The Myth of the Lost Cause

One of the things that continue to amaze me about our involvement in Iraq is that the lessons of Vietnam we have talked about for thirty years have been so utterly ignored -- as we entered the conflict and as it continues each day to spiral out of control. When Vietnam does come up, it is always the creature of the right-wing, waving a bloody shirt wrapped in a black flag in our faces. Napoleon said that “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” The guys on the right have rewritten history to suit their agreed-upon ideology. They have transformed a foreign policy blunder that cost millions of lives into a noble “Lost Cause” where the military and the United States government itself was betrayed by the left-wing antiwar movement. This construct thereby denies credibility to any opposition to the Iraq war and demonizes those who oppose the war as unpatriotic or even traitors. More amazing is that given the actual facts there is anyone who would believe this distorted view of history.

In American history, the “Lost Cause” is the myth created by a handful of former members of the defeated confederate leadership in the years following the Civil War. It has been propagated widely and although almost entirely fictional it retains a real currency as popular history, especially in the south. The Lost Cause maintains that the Civil War really had very little to do with slavery. The writers of the Lost Cause myth frame the entire conflict as a constitutional issue -- states rights vs. federal domination -- with a poignant sidebar to northern industrial hegemony over the more genteel, pastoral, agricultural south. In fact the latter subjects made up only a tiny part of the causes of that brutal war. Any solid contemporary historian would underscore that the south’s obsession with slavery was absolutely the central "casus belli." The slave-holding southern states not only wanted to retain the institution of slavery, but they demanded the right to extend human bondage to the territories and the absolute right to transport their “property” to any state in the Union, regardless of its “slave” or “free” status. When they became frustrated with legal efforts to further the expansion of slavery, these states seceded and baldly and unabashedly proclaimed the world’s first “slave republic” in their constitution. Only later did a defeated south attempt – quite successfully – to downplay slavery as anything but a subset of the conflict. The Lost Cause saw extensive resurrection during the civil rights era, when the mayors and governors of the segregated south again tried to demonize the north in general and the federal government in particular as trying to impose its views upon “sovereign states”, and it was echoed again just recently in Trent Lott’s eulogy to Strom Thurmond.

The point here is that fictional history is not any less fictional if it is repeated and accepted widely.

Over the years, right-wing revisionist historians have promulgated a Lost Cause myth of their own about the war in Vietnam. There is not enough space here to address all of their points, but as one commentator to this blog has summarized it, the United States entered the Vietnam conflict “to help the cause of freedom and stop the spread of tyranny.” Well, there is some truth to that, at least to some of the intentions that motivated our government as we tumbled headlong into a sticky conflict that was to have no satisfactory resolution. The US got involved in Vietnam against the backdrop of the cold war and what was seen as a “Lord of the Rings” style battle of the free democratic west versus the evil monolithic communism of the east. Our strategic intelligence was poor – the CIA has never been very good at it – and we failed to grasp the complexity of loose alliances (as between China and the Soviet Union) and nationalism (Vietnam’s determination to overthrow foreign domination, either by its colonial master, France, or any other power such as the US or China). We also wildly exaggerated the stakes of this little civil war in Southeast Asia and predicted a kind of Armageddon if South Vietnam should fall.

But as we forgive presidents and senators for not knowing any better, we must remember not to cut them too much slack, as it were, because there were plenty in and out of government who did know better and who did warn Lyndon Johnson, for example, that a full scale American involvement in Vietnam could turn into the debacle it was to become. I would suggest Stanley Karnow’s "Vietnam: A History" as the bible on this subject, but since I realize that the right wing is likely to attack anything that counters their views as nothing but liberal revisionism, I would also suggest the actual transcripts of Lyndon Johnson’s secret white house tapes as edited by Michael Beschloss: "Taking Charge" and "Reaching For Glory" as indisputable primary sources to my points above. Plenty of people remembered what happened in Korea; many people wondered whether it made any sense to draw another line in the sand somewhere in Asia most Americans never even knew existed.

Part two of the right wing “Vietnam Lost Cause Myth” is remarkable: they would have you believe that we could have “won” in Vietnam if we had simply let the generals have their way. If we had let the military fight the war the way they wanted to, if the politicians hadn’t lost their resolve, if the antiwar movement hadn’t encouraged the enemy, if the American people hadn’t grown weak and weary. Etc., etc., etc. All bullshit that is based on neither history nor reality. We dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we dropped during all of World War II! Nearly 60,000 Americans died there over ten years, and over 5 MILLION VIETNAMESE (combatants and civilians) were killed by best estimates. We used every terrible weapon at our disposal short of nuclear weapons (which only would have devastated our side and theirs and provoked an end-of the-world scenario with the Soviets and/or Chinese nuclear response). Our involvement destabilized the entire region and indirectly resulted in millions of more deaths. And we achieved nothing of consequence.

When we withdrew, South Vietnam was in fact overrun by the north in short order, but it was far from the strategic calamity once predicted. The world went on. The communist “side” was little stronger than before. The Soviets and the Chinese had become enemies. The Chinese and the newly united Vietnam fought border wars. The United States remained a world power and only fifteen years later the Soviet Union basically “went out of business” and dissolved itself without a shot being fired. All the predicted dire results were illusory.

As the right-wing continues to construct its present-day myth of Iraq, keep these other myths of the past close in mind.