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Searching for a cure [to “Vietnam Syndrome”] took up no small amount of conservative energy.

But it was the centrists and liberals who produced the WWII nostalgia that ultimately provided it.

Nostalgia succeeded in helping shift the burden of proof — such that wars were presumed innocent and righteous — as opposed to the far more sane position that war is guilty until proven innocent.

When politics dies — when it is suffocated underneath the warm blanket of patriotic consensus — the conscience of the republic dies along with it.

This is a must-read graphic treatment of a 2006 piece by Chris Hayes, ‘The Good War on Terror’.

https://thenib.com/the-good-war

14 thoughts on “Searching for a cure [to “Vietnam Syndrome”] took up no small amount of conservative energy.”

  1. I think it’s interesting, but ultimately it has as an assumption that there has ever been, at any time in the history of America, a substantial polity that opposed any war when it was started. Vietnam was hugely popular through to Nixon’s administration, the various Wars on Terror routinely polled at 85 percent approval rating when they were launching. America is so derangedly bloodthirsty that it hates peace and considers it a failure as a nation, crazed to kill and kill and only when it is dog-tired of killing does it even pretend for a couple of years it likes peace.

  2. < ![CDATA[I think it's interesting, but ultimately it has as an assumption that there has ever been, at any time in the history of America, a substantial polity that opposed any war when it was started. Vietnam was hugely popular through to Nixon’s administration, the various Wars on Terror routinely polled at 85 percent approval rating when they were launching. America is so derangedly bloodthirsty that it hates peace and considers it a failure as a nation, crazed to kill and kill and only when it is dog-tired of killing does it even pretend for a couple of years it likes peace.]]>

  13. In my XP working in the policy world the Gulf War has a particular prominence in people’s thinking. It was a short, brief, profitable (for military contractors and defense companies), low-risk, high-tech (got to try out our new toys), limited-scope conflict under a Republican president, and it seems like we’ve essentially tried to replicate that in every U.S. military campaign since, without being very successful at it. I mean, remember “Mission Accomplished”? Every president (and definitely the U.S. military) now wants a war like that every term, it seems, to the point of pushing into stuff (like the Iraq War) that makes no sense and bogs down into a giant quagmire. And the “success” of the Gulf War is used to argue for U.S. intervention in various conflicts all the time. People have huge amounts of nostalgia for it. It’s pretty weird.

  14. < ![CDATA[In my XP working in the policy world the Gulf War has a particular prominence in people's thinking. It was a short, brief, profitable (for military contractors and defense companies), low-risk, high-tech (got to try out our new toys), limited-scope conflict under a Republican president, and it seems like we've essentially tried to replicate that in every U.S. military campaign since, without being very successful at it. I mean, remember "Mission Accomplished"? Every president (and definitely the U.S. military) now wants a war like that every term, it seems, to the point of pushing into stuff (like the Iraq War) that makes no sense and bogs down into a giant quagmire. And the "success" of the Gulf War is used to argue for U.S. intervention in various conflicts all the time. People have huge amounts of nostalgia for it. It's pretty weird.]]>