Andrew Bacevich, Why Washington Can't Learn
Posted on January 23, 2022
Who even remembers when President Bush — no, not George W. but his father! — exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!” That was in the wake of Operation Desert Storm (aka the First Gulf War of 1991) and it was indeed true that the U.S. military had kicked Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait with remarkable ease. And yes, visually, it was meant to be opposites day. After all, updated versions of the U.S. helicopters that had evacuated Americans so chaotically from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975 as the long American effort there collapsed now landed Marines successfully on the roof of the American embassy in Kuwait.
But here was the curious thing. More than a decade after that disastrous war and the “syndrome” that went with it had been officially relegated to the history books and — so Washington hoped — oblivion, when President Bush, the son, and his top officials responded to 9/11, almost the first thing that came to their minds was… yep, Vietnam. They instantly started wielding imagery from that ancient war like “draining the swamp” (in this case, of terrorists). And Vietnam would never again truly disappear. Within months of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already fervently denying that the U.S. was trapped in a Vietnam-style “quagmire” in that country. And, curiously enough, that war would be on Iraqi minds, too. Rebellious Shiites in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, for instance, were soon writing “Vietnam Street” on walls along their embattled avenues. (“This is called Vietnam Street because this is where we kill Americans.”)
https://tomdispatch.com/a-very-long-war/
