The "Vietnam Effect" in the Persian Gulf War

Abstract

eporting to the Congress our military success in the Persian Gulf, President Bush declared on March 3: We have finally kicked the syndrome. Asked about the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to protect Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, the president insisted in his April 14 press conference that we would not be drawn into another quagmire in Iraq. The words hardly needed to be uttered; from the beginning of our military involvement in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam has been a constant historical referent. The slogan We Support Our Troops helped forge a patriotic consensus (eighty-five percent according to most opinion polls taken in the first week of the ground war) unmatched in U.S. history. That slogan referred explicitly to the War and the cultural memory that the antiwar movement had systematically discouraged, even demoralized, U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. There is little in the actual history of the antiwar movement to support this remembrance, which, like most historical reconstructions, conflates different historical moments. The slogan's implicit negative, We did not support our troops in Vietnam, refers less to isolated incidents of