{"id":8134,"date":"2017-06-09T20:51:47","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T20:51:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/litci.org\/en\/?p=8134"},"modified":"2017-06-09T20:51:47","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T20:51:47","slug":"the-democratic-reaction-from-vietnam-to-iraq-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/the-democratic-reaction-from-vietnam-to-iraq-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cDemocratic Reaction\u201d: From Vietnam To Iraq Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1975, the United States suffered a severe military defeat in the Vietnam War (the first in its history). This defeat limited the capacity for direct military intervention by U.S. imperialism and led to a policy adapted to this reality that we have called “democratic reaction”.<\/em>
\nBy Alejandro Iturbe.<\/strong>
\nOriginally published @ International Courier 16.<\/strong>
\n 
\nIn 1954, French imperialism had been defeated and had to withdraw from its old colonial possession of Indochina. One of the consequences of this defeat was the emergence of the workers\u2019 state of North Vietnam, while imperialism in the southern part of the country attempted to maintain a capitalist state with a puppet government (South Vietnam).
\nThe South Vietnamese government was barely able to stand on its own in the face of the North’s military offensive and the guerrillas led by the Communist Party (the Vietcong). Within this framework, since the early 1960\u2019s the United States began to increase its military presence in the country. First, it did so in a limited way during John Kennedy administration (16,000 soldiers). His successor, the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, officially declared war on North Vietnam and increased U.S. military presence to 300,000. Finally, the Republican Richard Nixon (president between 1969-1974) increased the bet to more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers in combat, with the back-then most modern weaponry.
\nIntervention in Vietnam was not isolated but rather the most salient expression of a whole series of events that since the end of World War II expressed a policy by the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie, who considered themselves to have the right to intervene worldwide (both by means of coup d\u00e9tats<\/em> or invasions), with the excuse of “fighting Communism”. These include: the Korean War (1950-1953); the coups against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Juan Domingo Per\u00f3n in Argentina (1955) and Jo\u00e3o Goulart in Brazil (1964); the invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965) and the coup against Sukarno in Indonesia (1967).
\nIn the case of Vietnam, the military effort was strengthened by the use of highly cruel methods such as murdering all the villagers on the ground that were sympathetic to the Vietcong (for example, the infamous My Lai Massacre, in March 1968), or the use of napalm (liquid phosphorus) to burn fields and people.
\nBut none of this prevented the hard defeat that was already irreversible by the end of 1973. A defeat that was symbolized by the images of the hasty flight of U.S. helicopters (with officers and employees), and the desperation of their agents in South Vietnam (who were not contemplated in the evacuation plan) who hung from the helicopters to try to flee.
\nThe defeat in Vietnam showed, very clearly, two realities combined. The first was that the U.S. military was very effective if it involved rapid military intervention and support for a military coup, but when that intervention turned into a war of occupation things became much more complicated: the U.S. military itself left Vietnam not only defeated as deeply demoralized and divided.
\nThe second reality is that, with heroism and determination of the masses, it is possible to defeat imperialism in a war of national liberation, particularly if as in the case with the Vietnam War it is combined with a strong solidarity movement worldwide, and especially within the United States.
\nThe Carter Administration<\/strong>
\nThe defeat in Vietnam limited the capacity for direct military intervention by U.S. imperialism (and imperialism in general). The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” was the difficulty of imperialism in intervening militarily across the world (as it did in the past) because of the fear that this intervention would lead to a long and costly war as in Vietnam.
\nCombined with this, a political crisis broke out within the country: in 1974, Nixon was removed from office by a process of parliamentary impeachment and was replaced by his vice-president, Gerald Ford.
\nIn late 1976, a second-rate Democrat won the presidential election: the back-then Georgia governor James “Jimmy” Carter. During the electoral campaign, with a friendly and humble image, Carter turned the “new times” of the electorate and always began his speeches stating that he was not a politician nor part of the establishment.
\nIt was his Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (Polish-American) who elaborated the policy of “democratic reaction”. He was well aware of the unfavorable conditions in the world, and that for that reason the military aspect had to become secondary and be at the service of a new central tactic. According to his vision, winning does not mean the ability to defeat an adversary militarily anymore but to prevail patiently in the long run.
\nThis did not mean that imperialism had become “pacifist” or “humanitarian” but that the situation forced it to limit its military actions\u00a0for those to serve other tactical mechanisms (pacts, negotiations, bourgeois elections) that allowed to stop and deflect the revolutionary processes and to advance in the most strategic objectives.\u00a0Making a parallel with the \u201ccarrot and stick policy\u201d, the use of the “stick” was limited and put as an auxiliary to the “carrot”.\u00a0To this end, it had the collaboration of the Stalinist apparatus and its policy (“peaceful coexistence”), as well as from the treacherous leaderships.
\nIt is important to note that on top of the defeat in Vietnam, the revolutions of 1979 that toppled the Shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, with subsequent revolutionary processes in Central America (which U.S. imperialism considered its backyard) built momentum for the new policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d, which proved to be very useful.
\nBrzezinski is also considered to be the intellectual author of a strategic blueprint for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and other bureaucratic workers’ states.\u00a0The election of the Polish Pope John Paul II (1978) and the CIA operation in Afghanistan against the Soviet military occupation led Stalinism to a crisis (even if later the Taliban ended up being a new thorn for imperialism after taking power in the 1990\u2019s).
\nReagan And The Contadora Agreements<\/strong>
\nThe Carter administration was seen weak and lost popular prestige due to the failure of two special operations to rescue diplomats and officials from the\u00a0U.S. Embassy in Iran held hostages for a long period by Iranian “revolutionary guards”.\u00a0These failures were critical for his defeat to the Republican Ronald Reagan in his bid for re-election, in 1980.
\nReagan is remembered as a right-winger who “hardened” U.S. foreign policy.\u00a0The fact is that, although Reagan used the \u201cstick\u201d more frequently, it maintained the core of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d: to use the \u201cstick\u201d serving pacts and negotiations because the relation of forces imposed his administration to do so.
\nFor that reason, he only made one direct military intervention: the invasion\u00a0of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow the government of Hudson Austin (1983).\u00a0In the Falklands [Malvinas] War between Britain and Argentina (1982), Reagan clearly supported Margaret Thatcher but, militarily, this support was expressed only through the supply of a provisions basis (the Ascension Island). At the time, the IWL-FI Congress pointed out that “Imperialism is not doing what it wants but what it can”.
\nThe litmus test of this policy a whole was the Central American revolutionary process, which began in 1979 in Nicaragua and extended to El Salvador (where there was a powerful guerrilla movement, the Farabundo Mart\u00ed National Liberation Front – FMLN)\u00a0and, to a lesser extent, to other countries.
\nIn Nicaragua, it promoted, funded and armed the “contras<\/em>” guerrillas to fight and weaken the Sandinista regime (the \u201ccontras\u201d ranged from Sandinistas splinter sectors to Somocistas, including dissident bourgeois, peasants, and indigenous leaders).\u00a0In El Salvador, Reagan supported the fascist military offensive of the Military Junta to control San Salvador [the capital] and expel the guerrillas and their supporters from there.
\nBut this hardening was at the service of pacts and negotiations.\u00a0In 1983 the governments of Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia formed the Contadora Group to seek a “peaceful solution” to the “Central American conflicts”.\u00a0Subsequently, the “Contadora Support Group” (the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay) and the Costa Rican president Oscar Arias presented the “peace plan” that bears its name.\u00a0It was a delicate blow against revolutionary processes: while Reagan played the role of “bad guy”, Latin American bourgeois-democratic governments were the “friends” that stifled by embracing “peace”.
\nThe maneuver worked.\u00a0In Nicaragua, the war finished after the Agreement of Esquipulas II (1987): the guerrilla “contras<\/em>” was disarmed but at the same time the Sandinista regime delivered important concessions, including to isolate the Salvadorean guerrillas.\u00a0In El Salvador, it took a little longer: in 1992, through Chapultepec agreements, the FMLN abandoned the armed struggle for power, surrendered the weapons and became a “normal” political party.\u00a0The Central American revolution had been halted and diverted by the \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d policy.
\nThe Struggle Against South American Dictatorships <\/strong>
\nSince early 1980\u2019s in several South American countries (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) there was a strong rise of masses against the dictatorships in power since previous decades.
\nThat was another challenge for the policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d directed to avoid the fall of those dictatorships by mass actions, model taken from the successful Spanish “transition since 1976, after the death of Francisco Franco (1975) -meaning a transition controlled by the outgoing regime itself (thus avoiding being “judged” and violently destroyed).\u00a0This had basis on the capitulation of the treacherous leaders (in the case of Spain, the PSOE and the PCE) and expressed in the so-called “Pactos de la Moncloa”.\u00a0It was a preemptive policy against the democratic revolution, as well as a mechanism to avoid it.
\nIn Chile, after the defeat of Pinochet through the plebiscite of 1988, in midst of a very strong anti-dictatorial rise, the Chilean bourgeoisie together with imperialism were able to apply this policy thanks to the capitulation of the CP [Communist Party] and the SP [Socialist Party].\u00a0The dictatorship left the scene to be replaced by a regime of elections and parliament.\u00a0But the armed and repressive forces were left intact and many laws of Pinochetismo were maintained.
\nThis policy to avoid the fall of dictatorships was not always successful.\u00a0But even when dictatorships fell by the action of the masses the \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d sought to ensure the control of revolutionary processes in the framework of capitalist states through bourgeois democracy.
\nIn Argentina, the defeat in the Falkland [Malvinas] War (June 1982) accelerated the process of fall of the dictatorship by the combination between its self-collapse and the revolutionary action of the masses.\u00a0The democratic revolution had triumphed.\u00a0The masses took the streets to take advantage of the space gained and to fight for their many demands.\u00a0If revolution could not be avoided, it was a question of channeling and curbing its development through mechanisms of bourgeois democracy.\u00a0In this case, the essential role of containment was played by the two traditional bourgeois parties with mass support: Peronism (Justicialist Party – PJ) and Radicalism (Radical Civic Union – UCR).
\nIn order to do that, they relied on the illusions of the masses on democracy to solve all their problems.\u00a0Something that Ra\u00fal Alfons\u00edn (who would be elected president in 1983) took advantage of in its electoral campaign:\u00a0“Democracy feeds, heals and educates<\/em>“.\u00a0The revolution was not defeated on the streets but it was stalled by several tricky mechanisms that included trial and jail of the main military figures of the dictatorship.
\nThe main forces behind the implementation of this policy in different parts of the world were the ones mentioned and voted in the documents of the II World Congress of the IWL-FI (1984), called the World Counter-Revolutionary Front for “Peace and Democracy”. Imperialism, the Stalinist bureaucracy, the majority of the national bourgeoisies and their parties, the Church, the Western Communist Parties, and Social-Democracy were part of it.
\nThe Interregnum Of Bill Clinton <\/strong>
\nReagan’s two terms were followed by one led by his vice-president, George Bush Sr. (1989-1993).\u00a0The elections of late 1992 once again tipped the balance to the Democrats with the triumph of back-then Arkansas state governor, Bill Clinton.
\nCapturing his youthful image and smile (which reminded of John Kennedy) he defeated the “old” Bush.\u00a0Clinton had a “rebellious” past: he and his wife Hillary had participated in, and encouraged, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and in 1969 he avoided being draft into the army and sent to war.\u00a0A few years later he joined bourgeois politics and made a quick race within the Democratic Party.\u00a0It took advantage of a good international and national economic situation, derived from the benefits that imperialism obtained of capitalist restoration in the former workers\u2019 states (especially China).\u00a0He was then comfortably re-elected in 1996.
\nDuring his government, he maintained the foreign policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d, whose objectives he extended to other fields.\u00a0For example, he gave the initial impetus for what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S, Canada, and Mexico.\u00a0This and other similar agreements made later were a sign that imperialist interests could be defended without invasions or military coups but through agreements with the national bourgeoisies instead.
\nLet\u2019s not delude ourselves: Clinton also resorted to the \u201cstick\u201d. In 1998, he carried out the first attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with similar excuses to the ones Bush would later use: the alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction”. This military action, supported by the British government, was known as Operation Desert Fox. It was a limited action to put pressure but whose foundation would later be used by Bush. Within the United States, in 1994, he sanctioned the so-called “Three-Strikes\u201d Law which we address in another article in this magazine.
\nDue to the absence of major conflicts in the United States, Clinton ended his two constitutional mandates with the highest popular approval rating a president had since World War II. After that, he became one of the main leaders of the Democratic Party and he carried out campaigns that him to do very good business, such as the Haarlem Real Estate recovery in New York, or the boost for maquilas in the free zones of Haiti.
\nBush: A Defeated Change Of Direction <\/strong>
\nThe Republican candidate for the late 2000 elections, George Bush Jr., represented a sector of leaders of this party grouped around the project called New American Century. That sector considered the dispute over natural resources control across nations (essentially oil) the decisive factor of the 21st century. In case the U.S. could not ensure its hegemony on these fields, it was destined to fall as a world power.
\nIn order to ensure such control, aggressive and warlike methods against other countries were valid and necessary. Foreign policy by Clinton and the Democrats was characterized as “insufficient” and “timid” because it led to the weakening of the U.S. and therefore changes were demanded. That is to say, Bush and his team proposed to turn the rudder around: to put an end to Vietnam syndrome and the defensive policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d. Instead, Bush wanted to take the offensive making the \u201cstick\u201d the central element of his policies.
\nHowever, the Bush administration was born weak and under question: he obtained less popular votes than the Democratic candidate Al Gore and became president thanks to a controversial Supreme Court definition to his benefit.
\nIn order to carry out his project, Bush took advantage of the political effect of the attack to the Twin Towers in New York, on September 11, 2001. Many analysts even raise the possibility that the Bush administration was aware of the attacks and let them happen to carry out the backlash.
\nBeyond this controversy, after 9\/11 Bush received the support from both imperialist bourgeoisie and working people as his hawkish approach looked like legitimate actions. He proposed to launch the “war on terror” against what he called “the axis of evil\u201d: among others, the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Korea and Iran.
\nThe first episode of that war was the invasion of Afghanistan to topple Taliban regime (accused of supporting the 9\/11 perpetrators) in October 2001, with minority participation of troops from Britain and other countries. The next step was the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein regime for possession of “weapons of mass destruction”. Both regimes were overthrown but imperialism was forced to maintain military occupations that had to face increasingly unfavorable national liberation wars that ended up objectively with its defeat.
\nOccupation troops have already withdrawn from Iraq, but instead of achieving stability they left a country divided (at least in three) plunged into permanent military conflicts, and the need to rely on the Iranian regime (until recently, an “enemy”) to place a central government in Baghdad and try to prevent the situation from getting even worse. In Afghanistan, troops are still on the ground but the U.S. Military leaders recognize they have been defeated. These troops only serve to maintain control of the central areas of Kabul (the capital) while the rest of the country is dominated by Taliban forces or regional tribal chiefs. Meanwhile, a negotiation with the rebels is sought to achieve a slightly more dignified withdrawal. A collateral damage is the spread of instability (in fact, war itself) to neighboring Pakistan (a strong U.S. ally until a few years ago).
\nIt is true that these defeats do not appear, at first glance, as clear and evident as Vietnam. For example, they did not give rise to a workers’ state as in Vietnam. They were also somewhat obscured by the chaos left in Iraq or by the fact that they still control Kabul in Afghanistan. But they are not minor defeats. Imperialist bourgeoisie and its media were not deceived: they developed the concept of “Iraq syndrome” (in analogy with that of Vietnam) to characterize the resulting situation and the need to go back to the \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d policy.
\nIraq and Afghanistan were not the only defeats of Bush\u2019s project. We must consider, as part of these defeats, the failure of the coup against Ch\u00e1vez in Venezuela in 2002 and the clear defeat of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
\nThe invasion of Haiti in 2004 -and subsequent military occupation- deserves special consideration. Today Haiti is objectively a colony of the United States. But imperialism managed to “outsource” this occupation through the U.N. and the Minustah, led by Brazilian troops with the collaboration of other countries, and thus avoid the direct political cost. The occupation is maintained, at the service of Clinton\u2019s maquilas plan, but it is going through a deep crisis.
\nA New Face For A New Turn Of Rudder<\/strong>
\nBush left a “heavy inheritance”: unfavorable relationship of forces around the world and a deep economic crisis. In this context, the most lucid sectors of the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie launched a new turn of rudder aiming to resume the implementation of the \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d policy fully and Obama as the best figure to implement such change in 2008.
\nIn another article of this magazine, we discussed how Obama addressed this double \u201cstorm\u201d and what were the results. In spite of some important achievements (made possible by the crisis of revolutionary leadership and the capitulation of treacherous leaders), his administration failed to bring stability to the world. That is the current situation for U.S. imperialism.
\nIn an analysis of the current world situation, Zbigniew Brzezinski once again shows his imperialist lucidity. In an interview in 2014 for a Brazilian magazine, he said: “We are experiencing an unprecedented period of instability. There are huge fringes of world territory dominated by turmoil, revolutions, rage, and loss of state control… It is a global political awakening based on an awareness of injustices, inequalities, and exploitation… The United States is still dominant but now not capable of exercising hegemonic power… American fragility is evident in its inability to provide stability to the dynamic and unpredictable situation of Middle East…<\/em> “.[1]<\/a> So the concept of “imperialism is not doing what it wants but what it can” maintains full currency – even more than in the 80\u2019s.
\nOur first conclusion is that the policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d adresses this concrete and deep reality. Nevertheless, it brings back the lessons from Vietnam where military actions that turned into occupations and extended wars end up being very negative for imperialism. Whereas, in the context of a world convulsed by revolutions, the \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d has proven to be more successful and give greater margin to maneuver. It also achieved a complementary success: to co-opt the majority of the left-wing forces to the “benefits” of bourgeois democracy, turning them into new components of the “world order”.
\nThe question now is, however, what will the Trump administration do. His campaign speeches and several of the members appointed to his cabinet go in the direction of ending or reducing the policy of \u201cdemocratic reaction\u201d. If it comes true, it might have a disastrous effect that increases mass reaction combined with cracks within imperialist bourgeoisie. Revolutionaries must promote struggles in repudiation to Trump in order to take advantage of those cracks of the ruling classes.
\n**
\nTranslation: Fabio Bosco.
\nNotes:
\n[1]<\/a> \u00c9poca Magazine, issue 863, December 15, 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1975, the United States suffered a severe military defeat in the Vietnam War (the first in its history). This defeat limited the capacity for direct military intervention by U.S. imperialism and led to a policy adapted to this reality that we have called “democratic reaction”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8136,"menu_order":1361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"litci_post_political_author":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3645,4978,3491],"tags":[1551,4977,3656,4472,4980,4982],"class_list":["post-8134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-international-courier","category-theory","tag-alejandro-iturbe","tag-democratic-reaction","tag-imperialism","tag-international-courier","tag-iraq-syndrome","tag-vietnam-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\nThe \u201cDemocratic Reaction\u201d: From Vietnam To Iraq Syndrome - International Worker's League<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/the-democratic-reaction-from-vietnam-to-iraq-syndrome\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The \u201cDemocratic Reaction\u201d: From Vietnam To Iraq Syndrome - International Worker's League\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In 1975, the United States suffered a severe military defeat in the Vietnam War (the first in its history). 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