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Did the U.S. Learn Any Lessons From Vietnam?
Did the U.S. Learn Any Lessons From Vietnam?
by
Robert Freeman*
2/1/2015
...The military certainly learned to control the media presentation of its wars, hence the journalistically humiliating “embedded reporters” who only report idolizing stories of American soldiers’ battlefield valor. The result is a suitably ignorant, confused and, therefore, pacified public that can only burble crypto-patriotic vapidities about American prowess and honor in its now unending wars.
The same media, now concentrated in corporate hands, has learned how to easily engineer consent for the endless wars that the empire demands. Witness, for example, the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction that were used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, not unlike the Gulf of Tonkin lie that formed the go-ahead for U.S. escalation in Vietnam. Witness, too, the lies about Bashar al-Assad gassing his own people in Syria, and of Putin being the aggressor in Ukraine—all deceitful public rationales for recent U.S. aggressions.
...But it is the lessons the U.S. did not learn and the behavior it did not change from Vietnam that make its loss there the tragedy that it really is.
The U.S. did not learn the limits of imperial power. Vietnam cost the U.S. $450 billion. It inflicted grave damage on the U.S. economy and even greater damage on the U.S. reputation as a “beacon of democracy” in the world. Iraq alone will end up costing the U.S. some $6 trillion according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. That’s twice the amount needed to make Social Security solvent forever. The cost to the U.S.’s prestige in the world is still being tallied.
The U.S. certainly didn’t learn how to live at peace with other nations. Indeed, without the threat of the Soviet Union to constrain its aggression, the U.S. seems to have become a serial invader and destroyer of other nations, especially Muslim ones. Think Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and more, where the U.S. has killed millions of Muslims, mainly civilians.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the U.S. has become the very agent of falling dominoes that it once so ominously invoked in justifying its aggression in Vietnam. The “domino theory” was a brilliant (because simplistic) device for evoking a cascading series of communist takeovers, from Laos and Cambodia on through Thailand, Burma, and all the way to India. The CIA repudiated the theory internally in 1961, four years before the U.S. escalation, but the public never got the memo.
Today, it is the U.S. that is tipping over dominoes around the world and there’s no end in sight. Its illegal invasion of Iraq ignited the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war that has metastasized into ISIS and that threatens U.S. allies throughout the Middle East. Its destruction of government and all forms of order in Libya has loosed mayhem throughout North Africa, echoing now as Boko Haram in Nigeria. Its backing of the February 2014 coup in Ukraine threatens to unleash civil war in Europe with an outcome that, at its worst, portends World War III....
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/01/did-us-learn-any-lessons-vietnam
by
Robert Freeman*
2/1/2015
...The military certainly learned to control the media presentation of its wars, hence the journalistically humiliating “embedded reporters” who only report idolizing stories of American soldiers’ battlefield valor. The result is a suitably ignorant, confused and, therefore, pacified public that can only burble crypto-patriotic vapidities about American prowess and honor in its now unending wars.
The same media, now concentrated in corporate hands, has learned how to easily engineer consent for the endless wars that the empire demands. Witness, for example, the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction that were used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, not unlike the Gulf of Tonkin lie that formed the go-ahead for U.S. escalation in Vietnam. Witness, too, the lies about Bashar al-Assad gassing his own people in Syria, and of Putin being the aggressor in Ukraine—all deceitful public rationales for recent U.S. aggressions.
...But it is the lessons the U.S. did not learn and the behavior it did not change from Vietnam that make its loss there the tragedy that it really is.
The U.S. did not learn the limits of imperial power. Vietnam cost the U.S. $450 billion. It inflicted grave damage on the U.S. economy and even greater damage on the U.S. reputation as a “beacon of democracy” in the world. Iraq alone will end up costing the U.S. some $6 trillion according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. That’s twice the amount needed to make Social Security solvent forever. The cost to the U.S.’s prestige in the world is still being tallied.
The U.S. certainly didn’t learn how to live at peace with other nations. Indeed, without the threat of the Soviet Union to constrain its aggression, the U.S. seems to have become a serial invader and destroyer of other nations, especially Muslim ones. Think Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and more, where the U.S. has killed millions of Muslims, mainly civilians.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the U.S. has become the very agent of falling dominoes that it once so ominously invoked in justifying its aggression in Vietnam. The “domino theory” was a brilliant (because simplistic) device for evoking a cascading series of communist takeovers, from Laos and Cambodia on through Thailand, Burma, and all the way to India. The CIA repudiated the theory internally in 1961, four years before the U.S. escalation, but the public never got the memo.
Today, it is the U.S. that is tipping over dominoes around the world and there’s no end in sight. Its illegal invasion of Iraq ignited the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war that has metastasized into ISIS and that threatens U.S. allies throughout the Middle East. Its destruction of government and all forms of order in Libya has loosed mayhem throughout North Africa, echoing now as Boko Haram in Nigeria. Its backing of the February 2014 coup in Ukraine threatens to unleash civil war in Europe with an outcome that, at its worst, portends World War III....
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/01/did-us-learn-any-lessons-vietnam
*Robert Freeman is the author of The Best One-Hour History series which includes World War I, The Vietnam War, The Cold War, and other titles.
17 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
It's a good one, worth the time.
