Perhaps hard to find now, but The Scotsman still has a story on the invaders’ reaction to the suicide bombing by an Iraqi soldier posing as a taxi driver and, more importantly, the quotes of American marines has been reported several places. There is another take on the story here.
30 years since the invasion of Vietnam and we want our wars to be short and photogenic. Young marines freaking out and wasting civilians (as hard as it may be to tell who they are now) doesn’t make for good television. Not American television at least.
Posted by Mike at March 31, 2003 04:08 PM | TrackBackmike:
some interesting thoughts on the “vietnam syndrome” can be found here:
www.worsethanqueer.com
mimi's essays on the politcs of sentimentality and the gendered constructions of US foreign policy are rather telling.
below is mimi's take on “our troops”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
by mimi nguyen
March 23, 2003, 9:32 a.m.
I've been trying to think through some of the issues brought up by the war, most immediately the tenor of public debate (or its lack) about political practices, democratic models and historical conflicts. Bear with me as I try to work out these narrative themes in public.
So far, it seems to me that the admonition to “support the troops” invoked in the midst of debates about the legitimacy of this war and the U.S. unilateralist stance is the functional equivalent of a show-stopper, a plug in the hole, whether it appears as a warning (“You're undermining our boys, traitor!”) or a platitude (“Can't we stop politicizing the war and all agree that our boys need our support right now?”).
Its roots lie in the Reagan-era invention of the Vietnam Syndrome — conventionally understood as a loss of nerve, the shameful emasculation of U.S. military prowess, and a despised hesitation on the part of the “American public” to support another war of invasion or intervention. In an inverted projection of aggression, this discourse of wounded (masculine) pride produced the famous, plaintive monotone, “Do we get to win this time?” (Sly Stallone at his non-emotive best, no less.) This is a “we” that takes no account of the Vietnamese . The recuperation of the symbolic American soldier as the real innocent of the war in Vietnam a “good man” doing his job, betrayed by the people and politicians he left behind removes the Vietnamese and their civil conflict from the landscape of war.
What also goes unremarked in the so-called Vietnam Syndrome is the implicit state violence that transforms citizens into expendable soldiers for the war machine in the first place. The anti-war appropriation of the slogan, arguing that real support for the troops would “bring them home,” comes closest to enabling a possible critique of state violence and the nature of the “necessary sacrifice” on behalf of the administration's geopolitical aspirations.
Reiterated and often adjusted to appeal to various positions, this popular slogan -even when uttered in the spirit of conciliation -is nonetheless ideological, and seems to work at several, interrelated levels:
First, it takes form as an antipolitical gesture that refuses disagreement or meaningful contestation. It operates to short-circuit the political (and specifically the democratic) with a moral authority assumed to transcend all political stances. It is a fantasy of disengagement that undermines a necessary sociopolitical debate about nationalism and militarism, international relations and geopolitical power.
This approach emphasizes the familiar “human interest” angle, which is then limited to the point of view of the soldier who is produced as both an individual (“Joe loves his dog Muffy, a stray he's raised since he was a kid”) and an abstraction (“Joe is the typical soldier, doing a job for love of his country”). This consensual space of political transcendence is emptied of debate, as if how some populations or individuals are able to be (or not) in the world is not a matter of politics.
Second, in doing the first, it reinforces an “us versus them” principle, a possessive patriotism which claims “our boys and girls” as “ours” and delineates even by way of notable absence a monolithic “them.” It traffics in the active disavowal of the political and historical conditions of the conflict, its implications for targeted populations, and the ethical debates involved.
Third, the slogan produces a very specific language of containment that forecloses critical debates for managerial and therapeutic discourses of support. The managerial language of professionalization renders the conflict hygienic, a matter of proper allocations, collateral damage and statistical models, locating war outside history or politics.
The slogan also removes the scene of pain from the battlefield and away from what is done there, to others, and relocates the scene of pain to the psychological interior of the soldier-patriot and what is done there, by “us.” If we condemn civilian deaths in the march through villages and cities, we are traumatizing “our troops.” If we discuss the doctrinaire fundamentalism of the administration in its pursuit of war, we are hurting “our troops.” The therapeutic language of support reduces the range of acceptable terms and categories with which to discuss war to nonpolitical and sentimental ones.
We see this happening in the news media as the war coverage is split between the managerial language and imagery of allocation and deployment and the sentimental language and imagery of loved ones (most often represented by tearful wives) left behind, promising faithfulness and domestic stability (which has multiple implications when so apparently gendered):
“By employing conventions taken from narrative TV melodrama (including a focus on the family - the news 'family' and the families investigated), news programs can achieve the emotional intensification and moral polarization associated with dramatic serials.” (Lynne Joyrich, 1988, “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,” Camera Obscura 16, p. 133)
Posted by: mattew on April 9, 2003 09:09 PMThe public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Posted by: Denk Jeremy on December 10, 2003 05:31 PMThe fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
Posted by: London Daniel on December 20, 2003 09:39 PMJust leaving the [defanged] spam blurbs above. Odd marketing, ne?
Posted by: Mike on December 21, 2003 12:00 AM