The Politics of Trauma: Iraq as Vietnam

Trauma has a dynamic of its own that is little understood. One of its rarer aftereffects the reliving of a traumatic experience by its victims or their successors is especially baffling. It is also especially significant for political psychology in that reliving a mass trauma can dominate a nation’s politics for an indefinite stretch. Traumatic reliv-

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ing may be touched off by circumstances reminiscent of the original trauma, or else a trauma may just replicate spontaneously—may just clone on its own. In either case the reliving goes by the rules of unconscious equivalence: thus roles may reverse, opposites are interchangeable, and any one friend or enemy, say, may stand in for any other. Those

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rules of unconscious equivalence apply because trauma is relived only unconsciously. On this head I have encountered a single, qualified exception in my previous researches: a maverick French deputy who charged the French national assembly that toppled the Fourth French Republic in 1958 with re-enacting the traumatic demise of the Third French Republic in 1940: he met with clamorous denial on all sides. For the rest, all my efforts notwithstanding, I have been unable even to suggest in general terms who tends to re-stage which traumas why. But I think I have come some way toward understanding how such restaging works. This understanding stands to gain inordinately from even a summary look at the national traumatic reliving that I propose to consider today. For one thing, this is a current rather than a historic traumatic reliving: it is running its course even now, with us Americans running along, so that we can so to say catch ourselves in the act. And for another, it appears at first blush to fly in the face of that purportedly basic, or even defining, characteristic of traumatic reliving in general: that it unfolds unconsciously.

The trauma in question, which Americans are currently reliving, is America’s defeat in the Vietnam war. As every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knew before Vietnam, America never lost a war. But then America did lose that war, and ignominiously, to a poor colonial people, after committing untold atrocities in a hopeless, ten-year struggle against guerrilla insurgents before finally abandoning local US collaborators to their fate in 1975. Unlike this gradual humiliation in Vietnam, America’s second huge trauma of the past half century was pinpointed in time, as the short term for it indicates: 9/11, or al Qaeda’s devastating assault of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington by commandeered passenger planes used as missiles. Until 9/11, Americans had felt impervious to enemy attack at home (forgetting that the British had sacked and burned Washington in 1814, and not counting some West Coast fear of Japanese buzz bombs in World War II). On 9/11 President George W. Bush, ordinarily way out of sync with his compatriots, personified them for an unforgettable, interminable moment caught by Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11: utterly blanked out before the elementary school class where he got the news, struck unfathomably dumb (or dumber), he was, in a word, traumatized. His administration was to replay 9/11 vicariously in reverse. First it set up Iraq and Iraq’s strong man, Saddam Hussein, as proxies for al Qaeda and its evil genius, bin Laden, on the strength of the wild claim that the two men and their followings were in jihadist cahoots. Then on March 20, 2003, Bush’s America, backed by a token “coalition of the willing,” spearheaded a massive air assault on Iraq’s command, trade, and population centers expressly intended to inflict traumatic “shock and awe.” Predictably, this aggression and the ensuing invasion and occupation opened Iraq up to al Qaeda while stirring up local jihadism against Americans, as if to validate post facto the original false charge that Iraq was a party to 9/11. (I say “predictably” with full assurance in that even I, of all people, did predict this outcome in print at the time.) Therewith, by Washington’s table of equivalences, the replication of 9/11 at Iraq’s expense was complete. At the same time, the American-led war in Iraq had only just begun. The “end of major combat operations in Iraq” proclaimed by Bush after six weeks of “shock and awe” marked the start of an ideologized, colonial-style war of pacification, or counterinsurgency, transparently reminiscent of the traumatically lost war in Vietnam.

Let me recall just a few salient points of this congruence of Iraq with Vietnam. Each was a war of aggression launched under special war powers consented to the President by a Congress manipulated by false intelligence. Thus the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution empowering Lyndon B. Johnson followed an alleged unprovoked attack by six North Vietnamese torpedo boats on a couple of American destroyers minding their own business off North Vietnamese shores; as emerged later, however, those destroyers were in reality spy ships routinely dispatching raiding parties into North Vietnam, and the six attacking torpedo boats were no more than blips on a radar screen. Comparably, in 2002 the Bush administration, going one better to the same effect, got its War Powers Resolution through Congress on the strength of preposterous trumped-up charges that Iraq was fabricating weapons of mass destruction for jihadist use in concert with al Qaeda. (As the official line went in September 2002, “you can’t distinguish between al Queda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”) Both American-led wars were ideolo-

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gized as crusades against worldwide networks of evil, Communist and Islamist respectively. In Iraq as earlier in Vietnam the self-proclaimed liberators were radically unwelcome for all their handouts of guff and candy. In each case they lost control on the ground to guerrilla warfare, mostly urban. They claimed to be fighting Communist terror in the one case and Islamist terrorism in the other, only to commit atrocities and practice torture identically in both. In each case they protected corrupt puppet governments while they talked of instituting democracy. In America domestic support for the war plummeted by roughly the same timetable each time round, with Washington’s only exit strategy remaining a proud refusal to cut and run. In each case America, by way of explaining away its failure, charged neighboring countries—Laos and Cambodia, then Iran—with aiding and abetting the insurgents. And so on and on.

This close parallel between the two wars has hardly passed unnoticed in America. Quite the contrary, it has been a commonplace from the very get-go among American opponents of the war, soon a mounting majority. Vietnam veteran John Kerry centered his 2004 Democratic presidential campaign around the theme of Iraq as a new “quagmire” like Vietnam. Even on the Republican side, Richard Nixon’s chief diplomat of Vietnam days, Henry Kissinger, told CNN on August 15, 2005, that he had “a very uneasy feeling” about the Vietnam-Iraq parallel, and other bigwig Republicans have since concurred.

Now if we see the Vietnam-Iraq parallel for what it is, America’s reliving of Vietnam in Iraq, we should see as well, with the same 20:20 psychohistorical vision, that what touched off that reliving was the war already underway in Iraq. The ideologized aggression on Iraq in the wake of 9/11, the dubious War Powers Resolution behind it and the fanatical guerrilla warfare that it unleashed, were so many reminders of the fateful Vietnamese engagement. As such, they led irresistibly from the one reliving, that of 9/11, into the other, that of the Vietnam war. However, the recognition of the continuing, losing Iraq war as a reliving of the traumatic Vietnam war raises a tricky conceptual problem. Its solution will prove highly revealing about the politics of trauma—but first the problem. If, as I said at the outset, traumas are relived unawares, what are we to make of Americans’ increasingly widespread awareness of the recycling of Vietnam in Iraq?

A first correct answer is deceptively simple. It is that America as a whole is not doing the reliving; rather, the government alone has been rerunning the Vietnam scenario, just as in that traumatic scenario the government started and conducted the war independently of the nation as a whole and increasingly against its will. The Bush administration, which took the rerunning upon itself, has been, together with its supporters and apologists, in denial of the transparent parallel between the two wars. Or rather, Bush himself did admit that parallel a couple of times, but only to argue from it to a need to “stay the course,” or in effect to deny it after all. For the rest, those who denounce the parallel are telling the war party: “You are reliving Vietnam,” to which the Bushmen reply: “No, we are not.” Thus does the traumatized nation deny by halves that it is reliving: the one half sees only the other half behind a reliving that the other half can’t or won’t see at all. Or to put a finer point on it, the opponents of the Iraq war are not charging the Administration with refighting the traumatically lost Vietnam war on any level of intentionality. They are only saying about the Iraq war: “America has been there before, with the same disastrous results as now, which will only worsen the longer America stays.” In so saying, however, they are distancing themselves from that reliving no less than if they told the war makers: “Some demon in you has you replaying the Vietnam scenario.” As traumatic relivings go, this one is singular insofar as a good half of the nation performing it does at least recognize the surface congruence between the traumatic experience and its reliving. Even so, the fact of a reliving—the deadly pathology behind that congruence—remains unconscious.

But this needful distinction between seeing the Iraq-Vietnam parallel and seeing the reliving behind it is, to repeat, deceptively simple compared with the whole truth of the matter, which is that the opposition to the Iraq war is an integral part of that reliving. This may sound like a catch-22: if you protest the Iraq war, you are by that very token a party to it as a replay of the Vietnam War. Yet that is the tricky score. A trauma suffered en groupe is

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relived en groupe not by composite design, but through a concatenation of individually motivated actions and attitudes. No one involved in that resultant reliving feels involved in it. I can speak personally to the sense of necessity and futility intermixed with which I marched against the Vietnam War from Morningside Heights across Central Park to Fifth Avenue in New York and again, four decades later, against the Iraq War from the Boston Common down Beacon Street and around to Copley Square, yet I can find no trace in me of a desire for America as a whole to relive the Vietnam fiasco. Still less can I feel how the reliving mechanism has been paralyzing the will of the political opposition to halt the replay of Vietnam before the bitter end, yet anyone with sufficient detachment can see this paralyzing at work plain as day. Indeed, the most striking thing about the political opposition to the Iraq War is its ineffectuality on the Vietnam model. Right after its victory in the congressional elections of 2006 the antiwar party could have cut off funding for the war without further ado; instead, it preferred to “support the troops.” It might also have impeached the President for the trickery, long since exposed, that procured him his War Powers Resolution, but such a ground for impeachment presumably lacked the high seriousness of sexual misconduct in the Oval Office.

At the time of the “shock and awe” aggression I wrote of it as a reliving of 9/11 in which Bush’s personal stake turned on Saddam Hussein’s alleged attempt to kill Bush Sr. As for Bush Jr.’s stake in the Vietnam reliving that ensued, I see it as again filial. At the successful conclusion of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the elder Bush, flanked by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, declared: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” With the Iraq war the younger Bush replied rightly: No, Dad, we haven’t.

One final point. Vietnam and 9/11 each traumatized the American nation as a whole. Later the American government led the nation as a whole in replaying 9/11 and then in replaying Vietnam. In the latter case, in launching and leading the Vietnam replay in Iraq, the present government has acted, mutatis mutandis, as the then governments acted in launching and waging the Vietnam war itself–in the original traumatic experience. In the case of 9/11, however, the replay was likewise launched and led by the government even though that traumatic original, the assaults on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, did not follow from any governmental doings. Theoretically it did not even need to be relived rather than simply memorialized, recalled incessantly, and defended against after the fact, like many another trauma; or alternatively it might have been relived in who knows what other form, governmental or not. Yet the Bush government, for all its blindness to reality and deafness to the voice of the people, did sense and implement the obscure need for the nation to work through its 9/11 trauma again and then its Vietnam trauma again. Nor is this a unique instance of a government’s special sensitivity and responsiveness to the traumatic felt needs of the governed; on the contrary, governments in general, even highly democratic ones, appear to be more representative on the level of trauma than of public opinion. And with this troubling addendum to a John Locke’s or a John Stuart Mill’s vindication of representative government, my reflections on Iraq as Vietnam are closed.

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