After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.
The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.
But when the younger Bush, Clinton’s successor, launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Vietnam syndrome came back with a vengeance. Barely three weeks after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2002, famed New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple penned a piece headlined “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.”
“Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past,” Apple wrote, “the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.”
“Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?” he rhetorically asked. “Echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable,” he asserted.