Tragedy of Iraq pushes trauma of Vietnam War into background
- By Andrew Lam
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 2, 2014
Spectacular failure
Yet for a long time, Vietnam functioned as a benchmark for spectacular American failure. It remained a deep, searing wound. It took some time after the war’s end before movies were made and books sold on the topic.
There was a willful repression of America’s only military defeat, followed by a flourish of Vietnam novels and movies. Together they constructed a mythic reality around the nation’s experience in Vietnam that challenged our old notion of manifest destiny and examined our loss of innocence.
In the 1980s, conservatives began to claim that the Vietnam Syndrome — which they saw as an undesirable pacifism on the part of the American public and the US government — had been “kicked.” Most famous of them all was George Bush Sr., who declared in 1991 after victory in the Persian Gulf War that “the ghosts of Vietnam had been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.”
But Bush Sr. spoke too soon. The glory of winning did not translate into a second presidential term, and Vietnam continued to haunt our national psyche.
When president Clinton withdrew troops from Somalia after 18 soldiers were killed in Mogadishu in 1993, diplomat Richard Holbrooke called it the new “Vietmalia syndrome.”
Lies and deception
What we are learning now with the enormous failure of Iraq — the lies and deception from the George W. Bush White House, the images of Iraqis wailing beside their dead loved ones, the shattered homes, bloody sidewalks, tortured prisoners, body parts in market stalls, burned-out cars, roadside bombs, downed helicopters and horribly maimed American soldiers, the 2 million refugees, the unending sectarian violence — is that tragedy cannot simply be overcome with some military victory, but with another tragedy of equal if not greater proportion.
In another generation, when a future US president sends troops to occupy some intransigent country on a dubious objective, American pundits will most likely ask this familiar question made new: “Will it be another Iraq?”
Indeed, the unfinished violence in Iraq is showing us that the so-called Vietnam Syndrome cannot be “kicked,” as it were, by winning but by losing, as it forces us to face our collective grief and guilt anew.
For all the horrors committed in the name of democracy, and all the soul-searching Americans did after the Vietnam War, we failed to alter the bellicose nature of our nation. And, as if a reflection of our collective amnesia, the only obvious winner is the ever-growing military-industrial complex.
Going back into Iraq is an option unimaginable to the American public, and suicidal for any sitting president.
But what will we do if the war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims engulfs the Middle East? How do we reconcile with the lives imperiled by our direct intervention? What moral obligations do we have toward other nations that went up in flames due to our meddling?
Impersonal karma
Carl Jung, who made great inroads into man’s collective psyche, once noted, “It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.”
That observation can be applied to the fate of nations, as well. For a country unable to confront and reconcile with its own heart of darkness is a country fated to repeat acts of barbarism.
A war is waged, then there follows a period of reckoning. But then, like clockwork, amnesia settles in. And another war, and along with it, new tragedies would begin.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” and “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” His latest book, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a short story collection, was published in 2013 and won a Pen/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2014 and was a finalist for the California Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
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