Vietnam revisionism and the cyclical myth of an imminent Iraq victory

Iraq: Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time

By Julian Delasantellis

If there's one group that knew a thing or two about the acquisition and maintenance of political power, it would have been Ingsoc, the dictatorial power elite (its name a bastardization of "English socialism") from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. "Who controls the past," Ingsoc told its cadres, "controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past."

What this meant was that, if you had a governing elite or ideology that felt it lacked the requisite historical legitimacy to rule, all you had to do was go back and change the historical record to one that better suited the elite's current needs.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this mission was tasked to the feared "Ministry of Truth", where party functionaries, among them the story's protagonist, Winston Smith, searched historical records - in Smith's case, through old copies of The Times of London - to excise historical events or personages that had fallen out of favor with the party. This now inopportune "incorrect" history would then be sent down the "memory hole"; party "newspeak" for the incinerator.

Surely, in an advanced democracy such as the United States, with its vibrant free press and bewilderingly myriad sources of information, the past is never updated to serve the present; there are no "memory holes".

If that were true, the US would not be allowing itself to be bled white in Iraq, and barely even knowing why.

Like most US holidays, Memorial Day, celebrated this year on May 28, long ago lost most aspects of commemoration and veneration that the name implies; for most Americans, it is "celebrated" as a three-day weekend devoted to cookouts, picnics and getting a good deal at the summer outdoor furniture sales.

One group that, in its own unique way, has tried to keep something of the spirit of the holiday alive is called Rolling Thunder. Every Memorial Day weekend since 1987, its members have rallied on the Washington Mall, with many of the burly, black-leather-clad attendees riding to the event on their US-built motorcycles, thus producing the sound of "rolling thunder". ("Rolling Thunder" was also the operational name for the bombing campaign the US Air Force and US Navy conducted against North Vietnam from 1965-68.) The event is carried on the C-SPAN cable public-affairs network, where I have watched it for many years.

The original, and still central, rationale for Rolling Thunder is to keep the POW/MIA (prisoner of war/missing in action) issue existent in the public consciousness. Most Americans think this issue primarily relates to US troops who never came home from the Vietnam War, but Rolling Thunder does not limit itself to that era; it is searching for live POWs from all of America's 20th-century wars still allegedly being held by their captors.

One speaker at the recent rally, Lynn O'Shea, a spokesperson for the National League of Families, sadly announced that the league was now suspending its search for any possible live US POW/MIAs from World War I, [1] presumably being held until recently by those eternally nefarious troublemaking Hohenzollerns.

But with time causing the Vietnam POW/MIA issue to fade from public awareness, in recent years, many of the speakers at Rolling Thunder have been using their microphone time to express another consuming passion, how infuriated they still are, more than a third of a century since the war ended, at the anti-war protesters of the Vietnam War era.

In previous years, it was always a crowd pleaser when Rolling Thunder speakers took the opportunity to make pointed, non-publishable comment on what they considered to be the sorry state of cleanliness of Vietnam-era anti-war activist Jane Fonda's genitals.

It is only in this context that the following comments by John Sommers, the executive director of the Washington, DC, office of the American Legion, the veterans' service and advocacy organization, become understandable.

We also just completed a successful mission, the American Legion and Rolling Thunder working hard together along with other organizations, to get a [Iraq] war funding supplemental appropriations bill passed without any guidelines or deadlines on bringing home the troops.

Sommers feels proud that his organization's lobbying helped defeat the recent congressional efforts to wind down the Iraq war. This might seem a surprising position for a veterans-advocacy organization, since it means that a lot more current US military personnel will get killed in Iraq before they ever get a chance to be civilian veterans; thousands of others will live out their lives as veterans with prosthetic limbs or in wheelchairs. It certainly is not a position shared by many of today's troops themselves; these days they regularly seek out media outlets to express how pointless they now see their current sacrifices in Iraq.

Apparently, for the veterans' advocates lobbying for the perpetuation of the war, and perhaps for much of the United States as a whole, the war has taken on a meaning and significance way beyond anything that is actually happening on the carnage-drenched streets of Baghdad or Diyala province.

For all the talk of the "controversial" Vietnam War, while it was being fought, the war was not all that controversial. It was popular with Americans up to around mid-1967. After the Tet Offensive in early 1968 it became wildly unpopular, right up to its conclusion in 1975. After 1968, no US politician of any import advocated continuation of the war to victory, and when North Vietnamese tanks rolled unopposed into Saigon in April 1975, most Americans felt relief that they were finally done with the place.

But as the United States feathered its hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and metastasized in the national consciousness. The US lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam War had to be disposed of down the memory hole.

On May 28, 1984, at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, president Ronald Reagan said, "Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought for freedom, a truly noble cause ... This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest levels of government."

Since the nation no longer actually had to fight the Vietnam War, the United States was discovering that it now actually liked the

Vietnam War. The revisionist-history project as applied to the Vietnam experience was gathering full force. The war was no longer a bloody, fatally mismanaged fiasco - it was now a "noble cause".

More important, the war was not lost by the troops - they actually won the fight - but by other forces in society: first, the government, then other societal forces.

The manhunt for the real losers of the Vietnam War was on.

James William Gibson, in his 1994 book Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America, elaborated on how these beliefs evolved.

Defeat in Vietnam came to be viewed as the result of what the Joint Chiefs of Staff called "self-imposed restraints". From this perspective, technowar would have inevitably produced victory if it hadn't been for the influences of liberals in Congress, the anti-war movement, and the news media, who together stopped the military from unleashing its full powers of destruction.

Gibson goes on to document a diverse compilation of US post-Vietnam cultural manifestations that developed on the now-accepted belief that defeat was caused by "self-imposed restraints".

Rambo: First Blood Part II and other POW-rescue movies indulged the fantasy of going back to Vietnam and blowing to pieces as many Vietnamese as possible, preferably but not necessarily limited to communists. Thereby they were winning the war, and not having to be concerned with the messy winning of the "hearts and minds" that posed such a challenge in the actual war.

Beyond that, there arose a bewildering array of other cultural illustrations of a US desire to change the actual historical record and result of the Vietnam War, what Gibson called the "New War". Among these were the rise of suburban weekend warriors playing paintball, the idolization of mercenaries, and an innumerable parade of pulpy paperback novels and B-grade movies that featured brave Vietnam veterans brutally battling varied assortments of drug dealers, treacherously spineless bureaucrats, and, especially, the anti-war left.

Gibson elaborates on the enemy in the New War that the heroes are fighting:

They have to contend with a different kind of enemy every step of the way - "bleeding heart" liberals and complacent government officials, moral cowards who refuse to fight. Why do these leaders make themselves the enemy of courageous good men?

In the 1985 movie Year of the Dragon, Mickey Rourke, playing Vietnam veteran turned New York City police detective Stanley White, laments that, just as it was in the war, he is unable to fight Chinese drug gangs with the vigor he would like:

This is a [expletive] war, and I'm not going to lose it, not this one. Not over politics. It's always [expletive] politics. This is Vietnam all over again. Nobody wants to win this thing. Just flat-out win.

In Chuck Norris' 1978 film Good Guys Wear Black, any shade of gray between who is good and who is bad is not allowed, as Norris learns that the last surviving members of his Vietnam commando unit are being killed off by a State Department bureaucrat (from the Ivy League, no less) who wants to open secret negotiations with Hanoi.

And, of course, at the beginning of Rambo: First Blood Part II, on being tasked to return to Vietnam to rescue missing POWs, Sylvester Stallone, who in reality spent the Vietnam War safely ensconced in Switzerland teaching physical education at a girls' private school, asks the question that has in essence become the pledge of allegiance of the new Vietnam popular myth: "Do we get to win this time?"

Two movies act as perfect bookends to old and new Vietnam consensus. In 1978's Coming Home, Vietnam veteran and war supporter Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) is the misogynistic brute, while paraplegic veteran and war opponent Luke Martin (Jon Voight) is the sensitive, caring lover. (Of course, part of Dern's justifiable rage, from the point of view of pro-war forces, was that he had been cuckolded by his wife, who else but the eternally treacherous Jane Fonda.) Sixteen years later, the roles were reversed as noble and gentle Vietnam hero Forest Gump (Tom Hanks) stepped in to protect his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Robin Wright), from an abusive anti-war protester, played by Geoffrey Blake.

Inevitably, Vietnam revisionism got sucked down into the squalid vortex that is US political debate. The political right found it one of the most effective truncheons it had with which to beat the political left. Many in the anti-war left matured into activists and elective office holders of the Democratic Party, and with the anti-war movement now shouldered with culpability for the only war that the United States ever lost, the left found itself constantly on the defensive, especially in gaining credibility in matters of foreign and defense policy.

It was not as if there were so many more war heroes on the Republican right; if anything, just as many Vietnam veterans entered US politics as Democrats as Republicans. The major difference between the two sides' Vietnam history was that most of those who later became leaders of the political right spent their Vietnam era contentedly hugging the protective security blanket of the student deferments that protected them from involuntary conscription. On the other hand, many in the anti-war movement burned from, and had their activism spurred by, the guilt engendered by the phenomenon in which their ability to get and stay in college protected them from the horrors of Vietnam; those without the means or ability to do likewise, mainly the lower and lower-middle classes, had no such readily available refuge. Those young men subsequently found themselves drafted into frontline combat in Vietnam.

Vietnam revisionism is also very prevalent in the current higher officer classes of the US military; most of them were young junior officers in Vietnam, so the theory's implicit absolving of that era's military leadership from the incompetence and mismanagement of the prosecution of that war is particularly appealing.

In 2004, the Democratic Party nominated John Kerry as its candidate for president. Kerry was a genuine Vietnam War hero, being awarded the Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, but mostly he had gained fame from an eloquent two-hour anti-war address he delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. During his 2004 campaign, he tried to emphasize the former and ignore the latter, but when the Republican-allied Swift Boat Veterans for Truth reminded Americans of his anti-war past (even to the extent of producing a fake doctored photo of him together at a peace rally with, yes, Jane Fonda), Kerry's campaign faltered and ultimately failed, losing to incumbent George W Bush by more than 3 million votes.
For the many anti-war veterans who supported Kerry, the irony was excruciating - a genuine war hero, Kerry, losing the election on the issue of conduct during a war that the other candidate, Bush, used every manner of artifice and exercise of privilege to avoid.

If anything, the "lessons" taken from September 11, 2001, had only reinforced Vietnam revisionism. Even though there were absolutely no points of ideological commonality, and more than 30 years of history, between the actual enemies involved, atheist Vietnamese communists and Islamic fundamentalist Arabs, a consensus seemed to develop that the attacks represented a total discrediting of a central tenet of the Vietnam anti-war movement, that peace was a possible, or maybe even a desirable, national policy objective.

Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly silencing the truth with repression and torture, the US national consensus had sent the truth it no longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the memory hole. Now, all that was needed was to prove the point with actual events, not pulp movies, books and character assassination.

Along came Iraq. Iraq is the New War made flesh.

If Iraq could be won by suppressing the factors that allegedly caused Vietnam to be lost, namely home-front perfidy, a final, virtually ex cathedra affirmation of the truth of Vietnam revisionism could forever enter the history books.

Until very recently, many commentators have noted how uncritically the US news media accepted the Bush administration's prewar prevarications, and then the ongoing optimistic assessments regarding the Iraq war. This is in marked contrast to the early days of Vietnam, where in-country journalists such as Neal Sheehan and the late David Halberstam produced and had published realistic depictions of the wildly mendacious and ineffective prosecution of the war that ultimately caused it to be lost. Even in the early 1960s, their realistic portrayals starkly contrasted with the sunny optimism of officials in Washington and Saigon.

This dearth of contemporary journalistic honesty and courage should not be surprising, since the reporting of the US media in Vietnam is a major sore point for Vietnam revisionists. Supposedly, by doing their job and telling the truth about the war, the US media weakened public support for the war, once again, allegedly causing the US to lose a war on the home front that it had been winning on the battlefield.

Whatever the truth of this allegation, as the Iraq war developed and was initiated, the media by and large accepted Bush's rationales and early assessments of the war and subsequent insurgency. With the surge in patriotism that followed September 11 implicitly leading to a newly reaffirmed and intensified national acceptance of Vietnam revisionism, the media were determined that, whatever it took, they were not going to get pinned with blame for losing another US war.

The ratings success of Fox News, shearing viewers away from more "mainstream" CNN, and the fact that the media concentration of the 1990s had led to a situation where the vast majority of the news and information Americans were receiving was coming from five conglomerates, all led by Republicans, also supported this phenomenon.

Frank Rich of the New York Times has noted how many journalists now look on their conduct during a March 3, 2003, prewar Bush press conference with shame, when they uncritically accepted all of his now-discredited reasons for going to war.

Today, with US casualty levels higher than they have ever been in the four years of war, and with all the ever-changing Karl Rove-generated and focus-group-tested rationalizations to justify the war (weapons of mass destruction, September 11, "we'll stand down when they stand up", fighting al-Qaeda, "they hate us for our freedom", spreading democracy in the Muslim world, "they'll follow us home") now discredited, the war still enjoys enough support to thwart all legislative efforts to bring it to a quick conclusion. This is because, although veterans groups such as the American Legion and the Swift Boaters may have accepted Vietnam revisionism explicitly, most of the rest of the society has also accepted it implicitly.

Up until recently, there were few more profitable businesses to be engaged in in the US than producing those once-ubiquitous "support the troops" magnetic ribbons that so many US vehicles displayed, their very existence saying that the people were going to "support the troops" in this war, because they didn't in the last.

On the few occasions when right-wing radio talk shows stop baying for the blood of Mexican immigrants and talk about the war, the discussion inevitably fades away from today's actual war to the theme that opposition to the war is leading to a situation "just like Vietnam". This is even though no effective peace movement has ever really developed for this war; most of it disappeared when an exhausted and dispirited Cindy Sheehan announced a withdrawal from her anti-war activities last week.

As in Forest Gump, the image of the 1960s anti-war protester, a personage now credited with stopping a war that the country really wanted to fight, has been so soiled by Vietnam revisionism that mainstream Americans want nothing to do with their modern equivalents. Many anti-war legislators are hesitant publicly to oppose the war too vigorously; they fear that, once again, the public will rise up and punish them in the future for advocating what polling says the public wants now - an expedited withdrawal from Iraq. War supporters say that if you "support the troops" you must support the war in which they fight. As of yet, the war's opponents have not been able to produce a coherent counter-argument to this simple-minded but now daily greater tautological exsanguination.

In John Le Carre's 1980 novel Smiley's People, retired British spymaster George Smiley realizes he might soon have one last chance to go up against the nemesis of both his professional and personal life, KGB spymaster Karla. "He had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them all ... no peace, no tainted witness to his actions should disturb his lonely quest."

This is the real quest for which today the United States battles in Mesopotamia. For the veterans of Vietnam, a decisive victory in Iraq would allow them somehow to validate the mindless pain and carnage of Vietnam - we should have won, this proves we could have, too. For the country as a whole, Iraq is a chance to return to the better US of the past, before Watergate, and Monicagate and all the social pathologies (drugs, divorce, sexual licentiousness, lack of proper respect for authority, etc) that conservative commentators such as Robert Bork, William Bennett and David Horowitz claim infected US society as a result of the counterculture that grew out of the anti-war movement of the 1960s.

Where does that leave today's troops, the actual object of the "support the troops" mandate? They have now been forced into the role of reluctant schoolchildren forced on to the football team by the never-forgotten failure of their father on that very same pitch many years ago.

What greater way is there to show disrespect to the troops than to deny who they actually are?

In 1944, Pertinax ( a nom de plume for French journalist Andre Geraud) published the book The Gravediggers of France, accusing his nation's pre-World War II political and military leadership of the disastrous incompetence and mismanagement that led to France's quick defeat by the Germans in 1940. Today, the spinners of the lie that is Vietnam revisionism are the Gravediggers of America. Into the massive sepulchre they have dug is now entombed America's honesty, security, foreign reputation and immediate future.

Along with 3,500 young American lives, and a countless number of similarly placed Iraqis.

Note
1. With apologies to Dave Barry, I am not making this up; you can hear O'Shea make this dolorous announcement on the RealVideo clip of the rally, at minute 49, retrievable with a search for "Rolling Thunder" on the C-SPAN website.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and an educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.

Original article posted here.