Unforgettable Vietnam
Gitlin, Todd
THE AFTERLIFE of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic...
...It would be useful for the media to devote to Vietnam one ten-thousandth of the attention lavished upon greatest hits lists...
...In this, he is the counterpart of maximal interventionists who want, like George Bush pere, to "kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...
...TODD GITLIN'S most recent book is the novel Sascrifice...
...It is probably inevitable that memories of unique events, especially traumatic ones, harden under the pressures of history into precedents and prototypes...
...In the meantime, Ho is Mao is Stalin...
...Although there is plenty of blame to distribute, surely the moral statute of limitations on American responsibility has not run out...
...Toward this end—as a reminder of the need for an alternative to great-power mania— the specter of Vietnam may perform its last useful service...
...With the melting away of the cold war—and therefore the symbolic meaning of Vietnam—there remains some need for an ordering principle in the world, to set limits to tyranny exercised within national boundaries, particularly if there is no plausible alternative to the use of outside force...
...Americans may not be the most ethnocentric of peoples but we are surely not the least ethnocentric either...
...Such a visit would surely be healthy for Americans and probably also for the Vietnamese...
...for all the symbolic deployments of one or another "Vietnam" as markers of American manhood, or treachery, or error, few Americans know more than a cliché or two about the place that three American presidents found to be worth devastating in the name of historical good...
...I fail to see why an absolute "no" should be the automatic cry of the left or of veterans of the movement against the Vietnam war...
...Regardless of how one evaluates radical and liberal criticisms of the cold war, one thing that strikes me is Lind's nostalgia for the glory days when particular characteristics of countries could be dispensed with...
...Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence of the actual Vietnam, or rather, actual Vietnams, places and people who make up a country that lives apart from metaphorical meanings in American minds...
...Wherever possible, therefore, a post-Vietnam president fights weekend wars, like Reagan in Grenada and Libya, and Bush in Panama...
...Their well-being ought to be a matter of interest to an American president looking for legacies...
...One intellectual stratagem is to revive the great game of dominoes...
...Since his conclusions are preset, Lind does not feel required to explore the real Vietnam...
...But there is no alternative...
...The actual Vietnam is, of course, the place where some two to three million Vietnamese died in an unwarranted, disgraceful war, and where much physical injury persists...
...Or, say, the Soviets turning the tide at Stalingrad— not that the latter analogy would please Lind...
...Like Bush—before he transformed Desert Shield into Desert Storm—he tolerates a congressional debate that confers, if not quite a declaration of war, then a certain political mandate...
...In particular, there are the many victims of Agent Orange and other gruesome weapons of war to whom the United States owes assistance...
...He wants his cold war all of a piece...
...Pending that glad day when an international constabulary can resist genocide and other UNFORGETTABLE VIETNAM crimes against humanity, it falls to improvised alliances, especially regionally focused ones, to take cross-border action when peaceful means are exhausted...
...So some knowledge of the actual Vietnam would be fitting...
...Some of the American left, with its heavier burden of symbolic Vietnam, do not either...
...He aims to conquer Vietnam by enlisting its specter in a retroactive crusade...
...or sneaky proxy wars, like Reagan 48 DISSENT / Spring 2000 in El Salvador and Nicaragua...
...Sometime in the next century—before a war fought with weapons of mass destruction, if we are lucky—such a force needs to come into being...
...Some do not...
...The United States, by dint of its military might, is likely to be central to such alliances, and to be both loved and hated for it...
...The only thing that mattered about dominoes was which of two possible positions they came in: vertical (good, free) or horizontal (bad, unfree...
...It is reported, I hope accurately, that President Clinton wants to visit the actual Vietnam during his last year in office...
...Southeast Asia is Korea is Germany...
...He is haunted by the fates of presidents who were ruined by Vietnam directly (Johnson) or in a paranoid spasm against the antiwar movement (Nixon...
...Duck no difficult questions...
...So Vietnam has proved to be a cautionary ghost, a useful guardian for a country possessed of unsurpassed power and a pronounced tendency toward false innocence...
...A whole-hearted "realist," Lind knows well that the United States was not fighting for freedom or democracy in Vietnam, but only to defeat the Soviet Union and China (the two compose a glutinous mass, as he sees them...
...Maximal interventionists, mainly Republicans, have learned their own lessons from Vietnam, namely: go in big, fast, and overwhelmingly, go in with allies, go in popular, exit fast...
...At the least, we owe some of our precious attention to the society of living Vietnamese...
...There are also the here-and-now Vietnamese working in often miserable factories making shoes for Nike and other American companies...
...In this setting, which is not the best of all possible settings but is the only one that exists, a Vietnam-inspired "No" to all American intervention will amount to a vote of confidence in local despots...
...It adds: caution, yes...
...He is untroubled by a myriad of facts challenging the coherence of American rationales, facts that historian Fredrik Logevall deploys in a worthy, far bulkier (but far more absorbing and careful) scholarly work that received little attention last year, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam...
...The better response: let's look at the options...
...Like George H. W. Bush in Kuwait and Bill Clinton in Kosovo, he assembles an alliance of magnitude, and seeks, if possible, sanctions by the UN Security Council...
...If we accept this—and how can a believer in human rights not accept it?—then we must also accept the material consequence...
...Yet useful specters can also be overly influential, like the specter of Munich hovering over Vietnam itself...
...The ultraleft is haunted by its own Vietnam specter, and takes Vietnam as a symbol of the irredeemability of America, the finality of its wickedness, its absolute taint...
...Instantly, the president finds himself staring at a topography of quagmires and slippery slopes...
...With a hop, skip, and jump DISSENT / Spring 2000 47 UNFORGETTABLE VIETNAM through the scholarship—the stuff he likes no less breezily than the stuff he doesn't—Lind is an energetic but indiscriminate debunker, as fierce with his cheap shots as with his more considered ones...
...I IND WANTS "Vietnam" to be a usable symbol of the excellence of American armed I force...
...or he withdraws troops at the first sign of a shoot-out, like Reagan in Lebanon and Clinton in Somalia...
...For everyone else, the specter of Vietnam is like the ghost of the senior Hamlet: remember me...
...Tell no lies...
...Odds are that the uses and misuses of symbolic Vietnam will continue...
...DISSENT / Spring 2000 • 49...
...As Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor show, along with the negative example of Rwanda (which illustrates the cost of inaction), there arise strong claims for the use of international force...
...nothing begins to make a territory real to the American consciousness—that blur at once parochial and ethereal—than for it to become, for one shining moment, the object of the cameras and scribblers that accompany an American president on tour...
...That Vietnam, the subject of much scholarship, is only a pawn in a great game...
...Invoking Vietnam as if it were the preordained conclusion of all foreign-policy arguments past and future rather than a legitimate— and important—caution can be an impediment to wise action...
...An ordering principle is another term for a police force...
...True, the United Nations derives its authority from today's nationstates and some of them have moral statures that are far from impeccable...
...Much of the European left understands this, especially the governing social democratic left in the European Union...
...people will go on fighting over the meanings of huge histories they barely begin to understand...
...Since 1975, the same post-Vietnam objections crop up—objections worth taking seriously— whenever an American president contemplates using military force for any purpose...
...In a tendentious new book that received deferential reviews last fall but royally deserved the thumping it got from Eric Alterman (Dissent, Winter 2000) Michael Lind defends the war as an unavoidable move in an indisputably righteous and retrospectively cleansed cold war...
...As UN secretarygeneral Kofi Annan has proposed, the United Nations would be the most legitimate base for such a force, preferably composed of citizens from nations that cannot reasonably be accused of imperial ambitions...
...People of good will cannot be deaf to them...
...If you like the way it turned out, in his view, you have got to swallow Vietnam, just as, if you like the way World War II turned out, you should be equally glad for the pulverizing of Dresden...
...But that is the rhetorical point: Lind's "Vietnam" is only, and purely, symbolic...
...a place in a proxy war, nothing more...
...The invocation of symbolic Vietnam is not automatically a conclusive response...
...The Vietnam memorial is engraved in stone, but the future is not...
...For all our decades of argument, grief, "healing," and highly selective memory since the last American soldier switched off the light at the end of the tunnel...
...For absolute pacifists, there is no difficulty in a case like Kosovo: war is war is war...
...Hesitation, absolutely...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
