BEN SHAPIRO: How Trump Finally Buried the Iraq Syndrome.
To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray. A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim — that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.
This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters. Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”
In other words, America was guilty — and the appropriate response was retreat.
That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America’s self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome. In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.
Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.
Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.
As Daniel Hannan wrote in 2014, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact:”
To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.
Back in the early 2000s, a similar pivot could be seen on the left’s 180-degree turn on the removal of Saddam Hussain. (George Clooney starred in a 1999 movie excoriating Bush #41 for failing to oust Saddam from power):
After (P)resident Biden set a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head and after months of “No Kings” protests, the left once again pivoted on a dime over his ouster, including members of the (p)resident’s own administration: Kamala Harris Humiliates Herself Condemning Capture of Maduro.