate Editor Abdul JanMohamed to put together an emergency special issue, which they assembled on short notice as “The Economies of War” issue and published in the Fall of 1991. [41] With a lead-off essay by Noam Chomsky and powerful critiques both of the Persian Gulf and Vietnam wars by other recognized scholars, this special issue declared its commitment to what I term in the title of this book, “the cultural politics of the new American Studies”. [42]

In what follows, I have made revisions only to clarify the historical contexts of President George H. W. Bush’s administration (1989–1993) and the First Persian Gulf War (August 1990–March 1991). Rather than draw certain obvious connections with subsequent events, especially our disastrous invasion of Iraq on the false evidence of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, I have preferred to let this historical moment speak for itself. Neither the anti-war activism in which I participated nor the scholarship published in its cause, stopped the First Gulf War or prevented our leaders from “finishing the job” in the Second Gulf War, with the disastrous results for the Iraqi people and the “Greater Middle East” we have witnessed since 2003. But the intellectual and political activities in real historical time to which my marching, speech, and published essay contributed in small ways finally “add up”, if only because they offer the consistent rational critique of irrational policies, often bolstered by false patriotism, that is so necessary to a free society.

“The Vietnam Effect”: 1991

Reporting to the Congress our military success in the Persian Gulf, President George H. W. Bush declared on March 3, 1991: “Thank God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” [43] Asked about the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to protect Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, the President insisted in his April 14, 1991 press conference that we would not be drawn into another “quagmire” in Iraq. The words hardly needed to be uttered; from the beginning of our military involvement in the Persian Gulf, “Vietnam” has been a constant historical referent. [44] The slogan, “We support our troops,” helped forge a patriotic consensus (85 % according to most opinion polls taken in the first week of the ground war) unmatched in U.S. history. That slogan referred explicitly to the Vietnam War and the cultural “memory” that the Anti-War Movement had systematically discouraged, even demoralized, U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. There is little in the actual history of the Anti-War Movement to support this “remembrance,” which like most historical reconstructions conflates different historical moments. The slogan’s implicit negative, “We did not support our troops in Vietnam,” refers less to isolated incidents of anti-war demonstrators “spitting” on returning soldiers, chanting “Murderers!” or otherwise condemning military personnel for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy than it refers to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, in which veterans were ignored or considered “embarrassments” both by their government and the general population. The belated parades, monuments, and memorials often served only to remind veterans of the Vietnam War of the long silence that they met on their return.

That silence, however, was not merely a consequence of war-weariness, apathy, or even contempt for those who had served in Vietnam; it represented a genuine moral confusion on the part of most Americans. In many cases, embarrassment was entangled with shame—a sense of guilt regarding widespread support for a war whose purposes we did not understand. In short, our cultural shame had something to do with our unarticulated sense that patriotism had not been based on knowledge, reason, and justice. Slogans from the Vietnam era, such as “My country, right or wrong” and “America, love it or leave it,” returned to haunt us not simply when we lost the war but when we began to recognize how misguided and misinformed our foreign policies had been. The lesson of Vietnam was simple: never again should sheer emotional support for our sons and daughters blind us to our patriotic responsibility to assess the reasons and motives for military action—that is, action that would put those very sons and daughters at risk.

The “Vietnam syndrome” meant for President George H. W. Bush a national sense of failure and powerlessness—a “habit” to be “kicked” as one would drugs or alcohol. Yet, the “drug” of the Vietnam era was the uncritical support for foreign policies we did not understand—the emotional enthusiasm for “victory” that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives. But this was precisely the drug that intoxicated us during the First Persian Gulf War, and our one-sided victory virtually guaranteed our repetition of the key mistakes of the Vietnam era. President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, Vice President Quayle, and General Schwarzkopf have repeated ceaselessly: “Our action in the Persian Gulf will not be another Vietnam.” The bombing of Iraq and Kuwait was designed to prevent just such a repetition of the military quagmire in Vietnam. The United Nations resolutions and its sanctioned military coalition were designed to protect the United States from criticism of neo-colonialism comparable to our policies of “winning hearts and minds” in Vietnam. Diplomatic negotiations with Iraq, despite obvious and enduring intransigence on both sides, were extensively covered in the press and on television, in part to demonstrate how we had exhausted all peaceful alternatives to military action.

For the American public, the political situation seemed convincingly different from that of the Vietnam era. Between November 2, 1990 and January 15, 1991, Tariq Aziz spoke almost nightly to the American television audience on Nightline and other news shows; Ho, General Giap, even Le Duc Tho (the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister interviewed frequently during the Paris Peace Talks) remained shadowy, elusive figures for the American public during the Vietnam War. Whereas Congress had waffled and equivocated during Vietnam, this time the televised congressional debates, often showcasing “eloquent” statements by congressmen both for and against military involvement, resulted in what was publicized as a clear mandate for our military presence in the Gulf. In fact, Congress merely delegated responsibility to the President, effectively mooting the long and important discussion since Vietnam regarding the issues of what assumed juridical form in the “War Powers’ Act,” by granting President George H. W. Bush even greater freedom to conduct war than Presidents Johnson or Nixon had during the “undeclared war” of Vietnam. Political scientists like Mark Petracca tried to remind Americans that the narrow but nonetheless decisive majority by which Congress delegated authority to the President constituted as significant an issue for protest as the threat of military conflict in the Gulf.

But the public discussion of such crucial issues of democratic governance depended to a large extent on remembering the continuing legacy of Vietnam. And it was precisely this sort of cultural memory that the decisive military victory in the Gulf helped to erase. The First Persian Gulf War was mercifully swift and relatively bloodless for the Coalition’s forces. The “Vietnam without Trees” that some anti-war activists had predicted never came to pass in the desert along the Gulf. We have been encouraged to believe a “clean,” “sanitary,” and “smart” war was the result of the superior technology, organization, and justness of the Coalition’s leaders, both in the field and Washington. As Kuwaiti coalition troops led the way into Kuwait City, to be met by resistance fighters, and as U.S. forces swept into southern Iraq, driving Iraqi troops across the Euphrates or into Basra, the fears of another Vietnam vanished. Anti-war organizations, put together with impressive speed and efficiency in the months leading up to the January 15, 1991 deadline the Coalition gave Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, collapsed overnight. This time it was the tiny minority of stubborn protesters who were met with silence, if not outright censorship. The word on the streets was that protesters “had better shut up.” [45] Public debate was over before it had begun, and patriotism had become an undisguised spectacle of cheering congressmen or replays of Whitney Huston, tears streaming down her cheeks, passionately singing the “Star Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV on January 27, 1991 in Tampa Stadium. On April 3, 1991, CBS-TV would broadcast its All-Star Salute to the Troops, which TV Guide described as a “patriotic orgy”. [46]

From President George H. W. Bush’s comparison of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia to the ceaseless reruns of World War II combat melodramas on TNT (as well as on many local channels) during the war, the improbable analogy with the Allies’ efforts against Axis forces has been emphasized in several media. That analogy has had the rhetorical effect of underscoring the negative example of the Vietnam War. “Contained” between World War II and the Persian Gulf victory, Vietnam could be treated as an “anomaly,” a unique case of failure whose mistakes might be “corrected” the next time. Contrived as this historical “containment” is in rational terms, its rhetoric helped strengthen revisionist historians’ arguments that our failure in Vietnam had little to do with our general foreign policies (especially those framed in the so-called “Cold War” period) and much to do with Congressional interference in the military conduct of the Vietnam war. In short, the rhetoric and spectacle of patriotic support for the Persian Gulf War was not the simple instrumentality of mass media propaganda, whether engineered or not by the government, but integral to the re-legitimation of foreign policies that since Vietnam and now in the aftermath of the Cold War have been subject to effective rational criticism.

Many opposed to the First Persian Gulf War argued that the “crisis” developed conveniently at the moment when defense budget cuts seemed inevitable and advocates of a “peace dividend” for much-needed domestic programs were gaining popular support. This argument has led some to speculate that the bombing of Iraq was a sort of “showcase” for new U.S. military technology, both to support new and even larger defense spending and to provide a long-term economic rationale for military “research and development” in the export markets for such hardware as the Patriot Missile system. Although it is well worth considering that advocates of substantial defense budgets may recognize the need to use other arguments than “national defense” in the post-Cold War era, the general thesis that the First Gulf War was fought primarily for reasons of economic expediency or military self-interest is far too crudely materialist. Defense spending is simply one among many of the signs of political power; the grammar of such power remains U.S. foreign policy, which since Vietnam has relied on a strategic slippage from the purposes of “national defense” to the regulation of “international law and order.”

In the Vietnam era, the war was often defended on the grounds that our containment of Communism was directly related to our national defense. Few arguments of this sort were offered by President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State Baker, or Secretary of Defense Cheney in justification of the First Gulf War, although arguments connecting the global economy to the economic interests of the United States were made. In response to the anti-war slogan, “No Blood for Oil!,” some followed Secretary of State Baker’s claim that there was “nothing wrong with fighting for oil” and that we were in the Persian Gulf to “protect American jobs.” Such arguments, however, seemed to have little influence on popular support for the war, and not simply because they could be so easily refuted. By contrast, the claim that “national security” was at stake in the Vietnam War was widely accepted, despite the difficulty of its demonstration. What made arguments regarding “national defense” ineffective, even half-hearted, in the justification of our military presence in the Persian Gulf was their incompatibility with the prevailing principle of U.S. foreign policy: the regulation of international law. Indeed, the success of this moral posture is evident in the public indifference to the fact that the United States conducted diplomatic negotiations with Iraq in the place of the United Nations. Once the U.N. resolutions and sanctions against Iraq had been approved, the United States was accepted as the representative of the U.N. both in the forging of a military coalition and in virtually all diplomatic negotiations with Iraq. Even after the First Gulf War was concluded with the Iraqi acceptance of the formal cease-fire of March 3, 1991, the United Nations debated new resolutions that supported the presence of Coalition forces in northern Iraq.

The First Persian Gulf War declared the United States to be the arbiter of international law; the United Nations, arguably the most appropriate organization for new power and authority in the “new global order,” appears even less significant in the public’s mind than during the Cold War. In this regard, the “Vietnam Effect” enabled President George H. W. Bush to reaffirm his authority as Commander-in-Chief by insisting that the Pentagon would “not fight this war with one hand tied behind its back.” Once again, George H. W. Bush’s metaphors are significant, in this case implicitly judging debates in the Congress regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War—especially the debates leading to the reduction of funding for the War between 1971 and 1973—to be the causes for our failure. The rhetorical isolation of the Vietnam War had the effect of reaffirming the continuity, coherence, and justness of U.S. foreign policy from World War II to the Persian Gulf crisis. It follows the logic of what Robert Divine has termed the “Quagmire Thesis” argued by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and David Halberstam during the Vietnam War: “Schlesinger’s quagmire thesis, while condemning American involvement, nevertheless excused American leaders of any real responsibility. It was all an accident, a tragic series of mistakes, but not one that called for a reconsideration of America’s Cold War policies or for a searching reappraisal of men and decisions.” [47]

During the First Persian Gulf War, the veterans of Vietnam, whose political grievances were about to be erased from the American agenda along with very name of “Vietnam,” responded generally as if this were the “Welcome Home” they had been awaiting for more than fifteen years. With the exception of organizations like Vietnam Veterans against War (VVAW), the majority of Vietnam-era veterans organized and participated in pro-war demonstrations and helped the emotional slogan, “Support Our Troops,” sweep the land and divide protesters. The Vietnam Veterans of America was first organized because of the exclusion of Vietnam veterans from Veterans of Foreign Wars and to serve as the means of sponsoring veterans’ political and economic grievances, but during the First Persian Gulf War local chapters of the VVA became rallying points for pro-war demonstrations. Efforts to challenge the slogan itself were met with fierce opposition. Any attempt to remind people that many Vietnam-era veterans still suffered from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) resulting from combat and shared by British veterans of the Falklands’ War was flatly rejected. The elementary distinction between “support” for human beings and “opposition” to combat activities was considered “too intellectual” in a time when only emotion made sense. The term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” was barely mentioned during the First Persian Gulf War (with the exception of a brief, midday special report on CNN, which included interviews with veterans from the Vietnam and Falkland Island wars). In effect, this serious disability suffered by many veterans of recent wars had been re-diagnosed. No longer referring to the psychological after-effects of combat, the “trauma” of Vietnam-era veterans in particular seemed to refer retrospectively to the American public’s failure to “support the troops.”

Amid such emotion, there were still implicit and recognizable “arguments” with respect to the meaning of Vietnam in U.S. culture. By virtue of their uncritical support for the troops in the Persian Gulf and their neglect of such crucial issues as PTSD, pro-war veterans implicitly argued that we had not fought to win in Vietnam but merely to maintain a symbolic presence in Southeast Asia against Soviet and Chinese challenges. In effect, they were favoring a version of the “Stalemate Thesis” best represented by Daniel Ellsberg (to be sure, an unlikely political ally for pro-war veterans), who blamed Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy for trying to juggle the contrary demands of not losing Vietnam to the Communists and not committing U.S. troops to an unwinnable land war in Vietnam. [48] Strong support of the First Persian Gulf War by veterans of the Vietnam War strengthened President George H. W. Bush in his resolve to avoid the historical trap, according to the Stalemate Thesis, that President Johnson had inherited from his predecessors’ equivocal foreign policies in Vietnam. What the veterans of Vietnam seemed to have overlooked as they cheered the President and supported their fellow soldiers in the Gulf was that the Vietnam War and its consequences for so many veterans were being erased from the historical map of U.S. foreign policy. “Quagmire” or “stalemate,” Vietnam had finally been “explained” in just the manner that the U.S. government had struggled unsuccessfully to do between 1968 (the Tet Offensive) and 1990. All along, what the government desired was an explanation that would allow us to isolate and then forget “Vietnam.”

Under these conditions, the American people did not simply “forget” Vietnam, but like the President and other government officials repeatedly denied Vietnam in the manner of some collective repression. Such widespread denial helped the general public deny as well the carnage of this brief war. Few U.S. citizens have ever expressed much concern about the sketchy information about civilian and Iraqi troop casualties in the six-week war, even though those figures are two to three times greater than the American casualties suffered in the nine years of U.S. combat in Vietnam. [49] In all of this, dismissed by some as the inevitable euphoria of victory, but criticized by others as a dangerous symptom of long-term intolerance for political dissent in this country, the parallels between our foreign policy errors in Vietnam and our conduct in the First Persian Gulf War have been virtually ignored, despite the unavoidable “Vietnam Effect” of the official rhetoric, which has been mimed so well in the press and the general population.

We lost the war in Vietnam, because we had no plan for peace. We lost the war in Vietnam before we landed troops in Danang in 1965, because we utterly misunderstood the political situation in both South and North Vietnam. We lost the war in Vietnam in 1954 as decisively as the French lost the battle of Dienbienphu, because in that year we assumed authority for the political future of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. With the best intentions and noblest sentiments, we took over the colonial project the French had pursued for a century in Indochina. To be sure, our colonialism was different from that of Vietnam’s many previous invaders. We did not want their latex or tin, as the French did, their hardwood or rice, as the Japanese did; we wanted to win hearts and minds. We wanted “a sphere of influence,” which would “balance” the influences of the Soviet Union and China in Asia. We spoke loudly and tirelessly of political self-determination, economic self-reliance, and democratic institutions, but we viewed Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia as simply “dominoes” in an elaborate game of balance-of-power politics. We knew little of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians whose governments and societies were destabilized by our larger ambitions. We didn’t want to know much about them.

As we moved massive military force to the Persian Gulf in late 1990, we could not understand why demonstrators in Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Malaysia, and other so-called “third world” countries both in the Middle East and other regions of the world should express such rage against our well-intentioned efforts to pursue a “just war,” to “punish” and topple the dictator and aggressor, Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is not a nationalist leader like Ho Chi Minh. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 is not comparable to the Vietnamese people’s struggle to rid their country of the French, the Japanese, the British, and the Americans. In these respects, President George H. W. Bush was right: this war was not another Vietnam. The war in the Persian Gulf was not waged as a neo-colonial effort against popular nationalist movements, like the National Liberation Front, the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and the Vietnamese Communist Party. And yet massive demonstrations against the presence of Coalition forces in the Gulf seemed united in their opposition to foreign intervention, especially by the U.S. and European forces represented in the Coalition.

A crucial part of the President’s argument that military action in the Persian Gulf was not another instance of western imperialism was the strength of the military coalition. For many liberals, the fact that the Coalition “held together” is convincing evidence that our purpose in the Gulf is part of a larger policy of “collective security” by which nations join together to maintain international law. As Harold Meyerson argued during the First Persian Gulf War, the internal divisions of the American Left caused by the Vietnam War assumed new characteristics in the face of Saddam Hussein’s expansionism: “Todd Gitlin calls this wing of the left ‘the collective security gang’—pro- and anti-warriors who believe in some form of international action against Iraq, with a legitimate U.S. role, but who oppose the establishment of a new Pax Americana—as distinct from the ‘anti-imperialist gang’—opponents of the war who elevate U.S. anti-interventionism to a universal principle.” [50] The “collective security” argument, however, tends to confuse the procedures and, in this historical instance, resolutions of the United Nations with the decisions of a group of nations that have decided to “act” in the best interests of international law. The United Nations’ resolutions did not authorize the bombing of Iraq or the occupation of southern Iraq. These military decisions were made by a coalition forged by the United States. From the very beginning, the “Coalition” was an obvious front for a Pax Americana.

We ought to have recognized the rhetorical slippage from “U.N.” to “Coalition” to “U.S.” as a kind of historical déjà vu. In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower formed a coalition that Dulles called at first “United Action” and later renamed the “Southeast Asian Treaty Organization.” Both were designed to “guarantee the security of Southeast Asia.” Neither proved very effective in the Vietnam War. To be sure, some members of “United Action”—Australia and New Zealand—and some members of SEATO—South Korea, for example—sent token troops, advisors, and military support to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and American forces fighting in Vietnam. But the “coalitions” were not politically effective; they were not strong organizations based on reasonable political and diplomatic solutions to the many problems left by European colonialism in Southeast Asia. They were symbolic coalitions patched together by the United States to justify its conduct in Vietnam.

There is a striking parallel between “United Action” and SEATO with the coalition forged to fight the First Persian Gulf War. Although the number of Middle Eastern countries participating in the Coalition Forces was impressive, a significant number of those countries are not democratic: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, for example. It is not just that we once again threw our lot together with repressive regimes in the “interests” of fighting another repressive regime—the “greater evil” of Saddam Hussein and Iraqi militarism; it is also that we mistook the support of these governments for the support of their peoples. Turkey’s official support for our conduct in the Persian Gulf, for example, was not maintained by opinion polls of average Turkish citizens, most of whom opposed Turkish involvement in this war. What did we hear from the Egyptian on the streets of Cairo, the Syrian worker in Damascus? Precious little. Did they share the views of those “coalition” partners, Egypt and Syria, and their leaders, Hosni Mubarak and President Hassad? Without access to mass media, without effective means of voting against their governments’ participation in our military coalition, people in these countries had only demonstration as their means of expressing their discontent. But President George H. W. Bush insisted he would not be “swayed” by these demonstrations and that they would have no “influence” on our national “resolve.” One characteristic feature of more traditional western imperialism has been a refusal to listen to the interests of the people and treat instead exclusively with undemocratic rulers, who have notoriously found “foreign interests” to be in their self interest.

Just as we constructed something of a political “fiction” in the alliance of SEATO, so we manipulated the “consensus” of the United Nations, not in its condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait but in the U.N.’s deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait and its tacit authorization of the United States’ government as the United Nations’ diplomatic representative. U.N. Secretary General Perez de Cuellar was treated as if he were a middle-level U.S. diplomat when he arrived in Baghdad at the eleventh hour to negotiate a peace settlement with Iraq. The Iraqi response to the U.N. Secretary General reflected accurately the secondary role he himself had assumed in the diplomatic negotiations.

In Geneva in 1954, while the French and Vietnamese ostensibly worked out the Geneva Accords, the United States was represented by Dulles and other high-ranking diplomats. Although claiming to be mere “observers,” we were active participants in the drafting of the Geneva Accords, but we refused to sign them. Having refused to sign those Accords, we then proceeded to ignore their provisions, notably the mandate for free elections in Vietnam two years after the signing of those Accords. With the exception of the patently fraudulent elections of Diem, Khanh, Ky, and Thieu in the increasingly unstable political climate of South Vietnam between 1954 and 1973, no “free elections” were ever held in Vietnam after 1954. But why did we fail to encourage these South Vietnamese governments to conduct such elections, rather than wage an unwinnable war that only realized our worst nightmare: the destabilization of the entire region? Our arguments in the years leading up to the successful coup against Diem and his assassination were simple: the government of South Vietnam under Diem was not sufficiently stable. Hardly a translation was needed at the time for those paying any attention: the government of Diem was unpopular; Diem would have been voted out of office in any free election held in the South during his nine years of power.

Have we effectively overcome the mistakes of Vietnam in the sixteen years since the conclusion of that war in 1975? Despite official arguments supporting the Coalition as representative of Middle Eastern opposition to Saddam Hussein and support for foreign intervention, the Coalition was clearly the work of the United States. Even had the European and Middle Eastern members of the Coalition forces withdrawn or refused to cross the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, U.S. troops were obviously sufficient to carry out our military purposes. Seventy percent of the combat troops were provided by the U.S. military; the vast majority of air sorties were flown by U.S. aircraft. The Coalition was quite obviously a thin disguise for U.S. military operations.

We sent troops to the Middle East to counter what appeared to be a political destabilization of the region comparable to the “collapse” of the “dominoes” in Southeast Asia. Yet, there is considerable evidence that we took such action without much knowledge of the political consequences. While diplomacy was still possible, President George H. W. Bush insisted tirelessly that there would be “no linkage” of the Palestinian question and Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Yet even before the ground war had begun, the President announced in his “State of the Union” address in January 1991 that “some resolution” of the Palestinian issue would be a necessary part of the peace settlements following the war. Supporters of our policies might argue that we intended from the beginning to negotiate a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian controversy, but only when we could do so from a position of regional strength.

Yet President George H. W. Bush could have announced such an intention before the January 15th deadline expired, if only to strengthen the U.S. hand in diplomatic negotiations and win wider popular support among Arab peoples. Had we expressed clearly a plan for establishing a Palestinian homeland, guaranteeing their political and judicial rights in the region, and promptly entered into negotiations with the Palestinians and the Israelis, then we might have gained far more credibility in the region and diminished Saddam Hussein’s effort to appropriate the Palestinian cause for his own purposes. In short, we could have used our influence in this crisis to initiate serious negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians independent of Saddam Hussein’s demands and the future of Kuwait. Our lack of a positive policy with respect to the Palestinian question is reflected both in our equivocation regarding the “relevance” of the Palestinian question to the stability of the Middle East and our postwar failure to do more than support a multinational Middle Eastern peace conference on the issue. Having just participated in a military action that has reorganized the political balance of power in the Middle East, we assumed in 1991 the position of having “no position” on the appropriate solution to what is arguably the most significant issue in the Middle East: the fate of the Palestinians. Such equivocation, if not outright foreign policy flimflam, recalls nothing so well as our indecision in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. If our government hoped to maintain a “symbolic” position by merely endorsing the “desirability” of a “peaceful solution” to the issue of a Palestinian homeland, then we may well understand why the next twenty years were marked by political stalemate in any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question. History demonstrates in those two decades that we have indeed slipped into a “quagmire” in the Middle East no easier to escape than the political trap in which we threw ourselves during our two decades in Southeast Asia.

Since the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, our opposition to Saddam Hussein has grown from “concern” about his growing military power in the region to the outright demonization of the Saddam who appeared on posters during the War, complete with bulls-eye and the slogan, “Now, It’s Personal!” As war fever spread in this country, debates concerning the “fate” or “future” of Saddam grew proportionately. With the war underway, there was ceaseless discussion about whether or not Saddam Hussein had been targeted by the U.S. military and whether or not he should be “terminated.” Discussions of the “morality” and “legality” of murdering Saddam Hussein took center stage from the other, more reasonable question for the State Department and the U.S. public: what are the other political parties and who are the other viable political leaders in contemporary Iraq?

Anyone who recalls the years leading up to Diem’s and his brother, Nhu’s, assassinations must find some uncanny resemblances in this obsession with Saddam Hussein’s “liquidation.” Truong Nhu Tang, one of the founders of the National Liberation Front, complains in A Viet Cong Memoir that the U.S. government never familiarized itself with the many well-qualified leaders of various opposition parties that developed during Diem’s rule in South Vietnam. [51] As he points out, we accepted Diem’s and Nhu’s caricatures of such opposition leaders and parties as “Communists,” even though South Vietnam between 1954 and 1963 was alive with a wide variety of different political constituencies, despite Nhu’s efforts to use his secret police to suppress every sign of political dissent. Even when the fall of Diem and Nhu’s government was understood by Henry Cabot Lodge and others in the State Department to be inevitable, we did little to identify, much less encourage, opposition leaders. For Troung Nhu Tang, this failure on the part of U.S. foreign policy merely strengthened the coalition of political groups formed in opposition to Diem’s government. In effect, our willful disregard of potentially popular political alternatives in South Vietnam helped turn the National Liberation Front into an effective political and ultimately successful military organization.

In a similar fashion, we seem to have ignored the possibility of any legitimate political opposition in Iraq to the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. At the same time, we have encouraged the “people” to revolt and overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party. Such conflicting messages have led to President George H. W. Bush’s recent embarrassment regarding the plight of the Kurdish refugees, most of whom are fleeing the efforts of the Iraqi Army to suppress a rebellion tangibly encouraged by CIA radio broadcasts calling for open revolution against Saddam Hussein. Shi’ite Muslim rebellion in southern Iraq has received less attention, even though it has been just as ruthlessly suppressed by the Iraqi Army, but the U.S. administration’s “policy” seems once again to reflect the equivocations of the Vietnam era. After all, “Shi’ite” simply means “Iranian” to the Bush Administration, and that argues for an even more dangerous “imbalance” of power in the region. Rather than identify leaders with popular support and plans for better government, we have concerned ourselves once again with the “caricatures” of foreign politics and issues that we learned to sketch during the Vietnam period.

During the War, the only hint of the United States’ foreign policy in the Gulf in the postwar period was Secretary of State Baker’s plans for a “Middle Eastern Bank” to finance the reconstruction of Iraq. Amid the jokes about such a plan as a clever solution for the crisis in American banking, the obvious implication was that this was the only idea that the State Department could formulate to meet the political crises after the war. Once again, the lessons of Vietnam seemed to have been forgotten. The enormous foreign economic assistance we gave President Diem to bolster his shaky government was largely wasted on hasty efforts to industrialize South Vietnam and “build” an army with equipment but without popular support. The enduring myth of U.S. economic aid to Vietnam from our last-minute economic assistance of the French to the evacuation of Saigon in 1975 is that such assistance was squandered by corrupt officials. Yet, the real waste of U.S. aid to South Vietnam resulted from our misunderstanding of the needs of the Vietnamese economy and people. As George Herring points out in America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam: 1950–1975, U.S. aid to South Vietnam between 1955 and 1960 initially helped stabilize the South Vietnamese government, but the disproportionate military aid and efforts to rapidly industrialize South Vietnam “did little to promote economic development or to improve living conditions in the villages where more than 90 percent of South Vietnam’s population resided”. [52] In our enthusiasm to strengthen the central, urban rule of Diem, in imitation of the developed nations, we ignored the rural infrastructure for both the economy and politics of Vietnam.

How will the funds of Baker’s “Middle Eastern Bank” be distributed? In Vietnam, we confused buildings, factories, and consumer goods with what is vaguely designated by the word culture. Despite his militarism, his expansionist aims, and his tyrannical rule, Saddam Hussein enjoyed considerable popular support in the Middle East in the months following his invasion of Kuwait. President George H. W. Bush insisted that we would not be “swayed” by such popular demonstrations, as if they reflected merely some sort of “mass hysteria” symptomatic of our worst ethnocentric fantasies about the “Arab masses.” Yet what seems so obvious in those demonstrations was the expression of protest against the inequitable distribution of wealth in the region, whether that wealth be measured in oil, jobs, land, or merely “voice”—that is, some recognition for the many social and political constituencies in the Middle East who are effectively unheard in the West.

Viewed in this way, can the poverty of so many Middle Eastern peoples, terrible when measured against the great wealth of the region, be relieved significantly by a “Middle Eastern Bank,” however comprehensive its ambitions? Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and other Arab nations of the Coalition have already benefited economically from the First Persian Gulf War. It is quite clear, however, that Jordan is to be punished economically for its neutrality and King Hussein’s protests against civilian casualties during the bombing of Iraq. Even in cases where popular sympathy has been elicited, such as for the plight of the Kurdish refugees, the economic future promises little more than infrastructure, even if we generously assume that such “reconstruction” would be done selflessly in the interests of the Iraqi people. Who will rebuild Kuwait? For that work, no “Middle Eastern Bank” will be needed. One of the world’s smallest nations, Kuwait is also one of the world’s richest nations. Even before the end of the First Gulf War, fifty billion dollars’ worth of contracts for reconstruction had been awarded by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile, virtually all to U.S. firms. The United States will rebuild Kuwait, and the United States will thus inevitably become the economic and military ruler of Kuwait. In this respect, we will succeed the British, who ruled Kuwait as a protectorate from 1914 to 1961, protected Kuwait from Iraqi territorial claims between 1961 and 1963, and worked out the agreements between the Kuwaiti royal family and British Petroleum, Getty Oil, and the Japanese owned “Arabian Oil Company” that shared Kuwait’s oil wealth in the 1950s and 1960s. In light of the grotesque scandals surrounding the U.S. banking industry in the 1980s, it seems absurd that our government should propose taking the initiative in developing a “Middle Eastern Bank” that would “solve” the postwar problems of the region.

How will we protect this tiny country against Iraq, against future aggression in the Gulf region? Only by putting in power a puppet government in Iraq, one whose subservience or fidelity to U.S. interests are so clear that we can withdraw the majority of our troops from what certainly will be the postwar “Occupation Zone” of Iraq. Who will “save” the Iraqi people—17.5 million of them before the War, who are even now beginning to starve, to suffer the disease and pestilence that follow contaminated water supplies, whose doctors lack the most elementary medical supplies, who haven’t the fuel to cook what little food they have or purify what water they can collect from fetid ponds and bomb craters? Needless to say, I am speaking only of the survivors, not of the corpses in the bombed out buildings, in the terrible heaps of rubble that the joint “censorship” of the Pentagon and Saddam Hussein have virtually erased from our minds. There are hints, of course, from refugees that the civilian casualties, even in the midst of the “smart bombs” and “non-civilian targets,” will horrify us when their sheer numbers come finally, as they must, to light. I need hardly remind you that “collateral damage” means people.

Of course, the United States will assume responsibility for humanitarian aid, as well it should, but it will be a humanitarian effort that, for whatever good it may do, will nonetheless assure our political sphere of influence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Like Diem, some well-intentioned but hardly popular Iraqi will be “selected” to restore his country to economic stability and bring the survivors back to “normal” life. And such a leader will depend, of course, on Western financial support; whatever his good intentions, he will be a bought man. But what of the countries neighboring Iraq and Kuwait? President George H. W. Bush refused to countenance what he termed “linkage” in the failed diplomatic negotiations with Iraq in the five months leading to this disastrous war. But how can the question of “linkage” be ignored when the war itself will command a new relation among the various states of the Middle East? The same questions were asked in the years following the landing of U.S. troops in Vietnam in 1965, when it became clear we were not just lending “advisors” but actively fighting the war for the South Vietnamese government. What would happen to Cambodia, to Laos, to Thailand? We know that we share considerable responsibility for the Khmer Rouge’s military victory in Cambodia, following our bombing of NLF and PRG sanctuaries along the Cambodian border with Vietnam. We know that the genocide of 3 million Cambodians carried out by the Khmer Rouge government was a consequence of the “madness” of the war waged in Vietnam, spilling over into Cambodia.

Is it possible for a sophisticated world leader to refuse to countenance “political linkage” of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with the other wars and territorial ambitions of the various countries in the region over the past fifty years, when in fact foreign policy cannot be understood as anything else than an effort to “link” different national interests? “Linkage” is now inevitable, and even in the specific case of what President George H. W. Bush considered the most unthinkable “linkage” five months ago: the “linkage” of the issue of Kuwait with the issue of Palestine and the 2.5 million homeless Palestinians. In his 1991 “State of the Union” address, the President suggested that some resolution of the Palestinian question will have to be part of the postwar peace settlement, if only for the pragmatic reason that no peace will be lasting in the region without addressing the question of Palestine and the Palestinian people. If this was so clear to President George H. W. Bush, then why was it an issue before he ordered military action to begin?

By refusing even to consider any “linkage” of the Palestinian question with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush initiated a military policy that made a wide range of “linkages” virtually unavoidable. Certainly Saddam Hussein’s military policies depend upon such political “linkages,” and they are likely to have disastrous military consequences for our coalition. After the air war began on January 16, 1991, Jordan’s King Hussein protested angrily the military campaign and the growing civilian casualties. After the war began, Jordanians expressed strong support for the Iraqis and for Saddam Hussein. Our response was to threaten to cut foreign aid to Jordan and to trivialize the “military threat” of the Jordanian army and air force. In the meantime, Iraq has sent much of its remaining air force to bases in Iran, and we have trivialized the “military threat” of Iraqi planes in Iran. But the average Iranian citizen has expressed growing sympathy with the Iraqis and anger against the relentless bombing that continues unabated just beyond their western border. Should we simply fear the entrance of Jordan and Iran into this war on the side of Iraq? No, we should fear far more the lasting political consequences of the deep-seated resentment of the United States that our military policies have created among the peoples of Jordan and Iran. Even barring their entrance into the military conflict, can we be certain that their moderate leaders, King Hussein and President Rafsanjani, will survive politically the growing popular sentiments against U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf?

The terrible future that our military policies in this war may well be creating has clear parallels with what happened in Southeast Asia. If that future comes even close to what I have sketched—an Iraqi Diem, or worse, an Iranian Shah, propped up by U.S. economic aid and military support, then we already know the consequences. There will be no peace in the Middle East; there will be merely an acceleration of the wars that have troubled that region in the wake of French, British, and now U.S. colonialism. Or perhaps more terrible still than overt warfare, there may come to power even more of the unpublicized political terror we condemn in Saddam Hussein and yet supported in the Iran ruled with an iron fist by the Shah and his secret police, Savak, for more than a quarter of a century.

The Vietminh at Dienbienphu fought for a great military victory, which General Giap knew would serve primarily political ends. It was, of course, a very real battle with terrible casualties and acts of extraordinary heroism on both sides, but the Vietminh, Giap, and Ho knew that it was primarily a symbolic victory that strengthened their hand in Geneva. In a similar sense, the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a military disaster for the National Liberation Front as well as for the North Vietnamese Communists who supported it. It accomplished little, except for the atrocities in Hue and the destruction of that ancient city. The marines retook Hue with awful casualties, but they regained that ground. The U.S. combat troops in Vietnam were not zoned out, demoralized by anti-war protesters, and indecisive in military action. We won the battles, but we lost the war. Because we lost the peace before the war began.

In the First Gulf War, we also betrayed an utter ignorance of local politics—or perhaps it is simply a studied carelessness toward both regions and a lack of interest in their indigenous peoples and local politics. That, above all, seems to have been the cause of our failure in Vietnam. Our “Southeast Asian” experts were legion, scattered from the State Department to universities throughout the U.S. But none seemed to have the slightest understanding of the complex political divisions in Vietnam, the different local leaders, the ethnic and religious diversity. We poured foreign aid into industrialization and urbanization programs encouraged by Diem, an urban Catholic, who was also deeply nationalist. We ignored the agrarian traditions of Vietnam, especially important in the rich and fertile lands of South Vietnam. We dealt with European-educated intellectuals, often cosmopolitans with contradictory yearnings for western ways; we treated the village peasantry and their agriculture as “inconsequential.” In terms of our global foreign policies, they hardly mattered, but in Vietnam they were keys to popular support as well as our own democratic values. We never won their “hearts and minds,” because programs like the “Hamlet Resettlement Program” and the “Phoenix Program” treated their centuries’ old traditions and values as the lingering traces of a “primitive” people in need of our enlightenment.

We repeated this pattern of arrogance in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, and the rest of the Middle East during and after the First Gulf War. Our allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, suffered the consequences of their alliance with our imperial commitment to modern, technocratic “civilization” as a political solution to regional problems exacerbated by EuroAmerican imperialism.

Most Americans agreed in the early stages of the War that the censorship of the news imposed by our government was in the “best interests” of our nation. “Doesn’t anyone remember the old adage from World War II: ‘Zip the lip?’” a correspondent to the Los Angeles Times wrote shortly after the ground war began, complaining of CNN’s coverage of military operations in the Gulf. I do not agree that we should accept such censorship, especially when it means keeping us in the dark regarding the casualties in Iraq and Kuwait. But even granting hypothetically such a need for military censorship, then can an equal case be made for the de facto “censorship” of our political plans for peace? If such plans are reasonable, especially when what we mean by “reasonable” takes into account the interests of the diverse peoples living in the Middle East, then shouldn’t we publicize them broadly in the interests of gathering support from those who now seem to hate us more every day? Wouldn’t a reasonable peace plan have helped bring the war to a more rapid conclusion, more convincingly encouraging the coup d’état that the U.S. government encouraged us would soon come to Iraq? Alas, it was the same in the Vietnam War. Our government encouraged us to believe that the “light at the end of the tunnel” would result from “internal” divisions of the Vietnamese Communists, disagreements between the North Vietnamese and Chinese, even the poor health and incipient death of Ho Chi Minh. Our hopes were as fantastic and as macabre as the CIA’s infamous plot to poison the cigars and beard of Fidel Castro.

Or is it that, as usual, at the end of the First Gulf War the United States had no effective plan for peace, could not imagine any “linkage” that would transform military action into human and social action of lasting consequence? In the place of the terrible scenario for a nervous “peace” I have sketched above, I offer my own version. Acknowledge that the “new global order” is not merely an occasion for the United States to take advantage of problems in Russia and China to reassert the same old U.S. dominance in world affairs, but a genuine opportunity to create a “United Nations” that will govern by way of the human diversity it is intended to represent. Scrap the “Security Council.” Cancel Veto-Power. Let every country admitted have one vote. Make consensus the aim for powerful and binding decisions regarding such matters as military aggression. Develop a genuinely multinational peace-keeping force, dividing the responsibility proportionately among the participating countries. Let this new United Nations negotiate settlements of issues of clear international consequence, and let this same United Nations delegate other issues of more local consequence to “subcommittees” composed of the nations in the region most immediately affected: in this case, a Middle Eastern Conference called by the United Nations and conducted according to general rules and guidelines established by the U.N. In effect, give the United Nations the powers to debate and finally decide legal, territorial, and economic issues of consequence to the world communities. In short, do not send James Baker III to Geneva to negotiate with Tariq Aziz in the “name” of the United Nations. After the Geneva Accords of 1954, who could believe in such a fiction? Why else did those last-minute diplomatic efforts collapse so quickly and so ludicrously?

Give the United Nations economic powers as well, so that this international body might impose long-term, effective economic sanctions against an aggressor-nation. All the arguments about how the League of Nations and then the United Nations have failed to bring about this new means of reaching global consensus and resolving legally and economically such disputes must for the moment be put aside. We have never before tried to forge such an international body for judgment beyond the logic of “balance-of-power” politics, outside the framework of European colonialism, or in the aftermath of the Cold War. We have such an opportunity now. [53]

If such a “peaceful solution” strikes you as naive, unworkable, or hopelessly unrealistic, I ask you to consider one more factor. Those who opposed this war were asked ceaselessly and rhetorically by other concerned citizens, “But what can we do?” The implied answer to this question is always the same: “We had no choice, but to pursue military action against Iraq.” Of the many possible peaceful options available to us and the United Nations before military action began, none was given a reasonable chance to work.

We will not fight in the Persian Gulf with “one hand tied behind our backs,” President George H. W. Bush insisted. And we would not lose our “resolve” to “finish the job” that according to this logic we “left unfinished” in Vietnam. But President George H. W. Bush was wrong on both accounts. To pit young men and women on both sides against smart bombs and missiles, Abrams tanks and land mines—in short, to pit the frail and precious human body against flying bits of sharpened metal—this is indeed to fight “with one hand tied behind our backs,” the hand, in short, that extends a human touch, a certain sympathy, not for a dictator like Saddam Hussein but for the 17.5 million Iraqis who suffer most from this war and for the homeless, displaced, impoverished peoples of the Middle East, who in their desperation look to Saddam Hussein as a hero. To imagine that “war” is a “job to finish” only ignores utterly the lessons of the Vietnam War. For some, it was our ignoble retreat from Vietnam—from the rooftops of Saigon in 1975 or from the Paris Peace Talks in 1973—that led to the repressive regime in contemporary Vietnam. But it was our conduct in that War that caricatured the best minds and talents of the Vietnamese nationalist movements as vulgar Communists, as “enemies of the people,” while we supported a succession of thugs, crooks, and megalomaniacs.

War is never a “job to finish,” as the veterans of the Vietnam War will tell you. For those who fought and served in Vietnam, the war will never be over. For the 58,000 Americans who died there, for the 75,000 who committed suicide after they returned home, for the estimated 2 million Vietnamese who died in the war, for the families who have suffered, and for the veterans from all sides of our ugly war who still suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—for these and many other survivors of the Vietnam War, the parallels of this war, however “swift” and “surgical” it may have been conducted on the battlefield, are to Vietnam, the war we lost when we could not articulate the peace. The peace is made not when war is over, but before war has begun. The “just war,” if such a notion is possible, depends not on arcane ethical debates, but on the promise of the peace that will come from such war, so that we may assess the cost of our brothers and sisters on both sides.

We have no plan for peace in the Middle East, no “policy” for the future of the region, unless it is a “secret” plan worked out in the offices of the Pentagon and the Executive branch of the government. Too often in our history, we have known how to make war but failed to imagine peace. 217 times we have fought in our brief history, only seven times with Congressionally approved declarations of war. It is not just the conduct of the war that we must protest; it is also our failure to pursue peace that we must protest. We should not be in the Persian Gulf to “win” the war we lost in Vietnam; we should be in the Persian Gulf to win the peace we never found in Vietnam.

During the First Gulf War, Harold Meyerson argued that the continuing crisis in the Middle East resembles neither World War II nor Vietnam, insisting that opponents of the First Gulf War “insist on a politics rooted in the present”. [54] Meyerson wisely argues we should avoid historical comparisons that distract us from particular circumstances in global conflicts. Comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, the invasion of Kuwait to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, confuses by conflating different dictators, eras, regions, and peoples. By the same token, we should not rush to forget the lessons of the past, especially when they are hard lessons such as those learned in Vietnam. These are lessons to be studied by what Meyerson considers the “fractured” American left but also by all those who claimed a short-term victory in the six-week war in the Persian Gulf. Unless we articulate a detailed foreign policy, address the concerns of the politically and economically disempowered (both at home and abroad), and learn to deal with other cultures rather than with political celebrities, we shall be doomed to a “new global order”—the popular slogan of President George H. W. Bush’s administration—of ceaseless little wars. Let us remember that opposition to the Vietnam War was not the cause of losing an unwinnable, immoral war; it was simply one expression of the dissent and debate that are the true signs of democracy and rational patriotism. Silence and forgetfulness have often enough been the heralds of history’s most terrible epochs.

Afterword: 2010

It is chilling to read the previous pages after almost twenty years, a decade after 9/11, and realize how clear it was in 1991 that the unresolved problems in the Middle East, most of them resulting from the postcolonial effects of EuroAmerican colonial interference in the region, would only be exacerbated by the Coalition’s military action in the First Gulf War. The emergence of al-Qaeda is not anticipated explicitly, but some organization of political and military resistance to the West seems nearly inevitable given our foreign policy myopia in treating Saddam Hussein as an isolable dictator, who could be controlled with sheer military force. The ceaseless “little wars” predicted in the final paragraph are now integral to our foreign policy and daily lives, affecting the lives of so many Americans and peoples in Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Philippines. These wars and their continuing after-effects are destroying our vaunted economy, even as some Americans have taken the oddly undemocratic tack of “celebrating” our neo-imperialism as a virtue or a sign of “success”. Instead, we seem poised on the brink of those collapses that have resulted from almost every imperial power in world history committed to a succession of wars to maintain its ever-expanding empire. As I write these lines, President Barack Obama struggles to extricate the U.S. from two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his own executive authority and liberal identity threatened by what Bob Woodward has dubbed in a just published book, Obama’s Wars. [55] Even before its release, the book was condemned by right-wing journalists for contributing to the defeatism originally associated with the “Vietnam Syndrome”. [56]