Tom Engelhardt: Name that War
... "Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and, ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle."
So wrote the New York Times' James Risen and David Sanger, quoting more of those faceless officials, in an ominous, front-page piece (G.I.'s and Syrians in Tense Clashes on Iraqi Border) last weekend about U.S. military border-crossings into Syria.
If this isn't the Is-To War, as inelegant as that may sound, I don't know what is. After all, in his most recent Saturday radio address, the President quoted a letter the American military claims to have intercepted on its way from al-Qaeda number-two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Iraq's terrorist of the year, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It seems the al-Qaeda leader and the President agree that we're all working off a version of the same Vietnam-style script in Iraq."The terrorists," said the President,"know their only chance for success is to break our will and force us to retreat. The al Qaeda letter points to Vietnam as a model. Zawahiri says: ‘The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam, and how they ran and left their agents, is noteworthy.' Al Qaeda believes that America can be made to run again. They are gravely mistaken. America will not run, and we will not forget our responsibilities."
There's a long history behind such Vietnam analogies. When the President's father was exulting in the glow of victory in Gulf War I, he claimed that defeat in Vietnam was finally in the past, exclaiming,"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!" How wrong he was. (By then, the Vietnam Syndrome was the way the whole Vietnam experience was summed up -- as if it had been nothing more than a prolonged state of mental aberration. It's worth noting that an Iraq Syndrome has already made its first appearance.)
Above all, the Vietnam War was never banished from the minds of our war planners and policymakers. Even when they were playing an opposites game with Vietnam (as in, for instance, their no-body-bags, no-photos-of-the-American-dead-coming-home policy), Bush administration officials had a clear case of Vietnam-on-the-brain, as did the society they represented. In 2003, while the invasion of Iraq was still ongoing, the historian Marilyn Young commented,"In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."
It came back, of course, because it had never strayed far; nor was this just a matter of the return of images or words in print. When we look back on these years, it will, I suspect, be clearer that Vietnam -- upside-down, inside-out, in reverse -- has driven the American war in Iraq. Thus, when U.S. commanders now send their troops"spilling" across the Syrian border, they do so in"hot pursuit" of insurgents -- another term (from the Risen/Sanger piece) that comes straight out of the Vietnam-era, crossing-the-Cambodian-border playbook.
And it's not just the war makers or the war fighters who have Vietnam on the brain. Even many war opponents seem to be playing by an only half-buried Vietnam script. Take the bloodbath-to-come -- the future Iraqi civil war of catastrophic proportions now featured in endless speculations and in the fears of many antiwar thinkers and activists, a fantasy (which could, of course, become reality) that acts as a constraint on thoughts about any kind of speedy military withdrawal from that country. A similar bloodbath was on the minds of, and a powerful constraint on, opponents of the Vietnam War, who long accepted that an American departure from Vietnam would lead to a terrible bloodbath there. This was a paralyzing fantasy, one which somehow mitigated the actual bloodbath then underway.
Of course, in the bright light of day, if Iraq is Vietnam and Syria is Cambodia, the analogy is a bizarrely unbalanced one. To make the comparison seriously, after all, you would have to start by saying that in Iraq the American foe is far less imposing, but what's immediately at stake is so much more consequential. The force that fought the United States to bloody stalemate (and finally defeat off the battlefield) in Vietnam was formidable indeed -- a regular army as well as a powerful guerrilla movement aided by two world powers, the USSR and China. It was politically unified, well-armed, well funded, and well supported; whereas the force that has so far fought the American military into a state of frustration in Iraq remains comparatively under-armed, fractured and politically at odds, and haphazardly funded; in short, relatively rag-tag. (In a chilling Time magazine piece on a former Baathist who prepares suicide bombers for both jihadist and nationalist organizations, journalist Aparism Ghosh offers this telling passage:"He fears [the jihadists] want to turn Iraq into another Afghanistan, with a Taliban-style government. Even for a born-again Muslim, that's a distressing scenario. So, he says, ‘one day, when the Americans have gone, we will need to fight another war, against these jihadis. They won't leave quietly.'") On the other hand, Vietnam was, from the American point of view, a nowhere, a happenstance at the periphery of a great global struggle, while Iraq is a vast oil reservoir, an essential part of the powering of any future the Bush administration might care to imagine.
Nonetheless, just for the heck of it, let's take seriously the analogy laid out by those anonymous officials quoted in the Risen/Sanger piece. The Bush administration is, as they point out, already engaged in military as well as political actions aimed at"rattling the cage" of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, much as the Nixon administration"rattled the cage" of neutralist Cambodian leader King Norodom Sihanouk (who believed his survival and that of his government lay in looking the other way as North Vietnamese troops manned those"sanctuaries" in his borderlands). In the case of Cambodia, first there were the U.S. covert cross-border missions and black ops; then unofficial"hot pursuit" across that border followed by Richard Nixon's massive, secret, and illegal B-52 carpet-bombing campaign against those borderlands (and beyond); and finally, in 1970, an actual invasion of the already wrecked country (though it was politely referred to as an"incursion").
When it comes to Syria we're obviously not there yet. The clashes remain minor; the air raids haven't started; an American occupation of the Syrian borderlands seems not in the immediate offing. (Of course, it's worth remembering that, on the other side of the border, is something a lot less impressive than the North Vietnamese Army.) Just yesterday, however, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all but threatened Assad's regime with some mix of the above, not just refusing to take any of the President's"options" off the table, but claiming that he would need no authorization from Congress to launch a full-scale attack on Syria. ("[She] said that President Bush would not need to ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iraq's neighbors. 'I don't want to try and circumscribe presidential war powers,' Rice said in response to a question on whether the administration would have to return to Congress to seek authorization to use military force outside Iraq's borders. 'I think you'll understand fully that the president retains those powers in the war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq.'")
It's clear that (in conjunction with the Sharon government in Israel), the Bush administration has long been thinking about destabilizing Assad's regime much as we destabilized Sihanouk's government. So it's worth recalling the outcome in Cambodia. While the long-awaited bloodbath never happened in Vietnam, an unexpected post-war bloodbath did occur in destabilized neighboring Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge rebel movement rose to power in the vacuum left when Sihanouk's government fell -- and then committed acts of mass slaughter for which there is no name ("genocide" being the wrong word when you murder vast numbers of your own people).
The Bush administration already blithely opened a Pandora's box in Iraq. Does it really care to go two for two by ratcheting up the pressure on Assad and then attempting a military-induced regime"decapitation" in Syria? In that void, don't even think about what might emerge -- not to speak of the fact that, under a banner that seems to read,"the Middle East for the Iranians," the Bush administration is clearing away all of Iran's enemies (except, of course, Israel). So this could certainly be labeled the Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For War....
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.