The Uses of Vietnam in the Age of Terrorism

Abstract

DURING HIS HISTORIC TRIP TO VIETNAM in November 2000, President Bill Clinton proclaimed the end of an era. Finally, he asserted in a speech to Vietnamese students at Hanoi's National University, America is coming to see as your people have asked for years-as a country, not a war.1 Indeed, the United States had made bold efforts in the preceding few years to move beyond old animosities and to deal with as it dealt with other Asian nations. In 1994, Washington lifted its 19-year-old trade embargo. A year later, the US normalized diplomatic relations with and opened an embassy. During the process, the president and his congressional supporters contended that the time had come at last to embrace the country as a full participant in the globalizing economy. Clinton's trip to capped this period of economic and political, as well as perceptual and semantic, change. Over the years, Vietnam had become an adjective for most Americans, usually affixed to pejorative words like debacle, or syndrome. Clinton's trip, in the words of famed journalist Stanley Karnow, helped exorcize that ghost.2 could once again be just a place on the other side of the world.For a time, it appeared as though Vietnam was indeed losing some of its radioactivity in American politics and culture. In the 1990s, the United States undertook limited military commitments in Bosnia and Kosovo despite the fact that these undertakings violated one of the allegedly iron-clad lessons of Vietnam: if Washington was going to go to war, it must do so with clear objectives, overwhelming force, and full public backing. Perhaps, it seemed, President George H. W. Bush had been right when he declared at the end of the first Gulf war that America's success had kicked the syndrome once and for all.3 In politics, meanwhile, Americans embraced both the draft-evader Bill Clinton and the former POW John McCain. It appeared that the country-or at least much of it-might be letting go of the passions of the era as it entered a new post-Cold War period with new national priorities.In popular culture, too, things seemed to be changing. Hollywood's lone major foray into the War around the turn of the millennium-MeI Gibson's insipid We Were Soldiers Once-departed sharply from earlier movies by trumpeting the manly exploits of American GIs in a context barren of political meaning. The most powerful cautionary tale dealing with American foreign adventures, Black Hawk Down, dealt not with but with the disastrous US intervention in Somalia in 1992 and 1993. Meanwhile, Americans celebrated their victory in the Cold War by rediscovering the greatest generation and the founding fathers, heroes who helped the country feel safely embedded within a long-term pattern of triumph and moral supremacy. Within this resurgent narrative of a victorious and righteous America, seemed increasingly an anomalous blip on the historical radar screen, a lost battle in a war that ultimately resulted in a win for the forces of good. The September 11th attacks merely intensified the trend. With the nation under assault from abroad, old Vietnam-era divisions seemed irrelevant. Americans of all stripes banded together in a fight against terrorism seen as unquestionably necessary and just.And then came the Iraq War. The first, so-called combat phase went well enough. Within a few weeks of crossing into Iraq, the US military had captured Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein. On 1 May 2003, a triumphant George W. Rush swooped onto the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and, in a now-infamous display of bravado, the navy proclaimed mission accomplished. Nothing, of course, was further from the truth. There remained the huge tasks of rooting out lingering armed resistance, rebuilding the Iraqi economy, establishing a viable post-Baathist political order, managing a nightmarish array of ethnic and religious rivalries, and winning the hearts and minds of the local population-problems that were not easily solved by the prodigious firepower and mobility that had brought the United States early success. …