Relapse of the Vietnam Syndrome
According to the United States Census Department, approximately 60 percent of the population is under the age of 40. The majority of living Americans either were not born or less than 10 years old when US involvement in the War in Vietnam ended. They are thus resistant to what has been labeled as the "Vietnam Syndrome." Those afflicted by this condition are marked by the conviction that the United States should always scrupulously avoid military intervention abroad. Those with the more benign form of the affliction have concluded from the inept military strategy in Vietnam that the US military is incapable of conducting successful and humane military operations. Why involve oneself in costly operations that will not succeed? The more virulent disorder is associated with the conviction that the United States is an inherently aggressive and evil country. Thus, any intervention must be in the service of imperialistic aims to dominate the world and must be opposed.
Those younger than 40 do not remember a world of American military losses, accompanied by angry divisiveness at home. They remember American power and leadership leading to the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe. They remember the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi aggression in a remarkably efficient US military operation. They remember the liberation of Panama from dictatorship and the stability brought by American forces to Haiti. They remember that American air power effectively stopped ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo. They remember the US military, with less than 400 troops on the ground, toppled the regime in Afghanistan that harbored the terrorist organization that killed 3,000 people on US soil on September 11, 2001. The experience of the younger part of the electorate is definitively different from those who came of age in the 1960s.
Of course, knowledge and appreciation of history should extend beyond only our collective generational memories. But it appears that some in the media who came of age in the 1960s were so traumatized by the Vietnam War that they are incessantly haunted by it. They seek feverishly for another Vietnam around every corner.
In 2001, New York Times columnist R. W. Apple quintessentially represented those still afflicted by the Vietnam Syndrome. After several weeks of bombing Afghanistan, Apple was fretting about a potential "quagmire." In many ways, the Afghan War was fundamentally different from Vietnam. It was not a guerilla war supported by a sympathetic populace and, unlike Vietnam, the US made a total commitment to victory. However, these important differences were dismissed. Most of the time one has to wait a long time to find out if one is in error. Apple learned more swiftly, when a few weeks after his column US troops were in Kabul.
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