Philosopher Georg Hegel declared the only lesson of history is that we do not learn from history.
As the US prepares for the final pullout from Afghanistan and what will soon follow as the fall of the country to the Taliban an entire generation of us wonder if this is not Deja vu all over again and that what we thought we had learned from the Vietnam War proved to be a fleeting lesson. For those of my generation who grew up during or served in the Vietnam War a thousand images cross our mind. A naked girl scurrying away from Napalm, the execution of Nguy n Văn Lém, American flags draped on caskets in rows, a woman next to a dead body at Kent State University. But for many it is helicopters evacuating the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 as the city and South Vietnam fell to the Vietcong. The domino we fought so hard to prevent from falling, costing America 58,200 lost military lives hundreds of thousands wounded, and tens of billions of dollars, fell, nonetheless.
In
college we read Francis FitzGerald’s Fire
in the Lake and supposedly
learned that we never were going to win the Vietnam War with guns alone. Napalming a nation to death was not going to
win over the hearts and minds of a people from a different culture we never understood. David Halberstram’s The
Best and the Brightest pointed to the arrogance of the Kennedy
Administration in failing to understand that Vietnam was more about colonial
independence than it was about communism and Cold War rivalry. And the Pentagon
Papers documented the mistakes, misinformation, and lies surrounding the US
involvement there, with the realization we could not win, no matter what the North
Vietnamese body count was that week as announced by Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara. We stayed up late at night
after watching Apocalypse Now, haunted by Richard Wagner’s Ride
Of The Valkyries accompanying helicopters at dawn attacking a
village, or the appearance of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a
scene after Captain Willard travels up the Nung River enroute to assignment to
kill Captain Kurtz. The message some of
us took from the movie and War was that it was a seduction into evil—we as a
country turned into what we most despised.US
Supposedly
we learned something from the Vietnam War about the futility of starting a
battle with no clear objectives or end game.
We supposedly learned that brute force did not prevail, the need to
align military power with soft power and our national interests, and that we
needed to understand other cultures and history if we wished to be more
successful in our foreign policy goals.
Yet by 1980 Ronald Reagan declared Vietnam a “noble
cause,” suggesting memories were short, hubris tall.
While
General Colin Powell’s doctrine
sought to reteach the lessons of Vietnam as we prepared for the first Gulf War
in 1900-1991, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Merely seven days after 9/11 Congress issues
the Authorization
to Use Military Force, giving President Bush as much carte blanche authority to use
military force against the Taliban and Afghanistan as did the Gulf of Tonkin did
for Lyndon Johnson. We sent in the Marines
and bombers and took Kabul quickly. Soon
after that lies about weapons of mass destruction took us into Iraq, and soon
we were in Bagdad with another resolution
and capitulation to presidential lies.
In both cases America reacted reflexively with military solutions, with
no game plans for goals and objectives, what constituted victory, and no idea
about the culture and people of these countries. We repeated the arrogance of Vietnam,
thinking somehow we could turn them into western democracies, and make those
people like us. All while bombing their
villages and killing their people.
Now
as America is ready to leave Afghanistan after 20 years and the media pundits screech
that we are abandoning our allies and simply giving up as cowards, these
reflections miss the deeper meaning of this war. We should have never been there to start
with. We made the wrong choices in 2001,
and like Vietnam even after we knew it was a lost cost we stayed on, hoping
that one more military surge would be the “light at the end of the tunnel” that
would finally win the war. I have no
idea what we should do, but I do know that we should have learned from Vietnam
that what we did in 2001 and are doing now is wrong and that it was never going
to work.
To
appease critics Biden has said that we will evacuate
those in Afghanistan who assisted us.
Already I can see the helicopters at the US embassy in Kabul.
Karl
Marx once declared: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great,
world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has
forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Vietnam was the tragedy, Afghanistan the farce.
