(tiếp theo)
The shaping of a syndrome
Throughout the twentieth century the United States was actively involved in dozens of wars. Of those wars, only three approached or exceeded the cost to America of the Vietnam War in the scale of human casualties and capital expenditure. They were the two world wars and the Korean War. None of these wars, however, generated a ‘syndrome’ that echoed down the years. There was no ‘Germany syndrome’, no ‘Japan syndrome’ or no ‘Korea syndrome.’ The reason for the uniqueness of Vietnam, for the emergence of the multifaceted ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’ is simple and straightforward: only in Vietnam did the United States suffer a comprehensive military and political rout, an unprecedented and unrepeated defeat and humiliation.[1] The ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ became widely used ‘to describe the collective lessons and legacies of the war.’[2]On the one hand, it refers to the ‘psychiatric malaise’[3] that has led a partial re-emergence of the isolationist tendencies of the American political world, reinforcing the public’s disinclination to involve the US in potential Vietnam-type situations. On the other, ‘the Vietnam Syndrome in its political-military sense amounts to a set of criteria that should be met if the US is to commit troops to combat.’[4]
The psychiatric malaise and non-interventionism
It was the Vietnam War that ‘caused terrible damage to America’[5] as it was confessed later by Robert McNamara, a highly influential Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and a principal architect of the Vietnam War. Indeed, when the United States had been ‘stung by a small aggressive force’[6] the damage done to the American psyche and her exceptionalism was obvious: the national belief in America’s omnipotence was deeply shaken as the United States had shown itself ‘just as fallible and unexceptional as any other nation in history.’[7] Vietnam Syndrome is thus defined, first and foremost, by ‘a multifaceted [psychological] phenomenon: paranoia, trauma, shock, euphoria, amnesia, emotional collapse’ suffered as a consequence of the Vietnam War by American people as a ‘national state’ rather than the inevitable circumstances of some individuals.[8] The psychiatric malaise makes any debate over Vietnam ‘clearly a moment of critical and traumatic self-scrutiny for the American people.’[9] The Vietnam trauma was the reason why ‘most Americans tried to forget about Vietnam altogether’ in their ‘understandable amnesia’ though the exact opposite was identified, the inability to forget.[10] For the American leadership, the mental impairment was discovered relatively early in their conduct. The term ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, a.k.a. ‘the Vietnamese Syndrome,’ was first coined by Henry Kissinger long before the full impact of the American defeat and humiliation had been felt across the nation. In a 1969 Foreign Affairs article, Henry Kissinger described President Johnson’s negotiation efforts as ‘marked by the classic Vietnamese syndrome: optimism alternating with bewilderment; euphoria giving way to frustration.’[11]
During the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, what most people seemed to mean by the "Vietnam Syndrome" is a reluctance to commit American combat forces overseas, a suspicion and distrust of the government. "No more Vietnams!" became a verbal stop sign in any conversation entertaining the possibility of military intervention. This also seemed to have been the overriding lesson Americans drew in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The lesson was based on the Vietnam experiences of a long, protracted war, costly in human lives and money, of uncertain victory and questionable morality.
The high casualty rate of American soldiers was the primary determining factor for the aversion to military intervention. The public are expected to prepare themselves for such a high cost if they are to see a given war goal of their government achieved. But high numbers of war casualties tend to have a significant effect on public support for a particular conflict. Scholars point out that although there was solid public support for US involvement in World War II, had the US invaded Japan this ‘support… would certainly have declined in the face of enormous casualties’[12] that the invasion might have entailed. In the case of the Vietnam War, the disillusionment of the American public was stimulated not only by the absolute level of casualties, but by the fact that ‘casualties were being sustained to little evident point.’[13] The Americans felt the price for Vietnam, in which they had been denied victory, was too high. The ‘willingness of society to pay human costs of war,’[14] therefore, diminished.
As with the casualty rate, the public’s endurance of the high fiscal cost of the Vietnam War, contributed to its aversion to intervention and further undermined the national mood of self-confidence[15] that had characterized the post- World War II years. This national self-confidence had been partly engendered by the increased prosperity many Americans enjoyed during this period. Liberals of the 1960s had preached that American society, built on such solid foundations of democracy and capitalism, was perfectible through a particular form of economic management that would produce an abundance of resources.[16]Yet Johnson’s mismanagement of the economy, his insistence that the economy could finance both ‘guns and butter’ and his concealment of the war’s real costs, partly led to the onset of massive high unemployment in the late 1960s. In the post-Vietnam years, many Americans, anxious to avoid future economic hardship, became unwilling to enter into overseas involvement that may prove expensive.
The contention over the morality of the American participation in the war shook the public’s belief in the ‘American greatness’ and its ‘unique destiny.’[17] According to Roger Whitcomb, ‘morality became the reference point of uniqueness; Americans were simply “better” than the common run-of-the-mill peoples of the world’[18] US foreign policy is supposed to embody the principle that ‘there is a fundamental difference between right and wrong; that right must be supported, that wrong must be suppressed…’[19] But Marilyn Young points out that ‘consistent poll results [reveal] that an overwhelming majority [of Americans] judge Vietnam War to have been… fundamentally wrong…’[20] Samuel Huntington believes that ‘in Vietnam the United States was using its immense power in ways inconsistent with the principles, the values, the ethical standards of the American people.’[21] The question over the ‘morality’ and ‘beneficence’ of America’s actions were also verified directly by the American people thanks to the largely uncensored media coverage during the war. Finally, the failure to defeat a small nation revealed, as McNamara admitted, that ‘neither [American] people nor [American] leaders are omniscient.’[22] This damage to the national psyche left many people unprepared to fight for an ideology that now rang hollow.
The Vietnam War also caused serious damage to America due the fact that the American leadership both under the Democrat and Republican administrations ‘…failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large scale US military involvement …’[23] Consequently, Americans have become increasingly suspicious of the government and institutions in the post-Vietnam years. Adherents of the influential Reformist School, which holds the war was a mistake, ‘proposed curbing the powers of the President and enhancing those of Congress.’[24] One consequence of this ‘realpolitik evaluation’[25] was the War Powers Act of November 1973 which ‘requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of the US troop deployments, and forces withdrawal of those troops within 60 days unless otherwise authorized by Congress.’[26] Nixon described this development as one of the ‘lingering symptoms of the Vietnam Syndrome.’[27] In his 15 July Address to the Nation, Carter identified the loss of ‘faith, not only in the government, but also in the ability of citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy’ as a ‘national malaise’[28]
Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the credo of non-interventionism as an interpretation of the Vietnam Syndrome went largely unchallenged and many viewed it as a sensible safeguard against future repetitions.
Criteria for intervention:
By the 1980s, however, international positions and forces have evolved to such a degree that interventionist politicians, the majority of whom were conservative, had come to see Americans’ avoidance of intervention as a constraint, rather than a restraint on the scope and objectives of foreign policy.[29] The ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, as Richard Nixon described, was the condition in which the United States was left ‘crippled psychologically.’[30] And the psychological impairment was such that [the United States] ‘was unable to defend its interests in the developing world’ and ‘retreated, like a traumatized individual, into a five-year self-imposed exile…’[31] The former president marked it as ‘a sickness… for which a cure [was] needed so that more strident and unfettered foreign policy [could] once again emerge.’[32] Although Jimmy Carter had characterized America’s loss of confidence in the government as a ‘national malaise’, he had not specifically singled out Vietnam as the cause. Yet he had advocated healing the nation by ‘facing the truth.’[33]
These advocates of interventionism aimed to ‘cure’ the ‘sickness’ by retelling the Vietnam War in a way that justified US actions and by describing the events of the 1960s and 1970s as an aberration, rather than an indication of the need for the reassessment of America and her role in the world. In mid-1980s Nixon stated that in Vietnam the United States ‘never fought a more noble cause’[34] and that America’s ‘armed intervention in the Vietnam War was not a brutal and immoral action.’[35] Reagan caught the theme of a ‘noble cause’ in his address on Veteran’s Day in 1988 where he asked Americans ‘to embrace the gentle heroes of Vietnam, … champions of a noble cause.’[36]
This new perspective, often called the revisionist interpretation, drew on different lessons from Vietnam. For instance, revisionists argued that the United States was defeated and humiliated in Vietnam because not enough force was used. The civilian leaders who, over-concerned with politics and re-election, had curbed the military potential. In this view, the military was forced to operate with ‘one hand tied behind its back’[37] - mistake that by President Bush was not prepared to make in the prosecution of the 1991 Gulf War. Here the main lesson, which Reagan incorporated into his political agenda, was: ‘don’t get in a war unless you intend to win, trust the military men who are trained to know how to achieve victory.’[38]
Both Reagan and Bush spoke of the lessons they drew from the Vietnam experience as if military power had not been used massively in Vietnam. By blaming only the ‘restraint’, if any, on the use of force for the American debacle in Vietnam, those revisionist leaders prevented themselves from ‘facing the truth’ since this hides the real shaping factors behind the Vietnam Syndrome. In his startling mea culpa memoirs, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara identified ‘eleven major causes for our disaster in Vietnam.’[39] These major causes can be confined to five categories- amount to misjudgments of America’s adversaries, a failure to grasp the limitations of military power, misjudgments of the American people, misjudgments of international opinion, and general bad management. McNamara believes that pointing out the mistakes ‘allows us to map the lessons of Vietnam, and… to apply them to the post-Cold War world.’[40]
Despite the fact that the lessons American leaders from Nixon, Carter to Reagan and Bush drew from the Vietnam War were not inclusive enough and despite the possibility that the lessons mapped by McNamara might not have been fully absorbed by post-Vietnam US administrations even if his memoirs had been released much earlier than 1995, one thing is already clear: the Vietnam Syndrome existed both the American people and their leadership. And obviously, this has far-reaching implications.
[1] Simons, Geoff (1998), Vietnam Syndrome: Impact on US Foreign Policy, Macmillan Press Ltd, p.xvii
[2] McCrisken, Trevor B. (2003), op cit, p.38
[3] Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.3
[4] McCrisken, Trevor B. (2003), p.38
[5] Mc Namara, Robert S. (1995), In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, New York: Times Books, p.xvi
[6] Donaldson, Gary A., (1996), America At War Since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, Praeger, p.135
[7] McCrisken, Trevor B. (2003), op cit, p.33
[8] Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.9
[9] Snepp, Frank (1988), Decent Interval: The American Debâcle in Vietnam and the Fall of Saigon, London: Penguin Books, p.469
[10] Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.11
[11] Karnow, Stanley (1984), Vietnam: A History, London: Pimlico, p.16
[12] Mueller, John (1994), Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p.298
[13] Ibid., p.124
[14] Ibid., p.297
[15] Morgan, Iwan W. (1994), Beyond the Liberal Consensus: A Political History of the United States, London: Hurst & Company, p.27
[16] Hodgson, Godfrey (1976), America in Our Time, New York: Double Day & Company, Inc., p.18
[17] Hunt, Michael (1987), Ideology and US Foreign Policy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, chapter 1-2
[18] Whitcomb, Roger S. (1998), The American Approach to Foreign Affairs: An Uncertain Tradition, Westport, CT and London: Praeger, cited in McCrisken, Trevor B. (2003), op cit, p.5
[19] Ibid.
[20] Young, Marilyn, ‘The War’s Tragic Legacy’, in McMahon, Robert J., (1995), op cit, p.638
[21] Huntington, Samuel P. (1981), American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, cited in McCrisken, Trevor B. (2003), op cit, p.27
[22] McNamara, Robert S. (1995), op cit, p.323
[23] Ibid.
[24] Gelb, Leslie H. and Betts, Richard, K. (1979), The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institute, p.362
[25] Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.26
[26] Donaldson, Gary A., (1996), p.133
[27] Cited in Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.27
[28] Carter, Jimmy, op cit
[29] Roper, John, Overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome: The Gulf War and Revisionism, in Walsh, Jeffrey (ed.) (1995), The Gulf War Did Not Happen: Politics, Culture and Warfare Post-Vietnam, Arena, p.29
[30] Nixon, Richard (1986), No More Vietnam, London: W.H.Allen, pp.12-13
[31] Ibid.
[32] Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, p.139, paraphrased by Marlin, Andrew (1993), Receptions of War: Vietnam in American Culture, Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, p.6
[33] Carter, Jimmy, Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals (15 July 1979), cited in Melanson, Richard (1991), Reconstructing Consensus: America Since the Vietnam War, New York: St. Martin’s Press, p.86
[34] Cited in McMahon, Robert J. (1995), op cit, p.610
[35] Ibid., p.611
[36] Ibid., p.614
[37] Cited in Simons, Geoff (1998), op cit, p.24
[38] Cited in Levy, David W. (1991), The Debate Over Vietnam, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, p.172
[39] McNamara, Robert S. (1995), op cit, p.320-3
[40] Ibid., p.324
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