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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Seven years in
hell By Tom Engelhardt
with defeat, can't admit what's
happening to them. Think of Japan in August 1945,
facing a defeat so total that just about every one
of its cities had been burnt to a cinder. Japan's
leaders still couldn't say the word. When the
emperor gave his surrender speech (and his
previously god-like voice was heard for the first
time by ordinary Japanese), he claimed that, well,
things hadn't turned out quite as expected. You
can search that speech in vain
for
an actual acknowledgement of defeat.
So
imagine a country whose fundamentalist leader sits
in an untouched office, where the crisis of the
day seems to be a faltering of the home sales
market or a foot under a stall in a public
bathroom, where the young he's sent to their
deaths have largely come from out of the way
places, where the stock market remains reasonably
buoyant, and the worst casualties are taken on
holiday highways.
The Vietnam experience
is instructive as to why Americans, however
dismayed by another "unwinnable" war, might be
pardoned for having trouble coming to grips with
the nature of that loss. After all, when the last
Americans were lifted off that Saigon US Embassy
roof as North Vietnamese forces entered the
southern capital, the "victorious" country lay in
ruins. Perhaps 3 million of its people (not
counting neighboring Laotians and Cambodians) had
- put in Iraq-era terms - become "excess deaths"
during the previous years of fighting; perhaps
9,000 of the South's 15,000 hamlets and villages
were in ruins; something like 19 million tons of
herbicide had been sprayed on the land by the US
Air Force, and unexploded ordnance was everywhere.
There were an estimated 1 million war widows,
879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people and
200,000 prostitutes. At least 1.5 million farm
animals had been lost and Vietnam's modest
industrial base lay in ruins.
The defeated
superpower had lost 58,000 dead and 300,000
wounded, but what's now called "the homeland" (a
militarized term of our era unknown in the 1970s),
except for some wrecked urban ghetto
neighborhoods, a few dead or wounded students on
university campuses, modest numbers of injured
protesters and policemen, and a dead post-doctoral
physics student in Wisconsin, lay remarkably
untouched. The United States still remained the
preeminent superpower on a two-superpower
planet.
In the recent history of the
reconstruction of war-torn lands, as with occupied
Germany and Japan after World War II (as well as
prostrate Europe via the Marshall Plan), Americans
were supposed to generously offer help in
rebuilding. But the land that now so desperately
needed reconstruction was "the winner"; and
Americans were still at heart a victory culture
facing a losing war. The US war mythology had been
built upon rare mobilizing defeats (think: the
Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, or Pearl Harbor) that
were destined to lead to ultimate victory. But
what to do in the face of ultimate defeat? In one
of the many strange reversals of the post-Vietnam
years, Americans decisively turned their backs on
the victorious land in ruins and began trying to
reconstruct their own country, focusing not on
some devastated environment but on the American
psyche which, it was said, was suffering from
something called the "Vietnam syndrome".
In relation to Iraq, we see a similar
back-turning process underway. American
politicians (mainly Democrats at this point) are
already dumping the blame for Bush's war on Iraqis
living in a devastated land that is now really
little more than a series of bloodied, embattled
religious and ethnic fiefdoms. Already Iraq
by-the-numbers has a Vietnam-like look of horror
to it, complete with more than 2 million of its
own wartime bus (instead of boat) people and its
own monstrous "killing fields". When, in some
relatively distant future, Americans finally do
face reality and "retreat" from Iraq in whatever
fashion, count on a desire to forget it all. But
this time, it may not be so simple.
For a
whole group of analysts and pundits, the words
"Iraq" and "fiasco" have become synonymous, fiasco
standing in (as in the bestselling book by the
Washington Post's Tom Ricks) for how the
post-invasion period was bungled by the Bush
administration and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. But
the essential fiasco lay not in acts, however
blundering and empty-headed, in Iraq, but in the
fundamentalism of a militarized (corporatized and
privatized) cult of armed imperial isolationists,
who blindly drove the country to the edge of an
imperial cliff (or beyond) and were incapable of
changing course even when reality essentially spit
in their faces.
Forty years after Vietnam
ended, the Bush administration made sure that
Americans would have deje vu all over again at
least one last time. In the bargain, the
president, vice president and their top officials
ensured that "the greatest force ... the world has
ever seen" would be a hurricane not of liberation
but of destruction, the geopolitical equivalent of
Katrina.
As it happened, 40 years later,
the planet had changed. American military power
not only would fail (as in Vietnam) to conquer all
before it, but the United States would no longer
prove to be the preeminent force on the planet,
just the last, lingering superpower in a contest
that had ended in 1991.
When, finally -
2010, 2012? - we do pack up, head home from the
Iraqi dead zone, and try to forget, it surely
won't be as easy as it was 40-plus years ago (and,
as the inability of our rulers to eradicate the
"Vietnam syndrome" from their own brains
indicates, it wasn't so easy even then). Whether
or not, as the president claims, the crop of
"terrorists" he's helped to grow will "follow us
home", something will certainly follow us home.
After all, when the troops return, if they do,
they will return to a "superpower" that, in
population life expectancy, has plunged from 11th
to 42nd place in only two decades, and, in infant
mortality terms, now ranks well below many far
poorer countries.
Of course, by then, the
president, vice president and those true believers
still left in his administration will undoubtedly
have entered the true American Green Zone, the one
where a lecture to an audience of admirers can net
you 75,000-100,000 greenbacks; where your story,
no matter who writes it for you, will be worth
millions; where your "library" can be a gathering
place for "scholars"; and the "institute" you
sponsor, a legacy recreating locus. It's a zone in
which the accountant, not accountability, rules.
In the meantime, we live with all the
pointless verbiage, the "debate" in Washington,
the "progress reports" and the numerology of
death, while the Bush administration hangs in
there, determined to hand its war off to a new
president, while the leading Democratic candidates
essentially duck the withdrawal issue and the
bodies pile ever higher.
It's important to
remember, however, that there was once quite
another tradition in America. Whatever the country
was in my 1950s childhood, Americans were still
generally raised to believe that empire was a
dreadful, un-American thing. We were, of course,
already garrisoning the globe, but there was that
other hideous empire, the Soviet one, to point to.
Perhaps the urge for a republic, not an empire
still lies hidden somewhere in the American
psyche.
Let's hope so, because one great
task ahead for the American people will be to
deconstruct whatever is left of the US empire of
stupidity and of this strange, militarized version
of America they live in. Americans can dream, at
least, that someday they will live in a world
where one Defense Department is plenty, where
militarized corporations don't have endless
battlefields on which to test their next
techo-toys, where armies are for the defense of
country, not to traipse the world in a state of
eternal war, and victory is not vested in imperial
conflict on the imagined frontiers of the planet,
but in "progress reports" concerned with making
life everywhere better, saner and more peaceable.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author ofThe End of Victory
Culture. His novel, The Last Days of
Publishing, has recently come out
in paperback. Most recently, he is the author of
Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts
and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
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