Reverse Vietnam syndrome?

We’ve become too optimistic, says Steve Chapman:

Throughout our history, Americans have been brave, resourceful and ingenious, but we have also been lucky. Consequently, we tend to take good fortune as the norm – and trust that we will always have it. We assume success, which sometimes blinds us to the possibility of failure. We prefer optimism, which may cause us to discount pessimism, no matter how well-founded it may be.

These tendencies help to explain how we ended up effectively taking over a radically alien country that we knew little about and were not prepared to occupy, much less govern. The Bush administration expected a brief, victorious war and a speedy departure: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the conflict in Iraq “could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Vice President Cheney promised that we would “be greeted as liberators.”

Those expectations proved to be grossly mistaken. But it wasn’t just the administration that failed to foresee what was coming – outside analysts and the American people also failed to heed the warning signs. How could so many people have been so wrong?

“We had the ‘victory disease,’” says John Mearsheimer, a defense scholar at the University of Chicago. Back in 1990, the nation approached the first war in Iraq with great trepidation, because the most recent major American war, in Vietnam, had ended in humiliation and failure. But this time, we were riding high on a series of triumphs – over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The last three victories were especially seductive because they came so quickly and at such a low cost in casualties. Not only that, but we enjoyed unchallenged global military supremacy, giving us the idea we could accomplish anything we chose to do.

Andrew Bacevich makes a lot of this. According to him, the victory in the Gulf War was the culmination of the efforts from various quarters to rebuild the prestige of the U.S. military and to restore military force as just one more element in the policy tool kit in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. This new confidence in military power was reinforced by the various military interventions undertaken by the Clinton administration.

Whether hegemony, or imperium, or whatever we want to call our unquestionable military supremacy, is a good idea or not, the efficacy of “hard power” still has limits, which we may be running up against as we speak.