Permanent War

If we have to use force it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.

Madeline Albright, Secretary of State, February 19, 1998

I recall all too well the nightmare of Vietnam.... I am determined to do everything in my power to prevent this country from becoming involved in another Vietnam nightmare.

Senator Robert Byrd, June 29, 2002

It is possible that the destruction of September 11 uncovered the suppressed remains of Vietnam.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat

We're going to get better over time. We've always thought of post-hostilities as a phase distinct from combat.... The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum.... This is the future for the world we're in at the moment. We'll get better as we do it more often.

Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, July 18, 2003

There seem to be only two kinds of war the United States can fight: World War II or Vietnam. The conviction on the part of some Americans and many politicians that the United States could (or should or would) have won the war in Vietnam is a convenient mechanism for getting around a remembered reality of defeat. An alternate strategy is to concentrate the national mind on World War II, skipping not only Vietnam but also Korea. In recent movies and television serials, World War II is depicted as a long, valiant struggle that the United States fought pretty much on its own, winning an exceptionally clean victory that continues to redeem all Americans under arms anywhere, at any point in history.¹ In virtually every military action since 1975, the administration in charge has tried to appropriate the images and language of World War II. Thus, Manuel Noriega, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein (twice) were roundly denounced as the Adolph Hitler du jour; September 11, 2001, of course, is the twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, in each of these wars or warlike events, some journalist or politician was bound to ask the fearful question: is this another Vietnam?

What is it that people fear in a repetition of Vietnam? Military and political defeat, of course, but, beyond that, the daily experience of an apparently endless war, one that registered on the home front not in calls for sacrifice and heroism but rather in domestic division, resistance to the draft, high desertion rates, urban riots, popular suspicion of the government, a steadily rising number of U.S. dead and wounded, the shame-inducing images of napalmed Vietnamese children, the reluctant knowledge of American atrocities like My Lai. In his speech in June 2002, Senator Robert Byrd listed his own nightmare images: "the antiwar protests and demonstrations, the campus riots, and the tragic deaths at Kent State, as well as the resignation of a president. And I remember all too well the gruesome daily body counts."²

Because the Vietnam War cannot be assimilated to a triumphal American narrative, presidents must regularly pick their way around it. They have done so mainly by taking its public relations failings to heart rather than by contemplating its history or meaning. Despite calling Vietnam a noble crusade, Ronald Reagan was in no mood to risk repeating other aspects of the conflict. Money and arms substituted for U.S. combat troops in both Nicaragua and El Salvador, and when a suicide bomber killed over two hundred U.S. marines in Lebanon, Reagan quickly withdrew the rest. At the same time, to demonstrate that the world's mightiest military power was not afraid to use its power directly (and to justify a military budget that never responded to the end of any war, including the Cold War), small, predictably winnable mini-wars were waged against small, largely defenseless countries. Operation Urgent Fury made it clear to all Grenadians, and most particularly the island...