American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (41 page)

The force of the explosion lifted the entire structure into the air and sheared the thick supporting columns. The blast threw some bodies fifty yards away from the site. “
I haven’t seen carnage like that since Vietnam
,” said marine spokesman Major Robert Jordan after emerging from the rubble, his forearms smeared with blood. The final death count: 241 American troops, nearly as many as were killed eight years later in the entire Persian Gulf War of 1991.

In the wake of that devastating attack, it would not have been surprising to hear President Reagan announce a major military escalation—retaliatory air strikes, increased troops, a resolute commitment to erase the threat posed by the radical jihadists responsible for the truck bombing. After all, Reagan had often promised just such a response. Early in his presidency, welcoming home American hostages from Iran, he declared: “
Let terrorists be aware
that when the rules of international behavior are violated, our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution.” Surely he would not tolerate this wanton attack on U.S. troops who had been sent to Lebanon as “peacekeepers.” There could hardly be a more heart-wrenching pretext for war—far more compelling than the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, which did not produce a single U.S. casualty but led Congress to give LBJ a blank slate for escalation.

But the president did not call for escalation. Nor did the nation cry out for it. In fact, within a few months, Reagan did what no Vietnam-era president could bring himself to do—he simply withdrew the troops. This was the same president who claimed that American leaders were “afraid” to let U.S. troops win in Vietnam, that they had no “determination to prevail.” But in Lebanon at least, it seemed evident that Reagan was himself hamstrung by the Vietnam syndrome. When it came to further jeopardizing American lives, it turned out that Reagan shared the broad national reluctance to enter what might become “another Vietnam.”

Reagan had once advocated intervention in Lebanon, believing that U.S. forces would be embraced as neutral peacekeepers; that they were only there to keep warring factions apart and help establish a cease-fire in a nation that had been ravaged by war since 1975. In fact,
U.S. “neutrality” was compromised
from the outset by its alliance with Israel, the nation that had recently invaded Lebanon, launched devastating bombing strikes on Beirut, and been complicit in the Christian Phalangist slaughter of more than eight hundred unarmed Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Furthermore, the CIA had long supported the Christian government, and well before the Beirut barracks bombing, so too would the U.S. military. The USS
New Jersey
fired shells from its sixteen-inch guns on Islamic settlements around Beirut. These gigantic missiles each weighed 2,700 pounds—“the size of Volkswagens” was how the navy liked to describe them. They were capable of destroying an area the “size of a football field” and were notoriously inaccurate. In his memoir, Colin Powell wrote, “When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target: the exposed marines at the airport.”

American forces were placed in an exceedingly dangerous country with an increasingly complex and contradictory mission. They were surrounded at the airport by forces that regarded them as hostile foreign occupiers. In the six months prior to the barracks bombings, U.S. intelligence agencies had received more than a hundred warnings of
possible car-bomb attacks
on American positions, and the U.S. embassy had already been blown up, leaving sixty-three people dead.

In the wake of the barracks bombing, Reagan did not immediately order a withdrawal. Initially, he pledged to stay the course in Lebanon. Others might be weak of will, but not him. In early January 1984, the president said that House Speaker Tip
O’Neill “may be ready to surrender
but I’m not.” Even a month later, Reagan claimed U.S. policy in Lebanon was “firm and unwavering.”

The very next day, February 7, 1984, Reagan ordered the military out of Lebanon. The White House said the troops had merely been “redeployed” to offshore ships. Reagan used more than euphemisms to avoid looking weak in retreat. As soon as the ground troops were safely offshore, the USS
New Jersey
launched
another firestorm of three hundred shells
on Muslim settlements in the hills overlooking Beirut. Hundreds of people were killed, mostly civilians.

Some especially hawkish policymakers cited the withdrawal from Lebanon as shocking evidence that Reagan and his top advisers were as paralyzed as liberals by the Vietnam syndrome. There was lots of private grumbling about advisers and military chiefs who must have formed a “
Vietnam Never Again Society
.” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was a particular target of hawkish scorn. Weinberger had developed a set of preconditions for military intervention that was eventually taken up more famously by General Colin Powell. What came to be known as the Powell Doctrine asserted that military force should only be used as a last resort in support of vital national interests, with clear political and military objectives, strong public and international support, an overwhelming commitment to win, and a plausible “exit strategy” should things go awry. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, found these conditions outrageous—“
the Vietnam syndrome in spades
, carried to an absurd level, and a complete abdication of the duties of leadership.”

But no syndrome or doctrine would prevent Reagan from ordering a quick, dramatic, and winnable display of American power in Grenada. Just two days after 241 servicemen were killed in Beirut, 6,000 American troops invaded the smallest independent island in the Caribbean—population 91,000. Reagan gave provisional approval for the Grenada invasion before the Lebanon barracks bombing; it was therefore not initially conceived as a way to deflect attention from the disaster. However, the green light for the invasion was issued just hours after the Lebanon attack, and the White House surely welcomed the opportunity to produce a triumphal story as the ashes still smoldered in Beirut.

After Grenada was quickly seized, Reagan justified Operation Urgent Fury as a rescue mission. He claimed that Grenada’s Marxist government posed a dire threat to the safety of eight hundred American medical students on the island. He also insisted that Grenada was
a “Soviet-Cuban colony
being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” Though each of those pretexts proved false, any challenge to them was irrelevant. There was no time for public debate. Even Congress was completely bypassed.

Reagan insisted the attack had to begin without public knowledge or debate because it might jeopardize the rescue of the American medical students. But the White House later conceded that it never had any concrete evidence that the students were in peril. Canadian officials complained that the only danger to foreigners in Grenada came not from the Grenadian government, but from the American invasion. In his memoir, Reagan acknowledged another rationale for secrecy:

Frankly, there was
another reason I wanted secrecy
. It was what I call the “post-Vietnam syndrome,” the resistance of many in Congress to the use of military force abroad for any reason. . . . I suspected that, if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under the strictest confidentiality, there would be some who would leak it to the press together with the predictions that Grenada would become “another Vietnam.” We were already running into this phenomenon in our efforts to halt the spread of Communism in Central America, and some congressmen were raising the issue of “another Vietnam” in Lebanon while fighting to restrict the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.

Here we have a former president justifying his secret, unannounced, unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation in order to avoid public debate about the war’s necessity and legitimacy, and his right to order it. Secrecy also foreclosed the chance for other nations to argue against the invasion before the fact. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of Reagan’s staunchest friends and allies, was furious.

Secrecy was a preemptive assault on the Vietnam syndrome. No one would be allowed time to worry about “another Vietnam.” The war was to be fought, quickly won, and then justified. The people would be presented with a victorious fait accompli. And, for the most part, it worked. Only a thin majority supported the war on its first day. But after Reagan went on TV four days later to explain his rationale and celebrate the triumph,
support climbed to 63 percent
.

In truth,
there was hardly any resistance
in Grenada to the U.S. invasion. Nineteen American troops died, about two-thirds from accidents or friendly fire. If the U.S. military had better maps, intelligence, and preparation, it might have taken the island in a matter of hours. For all the mishaps (including the bombing of a mental hospital that killed 18 people), the island was fully in American hands within three days. Most of the Grenadian People’s Revolutionary Army had little desire to fight. Many quickly tore off their uniforms, put on civvies, and abandoned their posts. Of the 800 Cubans on the island, only about 100 were regular military; the rest were mostly construction workers, many of them middle-aged. At one point 150 Cubans surrendered to just two American Rangers. There were no sustained battles. And the American medical students were safe enough to help patch up 30 wounded Cubans before being whisked away by their “rescuers.” But all this came out later. Journalists were not allowed into Grenada until the island had been taken.

The importance of secrecy to the reassertion of U.S. military power only deepened in the years ahead and it led the White House directly into the Iran-Contra scandal. Faced with a Congress that had twice passed laws (the Boland Amendment) to outlaw military aid to the Contras, Reagan and his staff simply ignored the law. It was violated most egregiously by a “neat idea” formulated by Colonel Oliver North on the staff of the National Security Council. North and his colleagues were desperately searching for ways to obey Reagan’s order to keep the Contras together “
body and soul
” in spite of congressional opposition. North’s ingenious plan was to support the war in Nicaragua (in illegal defiance of Congress) with profits from another illegal activity—the sale of weapons to Iran.

Reagan had decided to sell arms to Iran in hopes that, in return, Iran would put sufficient pressure on Hezbollah to release a handful of American hostages it was holding in Lebanon. The arms-for-hostages deal was a net loser. A few hostages were released, more arms flowed to Iran, but then more hostages were taken. Ultimately, the United States sold more than two thousand TOW missiles to Iran in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, a congressionally sanctioned embargo on arms sales to Iran. The sales also contradicted Reagan’s frequently expressed promise never to make any concessions to the nation that had recently held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.

After the media learned about the arms sales to Iran, Reagan denied that it was true. On November 13, 1986, he said on television: “In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages. . . . W
e did not—repeat, did not
—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”

Conclusive evidence showed that Reagan knew about and approved the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. That alone might have been the basis for impeachment. But once the second half of the story broke—the diversion of the profits from Iran to finance the Contras in Nicaragua—attention shifted to whether or not Reagan had authorized
that
illegal action. No written record of presidential authorization ever surfaced, and he repeatedly denied that he’d had any idea what Oliver North was up to in Nicaragua. Although a majority of Americans believed Reagan was lying about Iran-Contra,
talk of impeachment subsided
, largely because the president remained personally popular and because his final years in office were marked by improved diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and the passage of a nuclear arms reduction treaty.

Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, was elected president despite public concern about his role in Iran-Contra. If he didn’t know anything about Iran-Contra—as he claimed—why was he so out of touch? If he knew about the illegal deals, why hadn’t he opposed them? “
Where was George
? Where was George?” chanted Democratic conventioneers in 1988. After eight years as second fiddle to Reagan, Bush was saddled with a namby-pamby reputation.
Newsweek
called it the “wimp factor.”

Bush won anyway, mostly by claiming that Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis was the real wimp—soft on crime, soft on patriotism, soft on defense. When Dukakis tried to demonstrate his toughness by riding around in a tank wearing a bulky helmet, Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater said he looked like Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
In a TV ad
, Atwater ran the funny images of Dukakis in the tank as a voice-over listed weapon systems the Massachusetts governor had opposed, ending with this: “He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada. . . . And now he wants to be our commander-in-chief. America can’t afford that risk.” Dukakis had once led in the polls by 17 points. On Election Day, he carried only ten states.

As president, Bush was determined to jettison any remaining public doubts about his own toughness. In his one term, he launched the two biggest military operations since the Vietnam War.

In 1989, a few days before Christmas, Bush ordered 25,000 American troops to invade Panama to arrest General Manuel Noriega, perhaps the biggest posse ever deployed to seize a single suspect. It was the first time since World War II that the United States went to war without dressing it in Cold War clothing. The Berlin Wall had fallen two months before, and the Soviet Union was rapidly moving toward dissolution. So this time there was no talk of tumbling dominoes or Communist beachheads. Noriega was identified simply as a drug-dealing tyrant who endangered American lives. His association with drug trafficking had particular resonance at a time when stories about
the “crack epidemic
” in the U.S. and the power of Latin American drug cartels were headline news.