Strange anniversary

It’s a curious anniversary, 11 August. Of two events. In different decades. And yet curiously linked.

On that day in 1972, the last US ground combat troops left South Vietnam. That still left 43,500 US personnel there, but as it’s only by ground troops holding territory that a war is ultimately won, it was clear the US now viewed the war as unwinnable.

US forces on the run, after defeat in Vietnam

That was remarkable because over the previous two centuries – or slightly less – the US had fought an incredible number of other countries. It had fought the British. Twice. It had fought the Mexicans, an appalling number of times, as a Mexican friend once told me, if you count short incursions. It had fought the Spanish, the “Barbary States” of North Africa, the Japanese, the Germans, the Italians. 

Why, in the Civil War, it had even fought itself.

Don’t get me wrong. It hadn’t fought absolutely everyone. It had never fought the Russians, for instance. It’s true that their pilots had probably exchanged fire with each other over Korea, but as Russia never admitted its involvement in that war, they’d never officially been in a hot war. Which, considering the length and bitterness of the cold war between them, and the depth of their nuclear arsenals, was just as well.

This trick, by the way, of denying its involvement in various wars, was a bit of a Russian habit. They did it during the Spanish Civil War too, and everyone pretended to go along with the fantasy, just as they did with the equally transparent fiction that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy weren’t involved either. That was so that Britain, France and the United States could maintain the comfortable pretence that their precious non-intervention agreement over Spain was actually holding, so they could justify not helping the Republican government themselves.

A better reason for the Russians to pretend they weren’t involved is that, once their allies in Spain, the Communist Party, and their Soviet advisers had taken control of the Republican war effort, they made such a royal mess of it that nobody could possibly want to admit they had any part of it. The war was far more lost by the Communist Party generals and their Soviet mentors than won by Franco’s rebels and their mostly inept military commanders. Nothing to be proud of there.

But back to the Americans.

They’d fought all those people. And they’d never lost. In fact, they’d always won. Korea, perhaps, ought to have been a bit of warning to them. It was what in football terms I suppose we’d call a score-draw. Or, in chess terms, a stalemate. Both sides did some damage to the other, but neither could win outright.

They didn’t learn the lesson and went into Vietnam guns first, brains second. In the end, they lost 58,000 dead and 153,000 wounded. And, as demonstrated on 11 August 1972, lost a war for the first time in their history.

It was curious. A far poorer country, with far less depth of military strength, had defeated the world’s greatest superpower ever. The Vietnamese proved that, short of nuking them to destruction, the US couldn’t defeat a people in arms, however powerful a military it possessed itself.

Funnily enough, it should have known better. After all, nearly two centuries earlier, hadn’t the Americans united a majority of their people and demonstrated that one of the great powers of its day, Great Britain, couldn’t break them?

Now let’s roll forward 21 years until 11 August 2003.

That was the day that NATO took command of western forces in Afghanistan. The gesture was another of those military fictions, like Russian, German and Italian non-intervention in Spain, and Russian non-intervention in Korea. The incursion in Afghanistan was American. Making it a NATO operation just involved some other nations and gave the US a little cover, a justification for saying the effort was international, not just its own.

The reality is that it was a US response to the atrocity committed on its soil by terrorists on 9/11. Oddly, although that attack was organised by a Saudi and carried out by a massively Saudi terrorist gang, it led to US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The Iraq invasion culminated in a victory for America’s major enemy in the region, Iran, which has now emerged as a dominant power in Iraqi politics. The fighting also spilled into Syria, where Western intervention led to withdrawal with bloody noses, and a victory for Russia.

As for the invasion of Afghanistan, it was justified by the hunt for the Saudi head of the terrorist gang that attacked the US, Osama Bin Laden, though he was eventually tracked down and killed in Pakistan. Like Saudi, Pakistan is a US ally and therefore uninvadable. That left the only threadbare excuse being the need to overthrow the Taliban who were in power in Afghanistan, which the invasion did. Now, however, NATO has pulled out again and, lo and behold, the Taliban is swiftly taking back control, provincial capital by provincial capital.

Taliban forces in Afghanistan, massing for an attack on Kandahar

We’re witnessing yet another defeat for the US, apparently undefeatable right up to the end of the Second World War.

So raise a glass tonight to mark this curious anniversary. A monument to the apparent inability of the US, and the West generally, to learn anything from its military defeats. With the consequence, of course, that we subject ourselves to more of the same.