Therapy For Nation Builders

As we watched our helicopters abandon our terrified allies on the roof of our Saigon embassy, it seemed reasonable to assume that the shame of that moment would lead to a new sanity.

Instead, our failed ground combat interventions and nation building continue like a sort of neurosis, the kind that has been defined as doing the same thing over and over in expectation of a different result, in the manner of France fighting and losing one colonial war after another after World War II.

In America, however, this syndrome is a legacy not of colonialism but of World War II itself -- of a triumphalism of the sort John Kennedy perpetuated when he boasted of being from the generation born of that war, and said that the lesson to be learned was that we should pay any price, bear any burden, to assure the success of liberty.

How good we feel about ourselves, sharing this dream. Without the illusion that we can make it come true, we would be like Britain without its empire, like France without its mission civilatrice, a nation tinged by shabby resentment and existential resignation. The problem is that reality may leave us with nothing better in the end.

As part of our thought experiment, think now of our mind-set as an American sickness, an addiction in the form of a belief.

If it were an addiction, we would create a 12-step program to cure it. The first step would be recognizing that our governing establishment is powerless over it, and that our attitude toward our role in the world has become unmanageable.

Recovering alcoholics will say that they didn't begin their recovery until they "hit bottom." It turns out that it was a mistake to believe we hit bottom while watching those helicopters in 1975, or any of the smaller failures that have followed. And so, the proposal here is to make sure that this time we hit bottom hard enough to prove to ourselves once and for all that the very nation-building that George W. Bush swore off before the 2000 election still has him -- and, more important, us -- helpless in its grip.

On the other hand, maybe if we give the president everything he wants he'll turn this thing around. How nice. Then we can be off to invade Iran, barrel across the DMZ into North Korea, liberate Tibet . . .

Henry Allen is a writer and editor for The Post's Style section.