American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (43 page)

Nor did the Persian Gulf victory erase the doubts many Americans still felt toward U.S. military intervention overseas. Throughout the decade, wherever the United States committed forces, or thought about doing so—in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo—the same old debates reemerged: Was the objective achievable, were the ends just, the mission widely supported, the costs tolerable? And always the more negative version of the question: Would the United States mire itself in a long, fruitless, bloody war, and do far more harm than good? Would this be “another Vietnam”? Wariness about intervention—particularly for missions regarded by the Pentagon and policymakers as “humanitarian”—led to a foreign policy of inconsistent stops and starts. Missions were either aborted quickly when they turned dangerous (Somalia), delayed until they became less risky (Haiti), avoided altogether (Rwanda), or begun, almost exclusively with air strikes, well after many people had already been killed (Bosnia and Kosovo).

Perhaps the most debated foreign policy question of the era was what, if anything, the United States should do to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia (1992–1995). Both the Bush and Clinton administrations (Republican and Democratic) decried the “tragic” loss of life, but balked at major military intervention until it had continued for almost three years. “
We got no dog in this hunt
,” explained Bush’s secretary of state James Baker. The man who had identified an “economic lifeline” in Iraq and Kuwait (read: oil pipeline) apparently saw no vital resources in the Balkans. The standard defense of U.S. inaction in Bosnia was to label it a “civil war” created by ancient ethnic hostilities and inflamed by bitterly nationalistic tyrants on all sides. As horrible as it was, many said, no outsider could resolve the barbarism unleashed by the dissolution of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War.

Though there was certainly bitter hostility on all sides, as the bloodbath unfolded it became ever more apparent that one side was doing almost all of the killing—the Serbs. According to a 1995 CIA report, Serb forces were responsible for 90 percent of the war crimes in the region and were engaged in a “conscious, coherent, and systematic” campaign to drive out Bosnian Muslims through “
murder, torture, and imprisonment
.”

The Clinton administration considered intervention, and there were forceful voices demanding it. At the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, on April 22, 1993, Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of Hitler’s Final Solution, recalled the world’s indifference to the plight of Jews during World War II, how officials throughout the world understood that millions were perishing in death camps but the “last remnant of Eastern European Jewry” was “not even warned of the impending doom,” and the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto were not “given any support, not even any encouragement.” At the end, Wiesel addressed Clinton directly: “I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall [and] cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! . . .
Something, anything must be done
.”

The Clinton administration was divided. UN ambassador Madeleine Albright made a case for air strikes against Serbian targets. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was opposed. After one of their many debates on the subject, Albright said to the general: “
What are you saving this superb military for
, Colin, if we can’t use it?” Neither party in Congress favored bombing. The most common criticism was that it risked American lives, had little chance of working, and might be the first step toward a Vietnam-like quagmire. As Senator John McCain put it, “I will not place the lives of young Americans . . . at risk without having a plan that has every possibility of succeeding.” For him, the whole thing had the “
hauntingly familiar ring
” of Vietnam. “That’s the way we got our fist into a tar baby that took us many years to get out of and twenty years to recover from.”

In the fall of 1993, the United States received an object lesson in how humanitarian interventions could turn bloody—in Somalia. President Bush, near the end of his presidency, had agreed to join a UN relief effort to deliver food to that famine-stricken country. He was
encouraged by military chief Colin Powell
. Although Powell stridently opposed intervention in Bosnia, he agreed to send 25,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, in part to demonstrate to the incoming Democratic administration of Bill Clinton that the military still had a vital role to play in the world and there should be no thought of dramatically cutting military spending. But Somalia was afflicted by civil war as well as famine. Warlords competed to steal food and supplies. By the time Clinton was president, in 1993, the U.S. military in Somalia was increasingly engaged in military as well as humanitarian duty, especially once it tried to defeat the army of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the warlord it regarded as the most threatening. It was a classic instance of “mission creep,” the tendency of military responsibilities and objectives to expand once forces have been deployed.

On October 3, 1993, Aidid’s forces pinned down a U.S. unit in Mogadishu, and eighteen Americans lost their lives. U.S. forces killed some one thousand Somalis, but what dominated coverage in the United States was the sight of one of the dead Americans being dragged through the streets. A video of the scene was shown on TV in the United States, shocking a nation that was barely aware that U.S. troops were even in Somalia. Clinton quickly decided to pull the plug and withdraw.

The debacle in Somalia—later the subject of a popular book and film called
Black Hawk Down—
certainly contributed to the ongoing hesitancy to act more aggressively in other humanitarian interventions that might prove deadly. However, by 1995,
evidence of genocide
in Bosnia was too great to ignore. That summer, General Ratko Mladic led the Serbian massacre of more than 8,000 people in Srebrenica, most of them men and boys. It was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II. By then some 200,000 people had been killed, tens of thousands of women raped, and about two million people driven from their homes. The United States approved a billion-dollar sale of weapons and supplies through a private contractor to anti-Serbian forces. Their effective resistance, along with intensified NATO air strikes against Serbia, pushed President Slobodan Milosevic to accept a settlement (the Dayton Accords).

The most extreme genocide in the 1990s came in Rwanda, where the ruling Hutus carried out a systematic slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Most of the killing took place in April and early May 1994. President Clinton did nothing to stop it. His unwillingness to act upon the oft-quoted lesson of the Holocaust—“never again”—was hardly unprecedented. As Samantha Power points out in
A Problem from Hell,
“nonintervention in the face of genocide” has been the “consistent policy” of the United States. “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.” So U.S. inaction in Rwanda was not simply a product of the Vietnam syndrome or a reflection of post–Cold War apathy toward global problems, but a common pattern that stretches back to the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I.

Yet the memory of Vietnam did provide a language and rationale for looking away from the unspeakable evidence that hundreds of thousands of Africans were being hacked to death with machetes. As was true throughout the period 1975–2001, policymakers were intensely concerned about the potential loss of American troops. Just as the battle in Mogadishu raised fears that Somalia could become “another Vietnam,” President Clinton was concerned that
Rwanda could become “another Somalia
.” On May 4, after hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had already been murdered, President Clinton was asked about the genocide (a term the administration avoided using): “Lesson number one is, don’t go into one of these things and say, as the U.S. said when we started in Somalia, ‘Maybe we’ll be done in a month because it’s a humanitarian crisis.’”

Since neither the media, Congress, nor the public pushed hard for intervention to stop the butchery, the Clinton administration felt no obligation to take the lead. Inaction was justified as the unavoidable response to
public
apathy. When a small delegation from Human Rights Watch visited the White House to plead for intervention, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake said: “If you want to make this move, you will have to change public opinion.
You must make more noise
.”

When the slaughter was over, the United States finally dispatched troops to help refugees streaming from Rwanda. Ironically, the bulk of those refugees were Hutus—the group that had perpetrated the genocide. They were fleeing the country because Tutsi rebels under Paul Kagame had finally ended the genocide and seized the government. American troops were on the ground delivering food and medicine to the Hutu refugees. Even then, U.S. leaders were obsessed with preventing U.S. casualties. “Let me be clear,” Clinton said on July 29, 1994. “Any deployment of United States troops inside Rwanda would be for the immediate and sole purpose of humanitarian relief, not for peacekeeping.
Mission creep is not a problem here
.” Special Forces captain Dave Duffy echoed the president. “
We’re here to help
,” Duffy said, “but not at any cost to the American soldiers.”

In the quarter century after the Vietnam War, American casualties were indeed kept low, despite numerous military interventions. Yet in those same years the foreign body count soared. Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops and civilians were killed by U.S.-sponsored military interventions, either directly by American troops or by proxy. Untold others died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. Public opposition to U.S. policy was frequently found in public opinion polls but was not powerful enough to challenge the fundamental priorities of America’s civilian and military commanders.

The most important priority of all was to maintain U.S. military supremacy throughout the globe. To bolster that commitment, every administration expressed its faith in American exceptionalism. U.S. global power was justified because it would be used only as a force for good. That was the unquestioned creed of the nation’s leaders. President Clinton’s second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, described her faith in American exceptionalism most succinctly: “
We are the indispensable nation
,” she said. “We stand tall. We see further.”

If U.S. policies caused suffering, or failed to stop it, they were defended as necessary or well intentioned. The worst that could be conceded is that they were sometimes based on incomplete information. That was the gist of Clinton’s hedged apology to Rwanda. “All over the world,” he said, “there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who
did not fully appreciate
the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

No such regret was expressed in response to the horrible humanitarian crisis created by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s. According to a study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, as many as
576,000 Iraqi children
may have died as a result of the Security Council sanctions pushed by the United States. In 1996, on
60 Minutes
, Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright about the sanctions: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright’s response: “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think
the price is worth it
.”

Our nation is the greatest force for good in history.

—President George W. Bush, August 31, 2002

If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid.

—President Barack Obama, April 16, 2013

W
HEN
THE
LAST
U.S. combat troops finally pulled out of Iraq in December 2011, most Americans felt little relief. More than 60 percent of the public had opposed the war since 2006, yet their opinion seemed to count for nothing. Even when they elected a new president in 2008 who had been among the war’s first critics, it took Barack Obama another three years to find an exit. And so the war that began in March 2003 with “shock and awe” ended almost nine years later in head-shaking silence. No one could be confident that the United States had left behind anything but a wrecked and divided country.

As President Obama slowly withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, he added 35,000 more to Afghanistan, the war he always said was necessary and just, the land where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had once had their most important bases. But by the time Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, bin Laden and most al-Qaeda members had long since departed and others were vying to divide and control the country. The United States remained, struggling to defend an unpopular government against a seemingly endless insurgency.

Then on May 2, 2011, the White House announced that a team of navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. To some, it felt like the first moment of closure in the long, disastrous decade since the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001. But the killing of bin Laden changed little. The United States had been attacked by stateless enemies with the ability to organize and recruit anywhere in the world. In response to that threat, President George W. Bush declared global war, the bluntest possible instrument to use against borderless criminals who lacked a standing army. President Obama believed he found in drone warfare and special operations a more surgical approach, but it only succeeded at extending the global war to more countries with no evidence that the United States or the world was safer because of it.

Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan continued, and
the news got no better
. In early 2012, just after the United States had finally withdrawn from Iraq, a series of stories once again raised troubling questions about the morality and justice of America’s use of military force. First, in January 2012, a video surfaced showing four U.S. Marines in combat gear laughing as they urinated on Afghan corpses. In February 2012, six American soldiers burned at least a hundred copies of the Koran as part of an effort to destroy some two thousand books the military deemed “suspicious.” The book burning sparked a week of deadly riots. In March 2012, a U.S. soldier went into two Kandahar villages in the early morning and murdered sixteen civilians, most of them women and children. And then, in April 2012, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division posed for photos as they held up the severed legs of a suicide bomber.

So many similar stories had piled up over the previous decade, it was hard to believe that anyone would claim that they were only the misdeeds of a “few bad apples” that said nothing of significance about the nation as a whole or its foreign policy. Yet that is precisely what the Obama administration claimed. In response to the Kandahar massacre the president said: “We are heartbroken over the loss of innocent life. . . . It’s not who we are as a country and it does not represent our military.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton read from the same script: “Like many Americans I was shocked and saddened by the killings of innocent Afghan villagers this weekend. . . .
This is not who we are.”

As for the Koran burnings? “This is not who we are,” commented
General John Allen
. And when American troops smiled for photographs while holding enemy body parts, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: “This is not who we are, and what we represent.” Whatever the revelation—atrocities in the field, torture in secret prisons, government sanction for abuses of rights at home and abroad—the mantra is always the same: evildoing is the work of our enemies alone.

Things looked like they might take a new turn in May 2012, when Defense Secretary
Panetta went to Fort Benning
to give a major speech. A military spokesman said he wanted to respond to “recent isolated incidents of misconduct and ethical lapses in judgment.” In fact, however, Panetta made no specific reference to the pissed-upon corpses or murdered civilians. Nor did he take command responsibility for any crimes or abuses, or express remorse for the harm done to Afghanistan. In front of thirteen thousand soldiers of the Third Infantry Division’s Heavy Brigade Combat Team (the Hammer Brigade), Panetta devoted almost all of his speech to praising the troops—their “vigilance and honor” and their “very courageous” willingness to put their “lives on the line.” These blandishments were met with many cheers and “Hoo-ahs!”

Near the end Panetta pointed to the “challenges ahead.” Although “our enemies are losing on the battlefield,” they “will seek any opportunity to damage us. In particular, they have sought to take advantage of a series of troubling incidents that have involved misconduct on the part of a few.”

That brings me to the last point I want to make. I need every one of you . . . to always display the strongest character, the greatest discipline and the utmost integrity. . . . I know that you are proud, proud to wear the uniform of your country and that you strive to live up to the highest standards that we expect of you. But the reality is that we are fighting a different kind of war and living in a different kind of world than when I was a lieutenant here at Fort Benning. These days it takes only seconds—seconds for a picture, a photo, to suddenly become an international headline. And those headlines can impact the mission that we’re engaged in. They can put your fellow service members at risk. They can hurt morale. They can damage our standing in the world, and they can cost lives. I know that none of you—none of you deliberately acts to hurt your mission or to put your fellow soldiers at risk. You are the best.

Panetta’s main point is that “misconduct” by U.S. troops hurts
America.
When U.S. troops defile the foreign dead, or commit atrocities, those acts damage
our
morale,
our
mission,
our
reputation, and further endanger
our
troops. We are the primary victims. Panetta does not tell the troops that war crimes are morally wrong. Indeed, the crimes themselves were not even his focus. His concern is the photographic evidence of them that appears in the media. The enemy will “take advantage” of those stories to “damage” the United States. Panetta’s implicit message boils down to this: Don’t commit war crimes, because you never know when someone might take a picture of it to make us look bad.

For a quarter century after the Vietnam War,
the military’s media management
and censorship effectively screened out the most troubling images of American warfare from mainstream coverage. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, the most commonly viewed images featured American high-tech weapons, not their victims—smart bombs rocketing down chimneys, but no pictures of the wreckage when they landed. Photographers like Peter Turnley (
The Unseen Gulf War
) and Kenneth Jarecke (
Just Another War
) show unsanitized scenes of slaughter, but very few Americans saw them. Had some of those images been on the front pages of American newspapers, they might have become as iconic as the best-known photographs of the Vietnam War era—the self-immolating monk in Saigon (1963), the pistol-to-the-temple street-corner execution (1968), the trench of murdered civilians in My Lai (1968), the student shot dead at Kent State University (1970), the naked girl burned by napalm, running down a highway (1972).

It was only after 9/11 that the public began again to see a new round of horrifying photographs from American war zones. As Leon Panetta well understood, cell phones and the Internet now made it virtually impossible to block the distribution of damning information and images. In 2004, for example, Americans saw pictures taken by U.S. soldiers serving as guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Many of the photos show the guards smiling and hamming it up as they abuse and degrade prisoners. One photo shows a young American woman, Private Lynndie England, standing next to a line of naked male prisoners with bags over their heads. The men have been ordered to masturbate. England looks directly at the camera with a half smile and a cigarette jutting out the side of her mouth. She is using one hand to point at a prisoner’s genitals and the other to give a thumbs-up.

Investigations revealed
that U.S. guards beat and sodomized prisoners with broomsticks and phosphoric lights, forced them to eat out of toilets, slammed them against the wall, urinated and spat upon them, made them wear female underwear, led them around on leashes, made them sleep on wet floors, attacked them with dogs, poured chemicals on them, stripped them naked and rode them like animals.

In response to the Abu Ghraib photographs, President George W. Bush said, “What took place in that prison does not represent
the America that I know
. The America I know is a compassionate country.” But, in fact, Bush opened the door to just such behavior when he signed a memorandum on February 7, 2002, waiving U.S. adherence to the Third Geneva Convention, which guarantees humane treatment to prisoners of war. The memo asserted that al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees were exempt from such protections. In practice, the military and CIA used that authorization to justify the use of torture on any of its captives, even those who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. An additional series of memos produced by the Bush administration explicitly sanctioned torture. Just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, wrote a memo concluding that federal laws against
torture, assault, and maiming
would not apply to the overseas interrogation of terror suspects.

Top officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director George Tenet may have shielded President Bush from detailed information about the worst U.S. practices, but the president clearly gave general sanction to torture (including the forced near-drowning called waterboarding) and “extraordinary rendition” (the kidnapping of suspects and removal to secret foreign prisons for interrogation and torture). These policies explicitly violated long-established U.S. and international law. More than that, they fundamentally contradicted a core principle of American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States adheres to a higher ethical standard than other nations.

That claim had been violated throughout U.S. history, and ever more routinely during the Cold War when American-backed coups, assassinations, torture, and death squads were all common items on the nation’s foreign policy résumé. In 1954, the famous general James Doolittle advised the Eisenhower administration that the Cold War required the United States to adopt “fundamentally repugnant” measures to fight its “implacable enemy.” He warned, “
There are no rules in such a game
. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle was preaching to the choir. Yet in those years the repugnant methods were never publicly acknowledged. The Vietnam War exposed them for all to see.

Even so, until the post-9/11 period, American officials continued to insist that the United States only resorted to military force in response to clear-cut acts of aggression by foreign forces. That wasn’t true—the U.S. had many times acted as a preemptive, unilateral aggressor. But its stated policy never openly sanctioned the right to initiate war in the absence of hostile actions against the United States, its citizens, or allies. George Bush changed all that. With his “Bush Doctrine”—the policy of preemptive warfare—the United States claimed an “
inherent right
” to attack anyone anywhere in the world deemed by the government to pose an “imminent threat” to American security. Bush reserved to the United States the right to wage war merely in
anticipation
of
potential
hostile acts by others.

By the time the Abu Ghraib photos became public in the spring of 2004, the idea that Iraq had posed an “imminent threat” to the United States was completely discredited. The primary pretext of the war—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use against us—proved to be utterly false. There were no WMD in Iraq. Nor was there any evidence to support the Bush administration’s other major pretext for war—that there was a “
sinister nexus
” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was none. Iraq had nothing to do with the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001.

After the rapid toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003, Iraq descended into chaos. The U.S. occupation failed in every possible way. There was massive looting, disorder, displacement, unemployment, and human suffering—all played out in a wrecked country with no clear plan for establishing security and reconstruction. The United States demobilized the entire Iraqi military, leaving 500,000 armed men unemployed and angry. They formed the basis of a growing anti-U.S. insurgency that escalated radically in the year after President Bush stood on the deck of the
Abraham Lincoln
(May 1, 2003) in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner to declare the end of major combat. In fact, the war had only just begun. In the next year the insurgency intensified. The number of attacks on U.S. forces multiplied month by month. The insurgency was soon accompanied by a bloody civil war between Iraqi religious factions. U.S. troops were given the impossible task of creating order out of
the chaos that U.S. policies had created
.

Through it all, both the Bush and Obama administrations were desperate for any sign of good news, or at least some appeal to patriotism that might quiet dissent. In April 2004, just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was exposed, the Bush administration believed it had found the ultimate example of patriotic sacrifice to honor and exploit—the death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman. Tillman had dropped out of a successful career in the National Football League to volunteer for military service. He had been so profoundly moved by the devastating losses of 9/11 that he was willing to forgo millions of dollars, in the prime of his athletic life, to fight for his country. On April 23, 2004, Tillman was killed in Afghanistan after already serving a tour in Iraq. On May 3, ESPN broadcast Pat Tillman’s entire memorial service, with tributes from NFL players, coaches, and national figures like John McCain. One after another, they honored Tillman for his heroic service and for saving fellow Rangers in the face of hostile fire from the Taliban.