A Persistent Pathology

As the mere mention of Vietnam suggests, the repetition dilemma also has causes that go deeper into the past. I embarked on journalism in 1966 as a reporter in Vietnam. The experience led, naturally and seamlessly, to a decade of writing about the war, the opposition to the war and, finally, when the war "came home," to the constitutional crisis of the Nixon years and its resolution via Nixon's resignation under threat of impeachment. The war and the impeachment were connected at every point. It wasn't just that Nixon's wiretapping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or that the "plumbers" outfit that carried out the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon's persistence in trying to win the war even as he withdrew American troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an "enemies list" and sponsor subversions of the electoral process--it was that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without Congressional involvement.

And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing an uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional crisis at home. Again a global crusade (then it was the cold war, now it is the "war on terror") has given birth to a disastrous war (then Vietnam, now Iraq); again a President has responded by breaking the law; and again it falls to citizens, journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the connections between the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at home. In consequence, not only are we condemned to repeat ourselves for the duration of the current crisis but a remarkable number of those repetitions are already repetitions of what was said thirty years ago.

Consider, for instance, the following passage from a speech called "The Price of Empire," by the great dissenter against the Vietnam War Senator William Fulbright.

Before the Second World War our world role was a potential role; we were important in the world for what we could do with our power, for the leadership we might provide, for the example we might set. Now the choices are almost gone: we are almost the world's self-appointed policeman; we are almost the world defender of the status quo. We are well on our way to becoming a traditional great power--an imperial nation if you will--engaged in the exercise of power for its own sake, exercising it to the limit of our capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending the American "presence" to the farthest reaches of the earth. And, as with the great empires of the past, as the power grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated except by ritual incantation from its initial motives, governed, it would seem, by its own mystique, power without philosophy or purpose. That describes what we have almost become....

Is there a single word--with the possible exception of "almost" at the end of the paragraph--that fails to apply to the country's situation today? Or consider this passage from Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power with the Iraq venture in mind:

Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life have crumbled under the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have not been replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their breakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development.

Recalling these and other passages from Fulbright and other critics of the Vietnam era, one is again tempted to wonder why we should bother to say once more what has already been said so well so many times before. Perhaps we should just quote rather than repeat--cite, not write.

Of course, people like to point out that Iraq is not Vietnam. They are right insofar as those two countries are concerned. For instance, today's anarchic Iraq, a formerly unified country now on or over the edge of civil war, is wholly different from yesterday's resolute Vietnam, divided into north and south but implacably bent on unity and independence from foreign rule. And of course the two eras could scarcely be more different. Most important, the collapse of the Soviet Union has effectuated a full-scale revolution in the international order. The number of the world's superpowers has been cut back from two to one, China has become an economic powerhouse, market economics have spread across the planet, the industrial age has been pushed aside by the information age, global warming has commenced and rock music has been replaced by rap. Yet in the face of all this, American policies have shown an astonishing sameness, and this is what is disturbing. In our world of racing change, only the pathologies of American power seem to remain constant. Why?

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