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Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words -- both eulogies and curses -- have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.
Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by "Vietnamizing" it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as "a noble cause." Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a "syndrome," an unhealthy aversion/a> to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.
A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted that the country had finally "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all." As it turned out, despite the organization of massive "victory parades" at home to prove that this hadn't been Vietnam redux, that war kicked back. Another decade passed and there were H.W.'s son W. and his advisors planning the invasion of Iraq through a haze of Vietnam-constrained obsessions.
W.'s top officials and the Pentagon would actually organize the public relations aspect of that invasion and the occupation that followed as a Vietnam opposite's game -- no "body counts" to turn off the public, plenty of embedded reporters so that journalists couldn't roam free and (as in Vietnam) harm the war effort, and so on. The one thing they weren't going to do was lose another war the way Vietnam had been lost. Yet they managed once again to bog the U.S. military down in disaster on the Eurasian mainland, could barely manage to win a heart or a mind, and even began issuing body counts of the enemy dead.
"We don't do body counts," General Tommy Franks, Afghan War commander, had insisted in 2001, and as late as November 2006, the president was still expressing his irritation about Iraq to a group of conservative news columnists this way: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it." The problem, he explained, was: "We have made a conscious effort not to be a body count team" (- la Vietnam). And then, of course, those body counts began appearing.
Somehow, over the endless years, no matter what any American president tried, The War -- that war -- and its doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of defeat so deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to fully take it in, refused to depart town. They were the ghosts on the battlements of American life, representing -- despite the application of firepower of a historic nature -- a defeat by a small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it simply couldn't be shaken, nor its "lessons" learned.
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was typical at the time in dismissing North Vietnam in disgust as "a little fourth rate power," just as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Thomas Moorer would term it "a third-rate country with a population of less than two counties in one of the 50 states of the United States." All of which made its victory, in some sense, beyond comprehension.
A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility
That was then. This is now and, though the frustration must seem familiar, Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn't noticed -- and weirdly enough no one has -- that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.
If you care to pick a moment when it first headed for the exits, when we all should have registered something new in American consciousness, it would undoubtedly have been mid-2010 when the media decided that the Afghan War, then 8 - years old, had superseded Vietnam as "the longest war" in U.S. history. Today, that claim has become commonplace, even though it remains historically dubious (which may be why it's significant).
Afghanistan is, in fact, only longer than Vietnam if you decide to date the start of the American war there to 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (in place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when American "combat troops" first arrived in South Vietnam. By then, however, there were already 16,000 armed American "advisors" there, Green Berets fighting there, American helicopters flying there. It would be far more reasonable to date America's war in Vietnam to 1961, the year of its first official battlefield casualty and the moment when the Kennedy administration sent in 3,000 military advisors to join the 900 already there from the Eisenhower years. (The date of the first American death on the Vietnam Wall, however, is 1956, and the first American military man to die in Vietnam -- an American lieutenant colonel mistaken by Vietnamese guerrillas for a French officer -- was killed in Saigon in 1945.)
Of course, massive U.S. support for the French version of the Vietnam War in the early 1950s could drive that date back further. Similarly, if you wanted to add in America's first Afghan War, the CIA-financed anti-Soviet war of the mujahideen from 1980 to 1989, you might once again have a "longest war" competition.
The essential problem in dating wars these days is that we no longer declare them, so they just tend to creep up on us. In addition, because undeclared war has melded into something like permanent war on the American scene, we might well be setting records every day on the Eurasian mainland -- if, for instance, you care to include the First Gulf War and the continued military actions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq which, after 2001, blended into the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, its invasion of Afghanistan, and then, of course, Iraq (again).
For those who want a definitive "longest," however, the latest news is promising. Obama administration negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government are reportedly close to complete. The two sides are expected to arrive at a "strategic partnership" agreement leaving U.S. forces (trainers, advisors, special operations troops, and undoubtedly scads of private contractors) ensconced on bases in Afghanistan well beyond 2014. If such official desire becomes reality, then the Vietnam record might indeed be at an end.
What's important, however, isn't which war holds the record, but that media urge in 2010 to anoint Afghanistan the titleholder for pure long-term futility. In retrospect, that represented a changing-of-the-guard moment.
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