Myra Mendible is Professor in the Languages and Literature Department at Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers. In nations that have suffered military defeat, “stab in the back” myths emerge as a defense against shame: It is not our fault, we are worthy, but we were betrayed. In the US, the Vietnam syndrome incorporates the stab-in-the back myth as a way to secure the nation’s positive self-image. Deflecting attention from leaders’ misjudgments, the stab-in-the-back motif reassures the body politic, as Nixon did in 1969, saying that “only Americans can defeat or humiliate the United States”. This narrative conjoins two important myths: that America is “omnipotent and incapable of defeat,” and that any war the U.S. engages in must be noble and heroic. Therefore, if America is defeated, traitorous elites — craven politicians, un-American punks, degenerates, longhairs, pinkos and agitators, and the cowardly elite media — must be to blame. Book by Myra Mendible Race 2008: Critical Reflections on an Historic Campaign For information on ordering through Amazon, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Author: Myra Mendible Paperback: 230 pages Publisher: Brown Walker Press Published on: 2010-05-05 Language: English ISBN-10: 1599425378 Race 2008 brings together a diverse group of scholars and activists to examine the gendered politics, images, rhetorical practices, and racial/ethnic conflicts that served as a backdrop to this momentous election.

The nation had yet another opportunity to bind its fractured ego with a military victory in the Gulf War. Like Vietnam, Gulf I brought war into our living rooms, but this time managed as a visual testament of American supremacy. As the first so-called “television war,” Vietnam signaled new relationships in the process of postmodern war making.

It marked the dissolution of clear boundaries—between combatants and civilians, “secure” territories and “free-fire” zones, but also between direct experience and mediated sensation.

Vietnam produced iconic images of horror and defeat — body bags and Zippo raids and massacred civilians, Hueys hovering on rooftops loading terrified evacuees then hastily withdrawing. These images framed collective memories of the war, positioning the American spectator as the subject of a compelling tale of national humiliation.

Gulf I would be different. This time, to borrow a line from Rambo, we got to win. Historian Gerald Linderman notes that following the “humiliation” of Vietnam, “Gulf War seems a model of clarity and success, a war portrayed as being fought with the most efficient weapons and greatest resolve against the vilest of villains”.

President Bush and his scriptwriters turned Desert Storm into an epic tale of redemptive violence. The “enduring justice” exacted by the American military on Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard was justified as “payback” for our humiliation in Vietnam, a cultural myth that leaders roused and exploited.

The war unfolded in political speeches and media accounts as the antidote for our humiliation, the “good war” we needed to restore our national pride.
Indeed, mainstream media accounts turned Gulf I into the best kind of war for American audiences — distant, quick, and sensational — a virtual spectacle of US technopower. Ironically, our victory over a small Middle East country in the throes of economic and social deterioration would serve to blot out the memory of our defeat by what Johnson had called a “fourth-rate, raggedy ass little country”.

Sporting a catchy title and combining the evocative power of Hollywood spectacle and Washington rhetoric, “Desert Storm” played out as a saga of righteous retribution, a visual testament of the nation’s supremacy. It elicited the kind of thrilling catharsis that Americans have come to expect from action flicks and television wars alike. The loss of life for our side was minimal, and television images of Iraqi soldiers retreating in terror provoked more glee than sympathy.

Herbert Kelman (1995) rightfully argues that Americans’ jubilant mood of self-glorification during and after Gulf I is disturbing for its moral implications, as “a decent national reaction” to mass bloodshed should be one of sadness or regret at the human costs of war — “not one of pride and self-satisfaction”. Noting the citizenry’s patriotic euphoria in the face of such spectacular military dominance, humorist Lewis Grizzard was moved to remark that Americans should celebrate “a national day of gloating.”

Of course, this official tale is not the only one available to us. War photographer Peter Turnley’s pictorial record of Gulf I stands as one testament against this spectatorial fantasy of war. “This past war and any one looming,” Turnley (2002) writes in the introduction to his collection, “have often been treated as something akin to a ‘Nintendo game’. This view conveniently obscures the vivid and often grotesque realities apparent to those directly involved in war. As a witness to the results of this past Gulf War, this televised, aerial, and technological version of the conflict is not what I saw.”

Turnley’s refusal to interpret events through the lens of a narrative that justifies an unnecessary war, positions him as a witness who forces us to see the human face of the enemy. The devastation he witnessed was embodied, the cost of war exacted on the bodies of men, women, and children. Turnley’s photographic testimony compels us to recognize the human cost of this “enduring justice”; the spectator finds it difficult to take vicarious pleasure in this victory, as here the enemy has a face and civilian casualties cannot be easily discounted as collateral damage.

When groups or nations are forced to recognize the humanity of their enemies, witnessing serves to produce competing moral visions and appraisals. Most importantly, recognizing the other’s status as “worthy” victim can move subjects toward the experience of shame. Unlike humiliation, which entails a response directed against an external object, shame involves “a reflection upon the self by the self” (Miller, 1996).

By invoking the logic of humiliation, the story of Vietnam works to deny the shame that might otherwise take shape in the nation’s conscience. As victim, this subject is constituted as innocent and thus spared accountability or blame for negative outcomes. The well-intentioned victim of this tale bears no moral responsibility for the nation’s actions in Vietnam — or for the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers and 3 million Vietnamese civilians.

Thus Nixon rejected the possibility that the US should feel any shame as a result of our actions in Vietnam or because of the chaos that followed our retreat: “Of all the myths about the Vietnam War, the most vicious one is the idea that the United States was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall of Cambodia in 1975.”

Similarly, after the disclosure in 2001 that American soldiers had massacred civilians at Thanh Phong during a mission in 1969, influential writers like William Safire moved quickly to deflect any sense of shame or accountability. Assuming a sermonizing tone of righteous anger, Safire asks, “Are there no voices left, after that costly loss of life, to reject the Syndrome’s humiliating accusation of national arrogance — and to recall a noble motive?”

In nations that have suffered military defeat, “stab in the back” myths emerge as a defense against shame. Defeat functions in these myths as a “dramatic signal of unworthiness or inadequacy. The stab-in-the-back legend is a justification of self or group: It is not our fault, we are worthy, but we were betrayed. When such a falsehood is enshrined as official history, “it can be an emblem of complete denial of shame in a society as a whole” (Thomas Scheff, 1994).

In the US, the Vietnam syndrome incorporates the stab-in-the back myth as a way to secure the nation’s positive self-image. Deflecting attention from leaders’ misjudgments or policy decisions and towards those who opposed them, the stab-in-the-back motif reassures the body politic, as Nixon did in 1969, that only Americans can defeat or humiliate the United States” (Nixon, “Silent Majority Speech”).

Kevin Baker (2006) suggests that the stab in the back myth “has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America.”

This narrative conjoins two important myths: that America is “omnipotent and incapable of defeat and that any war the U.S. engages in must be noble and heroic. Therefore, if America is defeated, traitorous elites — craven politicians, un-American punks, degenerates, longhairs, pinkos and agitators, and the cowardly elite media — must be to blame” (Baker, 2006). It reconciles the cognitive dissonance resulting from the clash between America’s myths of invincibility and the reality of defeat.

Thus Mark Stein (2004) could remark in a news piece that “The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself.” Similarly, Colonel Harry Summers (1995), in his widely respected and often cited analysis of the Vietnam War, attributes America’s loss to the breakdown of national will, as “by every quantifiable measurement there was simply no contest between the United States, the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, and a tenth-rate backward nation like North Vietnam”.