‘With One Hand Tied Behind Our Back’: Collective Memory, The Media And US Intervention From The Gulf War To Afghanistan

Abstract

At the end of the Vietnam War the proverbial Cold War consensus on US foreign policy was shattered. The United States emerged from the conflict into an uncertain world. Over 58,000 Americans had been killed, their names inscribed on Maya Lin’s black granite memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and up to four million Indochinese were killed during the successive Vietnamese wars. Washington was severely damaged: the outcome was a humiliating defeat which discredited its reputation; allies in Europe and Asia were alienated; the financial costs were tremendous as was the opportunity cost of the ‘Great Society’ programme; and widespread division further undermined US society. Since that period there has been a constant search to reconstruct consensus.₁ US ‘world leadership’ was being challenged, though its need to assert power and intervene abroad had not diminished. The broader moral and fundamental lessons that could have been addressed were ignored so as not to upset the direction of US policy and its leadership of the ‘western’ world. Instead, tactical and instrumental lessons have dominated policy makers’ considerations. These popular lessons suggested that next time, better instruments would be used, and different tactics would be followed. Next time the media would not be allowed such a free hand. The war would not be lost on the ‘home front’² The battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the American people became crucial to subsequent intervention. Where possible the use of US troops was avoided and any images of casualties were controlled. Eventually during the 1990s airpower became the preferred instrument of direct intervention. It not only provided television images that made the war appear precise, but it also limited US casualties and dealt with the enemy from a safe altitude. Conventional warfare made little sense under such circumstances and by 2001 horrific acts of terrorism, a crime against humanity, were perpetrated in New York and Washington. There are multiple causes, but 11 September 2001 was, according to Halliday, ‘the most spectacular case ever of the policy espoused by anarchists from the 1880s onwards of “propaganda of the deed”, an iconic destruction against the clear blue sky.’³ The magnitude and horror of the event helped undermine but not eliminate the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ that had been so pervasive hitherto.