Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2021, pp. 14-15
History’s Shadows
By Walter L. Hixson
“ONCE ON THE TIGER’S BACK,” George Ball famously advised about Vietnam in October 1964, “we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” Ignoring this sage advice from a veteran diplomat, President Lyndon Johnson proceeded to leap onto the tiger’s back in a full-scale escalation of the Indochina war.
True to Ball’s metaphor, once the United States dismounted the tiger, via the Paris Accords of January 1973, the beast went into a rage. In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the fiction known as “South Vietnam” rapidly disintegrated, culminating in the communist takeover in April 1975. The U.S. left behind vast supplies of equipment, state-of-the-art military bases, hundreds of thousands of terrified former allies and refugees, and an embittered U.S. public. Sound familiar?
Crucial lessons were readily apparent in the wake of the disastrous war in Vietnam, but instead of learning from history all too many Americans opted for mythology. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Rambo re-mythologized Vietnam as a “noble cause,” as Reagan put it. Rambo asked, “Do we get to win this time?” thus promoting the proverbial stab in the back theory, which held that weak-willed government bureaucrats undermined the war effort and even deliberately left behind Americans missing in action—a complete fabrication with absolutely no basis in fact.
Failing to learn the obvious lesson that Vietnam was an unnecessary and extravagant intervention on a poorly chosen battlefield, the United States was poised in a new century to mount the tiger’s back once again for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Launched in 2003, the Iraq War, like Vietnam, was an orgy of lies, defeat and destruction whose final chapter has yet to be fully inscribed.
AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR
The Afghan War, at nearly 20 years in duration becoming America’s longest war, has now ended conclusively and like the Vietnam War it has done so in defeat, humiliation and finger-pointing. Opposition Republicans and the “liberal” media—both utterly incapable of grasping either history or complexity—predictably blame the current administration and intelligence failures. Previous presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump deserve more blame than President Joe Biden, who inherited a failed war and finally got the United States out.
As for “intelligence,” it has been obvious for years that the Afghan War was a losing proposition, and many observers have said as much. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was a thoroughly inhospitable battleground, one that had already proven to be the “graveyard of empires” where Britain and Russia had failed in previous centuries—just as the French had failed in Vietnam in another historical lesson that the U.S. ignored.
In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, the United States engaged in “nation building” and waged much ballyhooed “counterinsurgency warfare,” all the while lavishly funding a series of corrupt and ineffectual governments that were utterly devoid of popular support. Left to their own devices such governments invariably fall fast, whether they are headquartered in Saigon or Kabul.
The U.S. suffered more than 20,000 casualties in the failed Afghan War, but the military-industrial complex was nonetheless a big winner. The Pentagon received barrels of cash and lots of promotions and prestige even as it orchestrated defeat. Think of the infrastructure, health care and other assistance that might have been provided with the some $2 trillion that the United States squandered in Afghanistan.
Even with all the finger-pointing that inevitably comes with defeat, much if not most of the American public recognizes that the Afghan intervention was a lost cause. Many also understand the abject failure of the broader “global war on terror” and of militarism in general, in a world in which issues such as climate change and disease control are, or should be, a far greater priority than attempting to bomb foreign cultures into submission.
The end of the Afghan War and the 20-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks offer yet another opportunity to learn from history. We should begin by acknowledging that we brought the war on terror and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan onto ourselves. We should acknowledge that the 9/11 attacks came as blowback for a series of interventions going back decades. These intrusions—including the 1953 coup in Iran; enabling of the Israeli occupation and illegal settlement of Palestinian territory; the basing of U.S. troops in the Saudi Arabian holy land; and the repeated pummeling of Iraq killing hundreds of thousands of civilians—all served to victimize, alienate and radicalize much of the Islamic world. Decades of American intervention thus sowed the seeds of the 9/11 attacks.
History offers many lessons but only to those who are willing to learn them. At the very least we can hope that Americans will have learned by now, at long last, to adopt a high degree of skepticism about the next war, whether it is with Iran, North Korea or some other foe that we will be told is the root of all evil and must be subdued by righteous American might. When that time comes, try to keep in mind that once on the tiger’s back unpleasant consequences are sure to follow.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.
