American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  American forces were placed in an exceedingly dangerous country with an increasingly complex and contradictory mission. They were surrounded at the airport by forces that regarded them as hostile foreign occupiers. In the six months prior to the barracks bombings, U.S. intelligence agencies had received more than a hundred warnings of possible car-bomb attacks on American positions, and the U.S. embassy had already been blown up, leaving sixty-three people dead.

  In the wake of the barracks bombing, Reagan did not immediately order a withdrawal. Initially, he pledged to stay the course in Lebanon. Others might be weak of will, but not him. In early January 1984, the president said that House Speaker Tip O’Neill “may be ready to surrender but I’m not.” Even a month later, Reagan claimed U.S. policy in Lebanon was “firm and unwavering.”

  The very next day, February 7, 1984, Reagan ordered the military out of Lebanon. The White House said the troops had merely been “redeployed” to offshore ships. Reagan used more than euphemisms to avoid looking weak in retreat. As soon as the ground troops were safely offshore, the USS New Jersey launched another firestorm of three hundred shells on Muslim settlements in the hills overlooking Beirut. Hundreds of people were killed, mostly civilians.

  Some especially hawkish policymakers cited the withdrawal from Lebanon as shocking evidence that Reagan and his top advisers were as paralyzed as liberals by the Vietnam syndrome. There was lots of private grumbling about advisers and military chiefs who must have formed a “Vietnam Never Again Society.” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was a particular target of hawkish scorn. Weinberger had developed a set of preconditions for military intervention that was eventually taken up more famously by General Colin Powell. What came to be known as the Powell Doctrine asserted that military force should only be used as a last resort in support of vital national interests, with clear political and military objectives, strong public and international support, an overwhelming commitment to win, and a plausible “exit strategy” should things go awry. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, found these conditions outrageous—“the Vietnam syndrome in spades, carried to an absurd level, and a complete abdication of the duties of leadership.”

  But no syndrome or doctrine would prevent Reagan from ordering a quick, dramatic, and winnable display of American power in Grenada. Just two days after 241 servicemen were killed in Beirut, 6,000 American troops invaded the smallest independent island in the Caribbean—population 91,000. Reagan gave provisional approval for the Grenada invasion before the Lebanon barracks bombing; it was therefore not initially conceived as a way to deflect attention from the disaster. However, the green light for the invasion was issued just hours after the Lebanon attack, and the White House surely welcomed the opportunity to produce a triumphal story as the ashes still smoldered in Beirut.

  After Grenada was quickly seized, Reagan justified Operation Urgent Fury as a rescue mission. He claimed that Grenada’s Marxist government posed a dire threat to the safety of eight hundred American medical students on the island. He also insisted that Grenada was a “Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” Though each of those pretexts proved false, any challenge to them was irrelevant. There was no time for public debate. Even Congress was completely bypassed.

  Reagan insisted the attack had to begin without public knowledge or debate because it might jeopardize the rescue of the American medical students. But the White House later conceded that it never had any concrete evidence that the students were in peril. Canadian officials complained that the only danger to foreigners in Grenada came not from the Grenadian government, but from the American invasion. In his memoir, Reagan acknowledged another rationale for secrecy:

  Frankly, there was another reason I wanted secrecy. It was what I call the “post-Vietnam syndrome,” the resistance of many in Congress to the use of military force abroad for any reason. . . . I suspected that, if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under the strictest confidentiality, there would be some who would leak it to the press together with the predictions that Grenada would become “another Vietnam.” We were already running into this phenomenon in our efforts to halt the spread of Communism in Central America, and some congressmen were raising the issue of “another Vietnam” in Lebanon while fighting to restrict the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.

  Here we have a former president justifying his secret, unannounced, unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation in order to avoid public debate about the war’s necessity and legitimacy, and his right to order it. Secrecy also foreclosed the chance for other nations to argue against the invasion before the fact. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of Reagan’s staunchest friends and allies, was furious.

  Secrecy was a preemptive assault on the Vietnam syndrome. No one would be allowed time to worry about “another Vietnam.” The war was to be fought, quickly won, and then justified. The people would be presented with a victorious fait accompli. And, for the most part, it worked. Only a thin majority supported the war on its first day. But after Reagan went on TV four days later to explain his rationale and celebrate the triumph, support climbed to 63 percent.

  In truth, there was hardly any resistance in Grenada to the U.S. invasion. Nineteen American troops died, about two-thirds from accidents or friendly fire. If the U.S. military had better maps, intelligence, and preparation, it might have taken the island in a matter of hours. For all the mishaps (including the bombing of a mental hospital that killed 18 people), the island was fully in American hands within three days. Most of the Grenadian People’s Revolutionary Army had little desire to fight. Many quickly tore off their uniforms, put on civvies, and abandoned their posts. Of the 800 Cubans on the island, only about 100 were regular military; the rest were mostly construction workers, many of them middle-aged. At one point 150 Cubans surrendered to just two American Rangers. There were no sustained battles. And the American medical students were safe enough to help patch up 30 wounded Cubans before being whisked away by their “rescuers.” But all this came out later. Journalists were not allowed into Grenada until the island had been taken.

  The importance of secrecy to the reassertion of U.S. military power only deepened in the years ahead and it led the White House directly into the Iran-Contra scandal. Faced with a Congress that had twice passed laws (the Boland Amendment) to outlaw military aid to the Contras, Reagan and his staff simply ignored the law. It was violated most egregiously by a “neat idea” formulated by Colonel Oliver North on the staff of the National Security Council. North and his colleagues were desperately searching for ways to obey Reagan’s order to keep the Contras together “body and soul” in spite of congressional opposition. North’s ingenious plan was to support the war in Nicaragua (in illegal defiance of Congress) with profits from another illegal activity—the sale of weapons to Iran.

  Reagan had decided to sell arms to Iran in hopes that, in return, Iran would put sufficient pressure on Hezbollah to release a handful of American hostages it was holding in Lebanon. The arms-for-hostages deal was a net loser. A few hostages were released, more arms flowed to Iran, but then more hostages were taken. Ultimately, the United States sold more than two thousand TOW missiles to Iran in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, a congressionally sanctioned embargo on arms sales to Iran. The sales also contradicted Reagan’s frequently expressed promise never to make any concessions to the nation that had recently held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.

  After the media learned about the arms sales to Iran, Reagan denied that it was true. On November 13, 1986, he said on television: “In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages. . . . We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”

  Conclusive evidence showed that Reagan knew about and approved the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. That alone might have been the basis
for impeachment. But once the second half of the story broke—the diversion of the profits from Iran to finance the Contras in Nicaragua—attention shifted to whether or not Reagan had authorized that illegal action. No written record of presidential authorization ever surfaced, and he repeatedly denied that he’d had any idea what Oliver North was up to in Nicaragua. Although a majority of Americans believed Reagan was lying about Iran-Contra, talk of impeachment subsided, largely because the president remained personally popular and because his final years in office were marked by improved diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and the passage of a nuclear arms reduction treaty.

  Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, was elected president despite public concern about his role in Iran-Contra. If he didn’t know anything about Iran-Contra—as he claimed—why was he so out of touch? If he knew about the illegal deals, why hadn’t he opposed them? “Where was George? Where was George?” chanted Democratic conventioneers in 1988. After eight years as second fiddle to Reagan, Bush was saddled with a namby-pamby reputation. Newsweek called it the “wimp factor.”

  Bush won anyway, mostly by claiming that Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis was the real wimp—soft on crime, soft on patriotism, soft on defense. When Dukakis tried to demonstrate his toughness by riding around in a tank wearing a bulky helmet, Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater said he looked like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. In a TV ad, Atwater ran the funny images of Dukakis in the tank as a voice-over listed weapon systems the Massachusetts governor had opposed, ending with this: “He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada. . . . And now he wants to be our commander-in-chief. America can’t afford that risk.” Dukakis had once led in the polls by 17 points. On Election Day, he carried only ten states.

  As president, Bush was determined to jettison any remaining public doubts about his own toughness. In his one term, he launched the two biggest military operations since the Vietnam War.

  In 1989, a few days before Christmas, Bush ordered 25,000 American troops to invade Panama to arrest General Manuel Noriega, perhaps the biggest posse ever deployed to seize a single suspect. It was the first time since World War II that the United States went to war without dressing it in Cold War clothing. The Berlin Wall had fallen two months before, and the Soviet Union was rapidly moving toward dissolution. So this time there was no talk of tumbling dominoes or Communist beachheads. Noriega was identified simply as a drug-dealing tyrant who endangered American lives. His association with drug trafficking had particular resonance at a time when stories about the “crack epidemic” in the U.S. and the power of Latin American drug cartels were headline news.

  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 of
f 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.”