- $1 billion Empire State Building IPO: why it won't be like Facebook IPO
- In surprise move, GOP leaders admit defeat in payroll tax battle
- More than 30,000 Germans turn out against anti-piracy treaty ACTA
- Does Obama blueprint reduce budget deficit fast enough? (+video)
- Pentagon budget: Does it pit active-duty forces against retirees? (+video)
- Murdoch media crisis deepens with five new arrests
- How Pinterest combines the best parts of Facebook, Tumblr, and Etsy
- US, China face 'trust deficit' as China's heir apparent visits
Lessons of Vietnam linger for US
(Page 2 of 3)
Still, this public uneasiness about Iraq - where insurgents have stepped up attacks in recent days - is not reflected in any official disinclination to make use of the US military abroad. "The US has become increasingly uninhibited about the use of force," says John Pike, a national security analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. "Ever since we stopped worrying about the Fulda Gap [the point along the East-West German border where thousands of Warsaw Pact tanks supposedly would race through when World War III started], we have become quite creative in finding problems that have military solutions."
"Our legions have been on the march almost continuously since 1989, with no end in sight," says Mr. Pike, referring to such places as Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, Iraq, and Kosovo.
Projecting such post-cold-war US military actions into the future - particularly on the scale of Vietnam or Iraq - is another matter. Absent North Korea invading South Korea, or a terrorist attack in the US on the scale of Sept. 11, "US public opinion will not accept an Indochina-size war under any circumstances I can think of," says Fred Branfman. "This is the enduring legacy of Vietnam in the 21st century as I see it," he says.
A new strategic landscape
As the lone military superpower, the US today does appear freer to do what it wants to. When the US pulled out of Vietnam it faced other major military threats - mainly Warsaw Pact conventional forces in central Europe and a huge arsenal of nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles. Today, old Warsaw Pact members are joining NATO and the EU, and Russian missiles are off their hair trigger.
Yet constraints remain.
There's no military draft, for example, to fill recruiting gaps - which have become considerable since the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. There's also a real-time media and electronic communication regime that's more universally accessible to a skeptical public and soldiers in the field.
It was a year before a lone soldier blew the whistle on the massacre of more than 300 Vietnamese civilians by US Army soldiers at My Lai in 1968 and many more months before it became public. Today, thousands of soldiers in Iraq - equipped with digital cameras, cell phones, and laptop computers - have become effective if sometimes inadvertent journalists, letting the world know with a couple of key strokes not only the gritty details of day-to-day combat but also about such controversial episodes as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses.
Today's US military, though smaller than during the Vietnam War or cold war years that followed, in many ways is more powerful because of its high-tech weaponry. But that can be a constraint as well, says defense and foreign policy analyst Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., because a smaller military can be in fewer places at the same time.
"To provide a military presence, do peacekeeping or peacemaking, or to fight unsophisticated guerrilla opponents, you don't need sophisticated weapons as much as you need lots of boots on the ground - one of the problems in Iraq," says Dr. Eland.
