Attempting to recall lessons from the Vietnam War, President Obama said the United States, no matter how good its intentions, must accept that there are some failed states we simply cannot save:
“We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq — and we should have learned it by now.”
In this statement and its auxiliaries elsewhere in the speech, the president grossly misrepresents the history of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, as well as our longer history of invading foreign countries for our own selfish interests. He maintains the dovish myth of U.S. goodwill in all its military interventions: We only invade and take over other countries for their own benefit — only when they happen to “fall into crisis.” The truth is we usually help cause these crises, as we did in Vietnam and Iraq, and we often don’t do much rebuilding after we decimate the countries we invade.
As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman pointed out in “Manufacturing Consent,” during and after the Vietnam War, our mainstream media established the leftmost boundary of “acceptable” political opinion in the view that U.S. intentions in Vietnam were noble and benevolent, and our errors, if any, were technical and strategic, not moral. Obama has taken up these familiar dogmatic liberal assumptions and assured us that our country will continue its valiant, bloody effort to rid evil from the world. The view that U.S. use of force abroad has historically been, and indeed continues to be fundamentally immoral doesn’t even appear on our established spectrum of political opinion. Instead, our right to act unilaterally and “nation-build” when we see fit cannot be questioned. When other countries’ agendas happen to conform to our own, great; otherwise, as President Obama reminded us, it’s our way or the high way.
We expect such belligerent bravado from, say, Donald Trump, but we maybe don’t expect to hear such jingoism enunciated in Obama’s soothing tones, and hence, we often don’t notice it, but it’s there (Obama’s jingoism) and it’s bad news for the state of the world in 2016.
Zak Witus can be reached at zakwitus@umich.edu.