The Vietnam Syndrome

The Vietnam Syndrome is not, as Colin Powell once suggested, a fear of getting into “another Vietnam.”

The Vietnam Syndrome is the belief that we won. Or we shoulda won. Or we woulda won, if not for them. And it is the dominant element of the Nixon Political Myth.

When a Myth is based on a lie, as this one is, it can be very hard to get rid of. And the lie is told, wherever the Myth's followers gather. Were it not for Watergate, Vietnam would not have fallen. Were it not for the hippies, the journalists, the academics – the internal enemies – the Vietnam War would have been won.

That's why they Swiftboat. That's why they surveil everyone. That's why the War on Terror seems like a war on the American left. It's the Myth being sustained. 

Throughout my adult life I have watched millions of good people seduced by this lie, because they wanted to believe it, desperately,. In Garden Grove, near where my family lives, Vietnamese-Americans rejected the display of a “North Vietnam” flag. Even here in Atlanta you will see South Vietnam flags, and that country hasn't existed for a generation.,

Vietnamese have not been the only folks affected. Cuban-Americans continue to be played by the Right, and they now await  Castro's inevitable death as the signal for a new War, a war for them.

But no group has been as taken-in as Jewish people. American support for Israel, as I've noted, goes back nearly 60 years. And the Nixon Myth itself has as its roots in  the Munich Pact of 1938, so it goes 10 years further back.  (That's 68 years, for those keeping score at home.)

Even today, any suggestion of retreat, on any issue, is met by cries of “Munich” from the Right. The enemy is always Hitler, the left is always Neville Chamberlain. It's their favorite talisman.

Don't believe me? Let's take a walk in the right-wing blogosphere and find out:

Here's Bob Waters -- “peace movements generally don't bring peace, they bring war.” Marc Schulman on anti-war writer Glenn Greenwald   -- “there's more than a faint echo of Neville Chamberlain in his words.” The Jawa Report, attacking Peter Beinert of The New Republic --we face another World War II, not a repeat of the Cold War.”

We are nearly as far removed in time today from Neville Chamberlain at Munich as the Lincoln-Douglas debates were from the nation's founding.

Chamberlain's Act at Munich, meanwhile, is the genesis of the whole Nixon Myth. The Nixon Myth is that Vietnam wasn't really lost, that we were “stabbed in the back” by war opponents and prevented from winning.

It's the biggest lie of the 20^th century. Bigger than any whopper told by Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao Zedong. And it's told by Americans, believed by Americans, today. It's what sustains today's dominant worldview. It's powerful mojo.

So no one should be surprised when the “media narrative” or the “Washington narrative” concerning Iraq refuses to conform to reality, despite the public's proven distaste for the policy.

Such is the power of a political Myth, even one based on a lie.