BUSH SAYS AMERICAN PSYCHE TOO WEAK FOR WAR

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hastings
Newsweek
Updated: 6:03 p.m. ET Aug 23, 2006
Aug. 23, 2006 - Is Iraq the latest stage for an American psychodrama? President George W. Bush seems to think so. His remarks earlier this week about how the war is "straining America's psyche" suggest that the key to winning is preventing a nervous breakdown on a national scale. He defined the terms of the crisis like so: "If we ever give up the desire to help people who want to live in a free society, we will have lost our soul as a nation." Iraq itself is no longer just a battleground for the war on terror; it is no longer only a Mideast country to act as a model democracy; it is a place where our innermost being is up for grabs. That strain we feel is both spiritual and mental. At stake in this war for Arab hearts and minds is our American soul.

Sound familiar? I was reminded of all the Vietnam films I'd watched as a kid. There's a simple message in each of them, from “Platoon” to “Full Metal Jacket.” The war is about us, not them. Vietnam is merely the setting for Americans to understand what it means to be an American. What moral choices do we make? What is our national identity? How much strain on the psyche can we take before we crack? Did we lose our soul somewhere between Saigon and Hanoi? Those same questions are starting to be asked about Iraq—support for the war is at an all-time low—and the president was forced to acknowledge them.

In the classic Vietnam flicks, America's own national identity crisis is almost always more important than the country where the war is actually being fought. Oliver Stone's “Platoon” gives us the idealistic young soldier (played by Charlie Sheen) caught between the '60s radical (Willem Defoe) and the hard-nose realist (Tom Berenger.) The film ends with an airstrike being called on American troops; Sheen’s private kills Berenger’s sergeant, and Defoe is dramatically gunned down. America at war with itself, its own morals and national character locked in battle. In Brian De Palma's “Casualties of War”—a movie about a squad of soldiers who kidnap a Vietnamese girl and rape her on a long-range patrol—we see the same thing. The Vietnamese aren't the enemies; the struggle is over America's conscience. (To the point, the recent accusations leveled against Steven Green and some fellow soldiers accused of raping a 14-year-old girl bear eerie similarities to the film.) Or in “Apocalypse Now,” based loosely on Joseph Conrad's novel “Heart of Darkness,” when the hero finds his Mr. Kurtz in the form of Marlon Brando. The most influential Vietnam memoir, “Dispatches”—written by Michael Herr, who also worked on the “Apocalypse Now” screenplay—ends with this line: "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there." Of course we haven't literally, as Tom Bissell recently pointed out in Salon. It's a state of mind where nothing is as it seems, a line that captures what Vietnam meant for Americans, not for the Vietnamese.

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