Learning the wrong lessons from Vietnam

Violent racial strife in the streets of a major American city. A nation spending billions on military hardware while poverty ravages its inner cities. U.S. troops on a vague and shifting mission on the other end of the world, in an undeclared  war that was launched with dishonesty from the highest levels of government, with no real "light at the end of the tunnel."

OK, that pretty much describes America this week, right? But it certainly was also the case fifty years ago, in the summer of 1965, when the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in a riot while then-President Lyndon Johnson was dramatically escalating U.S. troop levels in Vietnam. That was the start of a tumultuous ten years that ended on April 30, 1975 -- the fall of Saigon that marks its 40th anniversary.

And thus the Vietnam War is having a moment right now, with new documentaries and anniversary events all week. But just as World War I was supposed to be "the war to end all wars," and wasn't, the Vietnam War has become the "mistake" -- the one that our now-secretary of state John Kerry said no one wanted to be the last man to die for -- which seems to happen again and again.

That outcome didn't seem possible in the spring of 1975. America was certainly humiliated by what amounted to our defeat in Southeast Asia, but the nation was also chastened, humbled -- and promising to do better. Never again -- after the death of more than 58,000 U.S. troops, not to mention countless more civilians and combatants in Vietnam and neighboring lands -- would our country spill so much blood over such a dubious cause. At least it was pretty to think so.

The end of the war brought a series of reforms -- the death of an active military draft, lowering the voting age to 18, and the War Powers Resolution, which would allow Congress to keep a runaway executive branch in check. But more importantly, there was the promise that future American foreign policy would offer more wisdom and less brute force. Even a once-hawkish figure like Ronald Reagan flatly promised American voters when he ran for president in 1980 -- or five years after the fall of Saigon -- there would be "no more Vietnams."

Reagan sort of kept his promise -- but he also was quick to look for workarounds. The "no more Vietnams" doctrine meant there was never discussion of sending U.S. troops to depose a leftist government in Nicaragua, but Reagan instead looked -- unlawfully at times -- to fund butcherous surrogates called the Contras (whom the Gipper called "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," once you got past the death squads, etc.) to do America's dirty work in Central America.

It was the birth of a notion. The fall of the Soviet Union and the post-Vietnam karma was a golden opportunity for a "peace dividend," but the moment was hijacked by those who were seeking a New American Century and who decided that the biggest lesson after the fall of Saigon was figuring out how to do this without all of that messy public dissent.

The all-volunteer military wasn't exactly the victory that peaceniks imagined; a fighting force that emerged from economically devastated rural and urban areas ensured that the kids of the rich and the politically connected wouldn't have to fight, and that made it even easier for elites to sign off on military solutions. Ditto the rise in new technology like drones -- flying death robots that makes it way too convenient for presidents to order targeted killings anywhere in the world, without risking a drop of American blood. The drone-age presidents have been aided by a cowardly Congress that is terrified, politically, of exercising the war powers that it voted for itself in 1973.  Behind it all looms a military-industrial complex that saw the tragedy of Saigon as a minor speed bump; today, U.S. military spending is as much as the next 10 highest nations combined!

The result is a literally endless, amorphous "war" on terrorism that has taken place in at least eight countries, either through drone warfare or more aggressive measures. Like Vietnam, the reasons remain nebulous, the allies ever shifting. The Vietnam War seemed interminable when it was taking place but large-scale U.S. combat there only lasted from 1964 through 1973, or nine years, while America still has has 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, FOURTEEN YEARS after that conflict started. And then there's Iraq, the "Godfather III" of U.S. warfare, where every time we think they're out, they pull us back in.

So why hasn't there been much protest against these longer and more diffuse new "Vietnams"? For starters, the end of the draft and the use of high-tech weaponry means the urgent drivers of 1960s and '70s unrest -- your neighbor's son was just killed, and you could be next! -- are mostly gone. And then there's all that surplus military hardware from all that excessive Pentagon spending that trickles down to your local police, to assist them as they make sure that any protests that do break out are confined to your little "free-speech zone."

This weekend, Tom Hayden -- the Vietnam-era activist who remains a voice for peace five decades later -- organized a two-day event in Washington to commemorate the protests, and to remind people why it mattered. He wrote on his blog:

"Today's escalation of secret wars and surveillance originated in the Vietnam era when government and the military became fearful of relying on public opinion, that is, on democracy itself. Voters became objects of official suspicion, and democracy was placed in their emergency care. Ending wars in the future depends on the coming of new movements for democracy and social justice at home."

The only lasting lesson of Vietnam was how to wage war without the people's consent, and how to get away with it. America's survival depends on unlearning it.