American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (42 page)

But Bush offered no opportunity to debate the merits of waging a war to capture Noriega. As with Grenada, the invasion was launched in secrecy. Bush announced it only after it had begun. “I have no higher obligation than to safeguard the lives of American citizens,” the president explained. “That is why I directed our armed forces to protect the lives of American citizens in Panama, and to bring General Noriega to justice in the United States.” Panama’s military had shot and killed an American lieutenant. Bush did not mention that the lieutenant and three other American servicemen had been fired on only after running through a legitimate military roadblock near Noriega’s headquarters. Nor did Bush say why a massive invasion with bombing strikes was a just or necessary means to avenge a single death or to capture a single man.

Nor did the media offer much critical analysis. Reporters sometimes pointed out that Noriega had once been a U.S. ally, but few challenged the White House claim that Noriega had only recently become a drug-dealing threat to democracy. In fact, Washington had known about Noriega’s drug profiteering, and tolerated it, since George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in the 1970s. The CIA had been paying Noriega more than $100,000 a year since 1972, and the ties deepened in the early 1980s as the United States sought Panama’s support for counterrevolution throughout Central America.
Because Noriega allowed the Contras to use Panama
as a training ground and staging area for attacks on Nicaragua, the United States turned a blind eye to his many shortcomings. By 1987, when Reagan and Bush began to denounce Noriega, his drug-dealing had actually declined, and his once tyrannical control of Panama had weakened. The real concern in Washington was that Noriega was no longer a trusted supporter of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua and El Salvador.

But it was hardly inevitable that the United States would invade Panama. Reagan’s top military advisers had cautioned against military action, particularly General Frederick Woerner Jr., chief of the Southern Command, who believed the Panamanians would soon overthrow Noriega themselves. By contrast,
the Bush administration took a more aggressive stance
. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney fired Woerner and replaced him with General Max Thurman, who ordered his thirteen thousand troops in Panama to wear combat fatigues every day and to be on a “war footing.”

In October 1989 an attempted coup against Noriega failed, and Bush faced media criticism for not doing more to support the effort to take down a man the president had increasingly denounced. Once again the media began talking about Bush’s “wimp factor.” Over the next two months, U.S. forces in Panama began engaging in provocative military exercises that were designed, according to some sources, to goad the Panamanian military into hostile responses.

Did Bush invade Panama to demonstrate that he wasn’t a wimp and to improve his domestic political support? Definitive proof is elusive. Presidents rarely leave memos admitting political motives for lethal policies. But there was no denying the positive political outcome. As one headline put it, “
Big Stick Silences Critics
as President’s ‘Timid’ Image Changes Overnight.” The Pentagon’s name for the invasion—Operation Just Cause—was as inflated as the “big stick” force of 25,000 troops. But it was a clever form of branding. As General Colin Powell put it, “
Even our severest critics
would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”

There were no severe critics in the major news outlets. Coverage focused on the operational challenges of the mission, not its justice. “
Have we got Noriega yet
?” was a question frequently asked by journalists who imagined themselves full partners in the nationalistic “we.” Another common question: “How many troops have we lost?”

The American death toll was relatively small—twenty-three killed—and those losses received careful media coverage. Panamanian casualties were generally ignored. When mentioned at all, Panamanian deaths were usually put at a few hundred. That was roughly accurate for the military deaths, but the burned and bombed-out civilian neighborhoods suffered a far greater loss of life—
at least three thousand people
according to the Commission for Human Rights in Panama.

Whatever the consequences in Panama, the Bush administration was thrilled by the impact of the invasion on domestic politics. It was, they believed, a major antidote in overcoming the Vietnam syndrome. According to Secretary of State James Baker III, Panama broke “the mindset of the American people about the use of force in the post–Vietnam era,” and thus “established
an emotional predicate
that permitted us to build the public support so essential for the success of Operation Desert Storm some thirteen months later.”

In fact, the Persian Gulf War proved a very tough sell. For starters, American leaders had never denounced Saddam Hussein as a monster until after he invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. In the prior decade, the Reagan administration had actually sided with Hussein in the ten-year-long war he started against Iran. The United States provided Iraq with crucial military intelligence, including the identification of Iranian targets. More than that, U.S. companies were allowed to supply Iraq with the materials necessary to make chemical and biological weapons.
When Hussein used
those WMD to kill tens of thousands of Iranians, and even his own people, the Reagan administration offered only tepid objections.

In July 1990, even as Iraq was massing troops along the Kuwait border, the Bush administration blocked a congressional effort to cut off U.S. economic assistance to Hussein if he did not renounce further use of chemical weapons and attacks on his Kurdish population. Bush Sr. and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney viewed Iraq as a relatively secular source of stability in a tumultuous region. And when U.S. ambassador April Glaspie met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, she offered no warning to Hussein about a possible U.S. military response should he invade Kuwait. Although expressing concern about the buildup of Iraqi troops on its southern border, she added, “
We have no opinion
on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

Only after Iraq attacked Kuwait on August 2, 1990, did the Bush administration define Hussein’s aggression as intolerable. Americans were far from convinced. In a 1996 interview James Baker contradicted his claim that Panama had warmed up the public for another war: “There was very little support in the United States for the idea of going to war in the Persian Gulf.
In fact, it was overwhelmingly opposed
.”

Bush’s denunciations of Saddam Hussein gained little traction, even when he ramped up the rhetoric and compared Hussein to Hitler: “I’m reading a book,” Bush told a crowd at a Republican fund-raiser in October 1990, “a great, big, thick history about World War II. And there’s a parallel between what Hitler did to Poland and what Saddam Hussein has done to Kuwait.” He went on to tell stories about Kuwaiti babies “thrown out of incubators” by Iraqi troops. “So it isn’t oil we’re concerned about. It is aggression.” Later that day, Bush went even further:
“We’re dealing with Hitler revisited
, a totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented in modern times. And that must not stand.”

At least half the public was still unconvinced, despite the sensational story about the murdered babies. There might have been even less support had the public known that the incubator story was phony. It was told by “
Nayirah
,” an anonymous fifteen-year-old girl who claimed to witness the atrocity. She testified in front of a congressional caucus, and the media broadcast it with no corroborating evidence or investigation of the witness. Even Amnesty International was taken in. Only much later, after the war, was the story questioned, and nothing could be found to support it. “Nayirah” turned out to be the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was prepared by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. The Kuwaiti monarchy spent almost $12 million on public relations to convince U.S. citizens to support the war, perhaps the largest foreign propaganda campaign ever launched on U.S. soil. Even so, all the Hitler analogies and incubator stories had failed to gain more than half the country’s support for war.

Secretary of State Baker was so frustrated he contradicted President Bush and said that oil
was
the primary reason the United States should go to war and that it was a good one. “The economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the Gulf and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline,” Baker asserted. “To bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs. If you want to sum it up in one word,
it’s jobs
.”

But many average citizens were still not convinced, especially with pundits suggesting that a war against Iraq might kill 10,000–50,000 Americans. That sounded very much like “another Vietnam” and Bush became obsessed with wiping away that negative association. During a December 1990 press conference, he referred to Vietnam three times in the space of seven sentences: “We are not looking at another Vietnam. . . .
This is not another Vietnam
. . . . It is not going to be another Vietnam.”

That whistling-in-the-dark defensiveness was hardly reassuring. But Bush and the Pentagon made smarter use of the Vietnam legacy by pandering to the postwar myth that soldiers in Vietnam had been held back from victory by all kinds of political restraints. This war would be different, Bush promised. U.S. soldiers would not have to fight “with one hand tied behind their back.” Both the government and the public would give them all the “support” they needed. In the run-up to the war, the Bush administration launched a major “support our troops” campaign. The not-so-subtle message was that anyone who did not support the impending war did not support the troops. Suddenly the nation was wrapped in yellow ribbons, just as it had been during the Iran hostage crisis, and “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers appeared on millions of cars and trucks.

The success of Desert Storm, and the media’s cheerleading coverage, effectively buried the prewar doubts and divisions. Polls showed massive support for what appeared on TV screens as the cleanest, most precise, most bloodless war ever fought. The Pentagon kept the media busy with a constant stream of video pictures showing sophisticated jets and attack helicopters launch computer-guided missiles into convoys and buildings. Commentators gushed over the technological wonder of war. CBS’s Jim Stewart summarized the war’s opening as “two days of almost
picture-perfect assaults
.”

The Pentagon’s management of the media effectively screened out most of the upsetting images of human destruction. But not all—when a U.S. missile killed some three hundred civilians in a Baghdad shelter, viewers saw images of the wounded, dead, and grieving survivors. Yet these grim shots did little to counter the mostly celebratory coverage, and there was not much public concern about civilian casualties. According to one poll,
only 13 percent believed the U.S. military
should be more careful to avoid civilian casualties. The major media frequently praised the military for doing everything possible to avoid “collateral damage” and criticized Iraq for putting civilians in harm’s way and then exaggerating civilian losses. As Bruce Morton intoned on CBS, “If Saddam Hussein can . . . convince the world that women and children are the targets of the air campaign, then he will have won a battle, his only one so far.”

One way the media ignored Iraqi casualties was to speak as if there were only one enemy—Saddam Hussein. “How long will it take to defeat Saddam Hussein?” TV journalists asked. “How badly are we hurting him?” To answer such questions, each network hired retired military brass to instruct the nation on U.S. tactics and military success. The idea of interviewing critics of the war was virtually unthinkable. Tom Brokaw unwittingly exposed the lack of balanced coverage when he interviewed a retired army colonel and then turned to a retired navy admiral with the words “
the Fairness Doctrine is in play
here tonight.” Fairness simply meant including representatives from two military services.

A survey of
878 on-air sources
during the first two weeks of the war found that only one represented a peace group. When antiwar voices were heard, it was typically only the distant chants of outdoor protesters, not the in-studio commentary of critics given time to make their case.

But Bush was right about one thing—Iraq was not “another Vietnam.” In Vietnam, Americans fought for more than a decade; in Iraq, for less than seven weeks (six of them with air strikes only); in Vietnam, 58,000 Americans died; in Iraq, fewer than 300; in Vietnam, the U.S.-backed regime collapsed; in Iraq, the Kuwaiti monarchy was successfully restored; in Vietnam, the public turned decisively against the war and the media followed suit; in Iraq, the media waved the flag and the public rallied around it.

Bush was jubilant over the contrast. The triumph in Iraq, he insisted, had driven off the ghosts of defeat and division still haunting the post-Vietnam American landscape. In fact, Bush sounded as if that was the war’s greatest achievement: “It’s a proud day for America—and, by God,
we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome
once and for all.” A day later he said, “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.”

The celebration proved strikingly short-lived. Most Americans forgot the war as quickly as a made-for-TV movie, which it closely resembled for those who watched it at a safe distance and did not know anyone deployed in the gulf. And the postwar news soon turned negative—Hussein was still in power, brutally repressing Shia and Kurdish rebellions, and the United States was still stuck in a recession despite the fact that the price of oil had settled back down after spiking during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Nor did the “specter” of Vietnam remain buried. It continued to pop up like a multiheaded poltergeist. Despite the heroes’ welcome given returning Gulf War veterans, many of them came home with problems reminiscent of the widespread traumas associated with Vietnam veterans. Eventually more than a third of the 700,000 new veterans were said to suffer from
Gulf War syndrome
—with chronic symptoms including fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, diarrhea, rashes, and post-traumatic stress disorder.