Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam

Or, How Not to Learn from the Past

Lloyd C. Gardner, Marilyn B. Young, Lloyd C. Gardner, Marilyn B. Young

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781595587374
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Vietnamkrieg

Essays by Christian G. Appy, Andrew J. Bacevich, John Prados, and others offer "history at its best, meaning, at its most useful." —Howard Zinn From the launch of the "Shock and Awe" invasion in March 2003 through President George W. Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" two months later, the war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate definitively that the United States had learned the lessons of Vietnam. This new book makes clear that something closer to the opposite is true—that US foreign policy makers have learned little from the past, even as they have been obsessed with the "Vietnam Syndrome." Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam brings together the country's leading historians of the Vietnam experience. Examining the profound changes that have occurred in the country and the military since the Vietnam War, this book assembles a distinguished group to consider how America found itself once again in the midst of a quagmire—and the continuing debate about the purpose and exercise of American power. Also includes contributions from: Alex Danchev * David Elliott * Elizabeth L. Hillman * Gabriel Kolko * Walter LaFeber * Wilfried Mausbach * Alfred W. McCoy * Gareth Porter "Essential." —Bill Moyers

1

Parallel Wars? Can “Lessons of Vietnam” Be Applied to Iraq?

DAVID ELLIOTT

As the invasion of Afghanistan temporarily sputtered in late 2001, reporters asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld if the United States might be getting into another Vietnam. “All together now: Quagmire!” Rumsfeld mocked.¹ Several months after the occupation of Iraq, Rumsfeld was again queried about the Vietnam parallel and again rejected it. “It’s a different era,” he said. “It’s a different place.”²

True on both counts. And yet the term “quagmire” hasn’t gone away, and the Vietnam parallels have proliferated.

Melvin Laird, secretary of defense in the Nixon administration, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The Vietnam War that I saw, first from my seat in Congress and then as secretary of defense, cannot be wrapped in a tidy package and tagged ‘bad idea.’ It was far more complex than that: a mixture of good and evil from which there are many valuable lessons to be learned. Yet the only lesson that seems to have endured is the one that begins and ends with ‘Don’t go there.’ The war in Iraq is not ‘another Vietnam.’ But it could become one if we continue to use Vietnam as a sound bite while ignoring its true lessons.”³

Uses and Misuses of Analogies

I teach a course on U.S. foreign policy and a course on the Vietnam War. Until 2004 I made great efforts to avoid linking Iraq and Vietnam. The “lessons of Vietnam” are numerous but often contradictory. Perhaps the most salient of these is to be very careful in applying analogies. Yuan Foong Khong, a former student at the Claremont Colleges, now at Oxford, wrote a classic book titled Analogies at War, in which he painstakingly analyzed the various ways in which analogies were misused by U.S. officials during the Vietnam War. The book appeared in 1992, just as U.S. foreign policy decision makers were grappling with the new and unfamiliar terrain of the post–Cold War world. Khong analyzed in detail how and why decision makers resort to analogies when confronted with novel problems. They serve as a cognitive filter that transforms the unfamiliar into something recognizable and reduces complexity to manageable proportions. The pitfalls of this conceptual screening process are many, however. The wrong analogy may be chosen—perhaps Kennedy and Johnson would have been better served by cautions about the French experience in Indochina than by bracing lessons from Munich and Korea. Or a potentially useful analogy may be misinterpreted or misapplied, as in the case of the misguided application of British experience in the Malayan Emergency to Vietnam.

Here is a brief reviewer’s summary of Khong’s book:

In this splendid study, Yuen Foong Khong has laid open the weakness but easy attraction of reasoning by analogy in the making of foreign policy decisions. Reasoning by analogy has characterized much post–Second World War international discussion, especially in the United States. Now “no more Vietnams” has joined “no more Munichs” and “no more Koreas” in the standard package of policy rationalizations. ... The importance of this volume is not merely its help in explaining American decisions leading to the Vietnam war. It is also a useful pointer to the use of the most frequently cited foreign policy analogy in the United States today: “no more Vietnams.” As Yuen Foong Khong shows in his conclusion, Vietnam has led to the drawing of a number of “lessons” for policy-makers. One is that interventions must only occur where American interests are vital; the other is that short, sharp interventions with a certain exit route and a high probability of “winning” are essential.

One might argue that this lesson, as summarized by the reviewer, should have cautioned against launching a war of choice, based on shaky premises, with no Plan B in place if the optimistic scenario did not work out. However, as the reviewer prophetically noted in 1993, “[Khong] argues that reasoning by the analogy of Vietnam will be no more successful than reasoning by the analogies of Munich and Korea.”⁴

So let us again emphasize Secretary Rumsfeld’s caution that Iraq is not Vietnam. And yet the Vietnam analogies have become part of the debate about the conflict in Iraq. We should try to understand why this has happened, before moving to the more obvious issue of whether these analogies shed any light on America’s current problems in Iraq.

The Vietnam analogies actually predated the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The most often cited was the parallel between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the congressional preauthorization of the use of armed force to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. The similarities most often mentioned were the blank-check nature of the congressional authorization of military action and the allegations of presidential deception to gain congressional assent.⁵

One important nonparallel is the nature of the decision-making process in the two conflicts. It is clear that both President Kennedy and President Johnson were pulled reluctantly along the path of escalation in Vietnam, while in Iraq the impetus for escalation came from the top. Because of presidential reluctance to raise the stakes in Vietnam, the decision-making process was prolonged and complex. In Iraq, it is hard to speak of a decision-making process. A senior official in the Bush administration later said, “There was no debate about the wisdom of going to war. ... No discussion of pros and cons, of what might happen, no planning for the unexpected. It was just something we were going to do.”⁶ Bob Woodward’s book on the planning of the Iraq invasion revealed that there was never a formal meeting to ratify or even discuss the merits of the idea, and that neither the secretary of state nor the secretary of defense was ever specifically asked if he agreed with the wisdom of this policy. Clearly Iraq will not go down as a model of good decision-making process for future generations.

The decision-making process in Vietnam was also flawed in many respects. Assumptions were not challenged, analogies were misused, options were not fully developed or explored, estimates of success were too optimistic, costs and benefits were not assessed, fallback plans were not often specified—all parallels with the Iraq process. Yet if the best and the brightest did not, in the final analysis, come up with the right answers to the Vietnam conundrum, it was not for lack of discussion and debate. The very incrementalism that many conservatives saw as the fatal flaw of Vietnam decision making at least guaranteed an extended process of deliberation.

“Vietnam”—Shorthand for “Failure”

Once the Iraq invasion had apparently succeeded—leading President Bush to declare “mission accomplished”—the Vietnam references tailed off. As many conservative commentators noted, the invocation of “another Vietnam” is based on the identification of “Vietnam” with defeat. The term “Vietnam” is shorthand for “failure.” Throughout much of 2003, U.S. officials, the Congress, and dominant public opinion were not inclined to label Iraq a failure, and the press was therefore generally cautious in invoking memories of Vietnam. When Vietnam was mentioned in the press during this period, it was usually done to suggest that the parallels were invalid or of limited usefulness, or to point to lessons of Vietnam that should not be repeated. So it is not surprising that the use of Vietnam parallels for criticism of the Bush policy reemerged in public discussion around the time the media began to question the view of Iraq as a success story in 2004.

Vietnam analogies started to appear in public discussion even during the invasion of Afghanistan, and sporadically surfaced in the debate about the wisdom of invading Iraq and in the immediate aftermath of that invasion. H.D.S. Greenway of the Boston Globe wrote in early April 2003:

Comparisons with Vietnam have their limits. The United States will not lose this war, for no other reason than there are no safe havens such as north of the 17th parallel provided for the Vietnamese. But there is no hiding that the Pentagon was taken by surprise by the stiff resistance of guerrilla-like irregulars, as evidenced by Washington spending most of a week playing down what men in the field have been saying. This, too, has its echoes with Vietnam.... What this all comes down to is—and there is no kinder word—hubris. ... Already officers in the Gulf are comparing Rumsfeld to Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense and architect of Vietnam who sent his soldiers into battle when he knew nothing of the Vietnamese.⁷

Yet even critical and seasoned observers initially were cautious about invoking the Vietnam parallel in Iraq.

An official acknowledgment that the United States is now involved in a guerrilla war in Iraq is no surprise and not immediate cause for alarm, military and foreign policy experts say. “You’re always well-advised to acknowledge reality,” said Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army colonel and Vietnam veteran. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid had just given the first official description of the Iraqi conflict as a guerrilla war, and indicated he might request more troops. “It suggests it is bigger than they had led us to believe,” Bacevich said, but added, “None of that means it’s Vietnam, that we should get ready for the Tet offensive, or that we should call it a quagmire.” Bacevich warned, “If it turns out there is a substantial portion of the Iraqi people who hate the Americans and want them gone, then it gets ugly.”⁸

The Christian Science Monitor spelled out the reasons for its editorial view that “Iraq is not like Vietnam” in late August 2003.⁹ This view was also editorially expressed by papers in Pittsburgh and Chicago around the same time.¹⁰ The Chicago Sun-Times cited evidence of progress and concluded that the main danger in Iraq was that panicky U.S. press coverage might turn victory into defeat—invoking a widespread interpretation of the Tet offensive in Vietnam as the point at which more resolute prosecution of the Vietnam War might have turned the tide, but was derailed by ill-informed negative press coverage. In an article subtitled “A Tet Moment for Iraq,” John O’Sullivan said, “ ‘Remember the Tet Offensive’ is the mantra I’ve been repeating to myself as gloomy media accounts of the deepening U.S. quagmire in Iraq crowded the airwaves and news pages . . . we are at a moment like the Tet offensive. This time we had better make sure that, whatever decision we make, it is based on understanding the reality of the conflict.”¹¹

By November 2003 the issue of Vietnam parallels heated up in the U.S. press. Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times and a former Times bureau chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War, wrote: “ ‘QUAGMIRE,’ ‘attrition,’ ‘credibility gap,’ ‘Iraqification’—a listener to the debate over the situation in Iraq might think that it truly is Vietnam all over again.” “But,” Whitney cautioned, “Iraq is not Vietnam, and 2003 is not 1975 or 1968. Saddam Hussein was driven out of power and his regime collapsed last spring. There is no independent sanctuary named “North Iraq” for his Baath Party henchmen to fight from, no Soviet Union to keep them supplied with arms and fuel, no equivalent of Laos or Cambodia in the Middle East for whole divisions of his loyalists to hide in, no Ho Chi Minh Trail that suicide bombers can use to drive to Baghdad. Nor is there an allied Iraqi government yet, elected or otherwise.”

Whitney added that the terms of the American discussion about Iraq are often similar to the arguments about Vietnam, “and small wonder: although the Vietnamese Communists won the war in 1975, nobody won the battle about it here at home. That may be why, when boiled down to their essence, parts of the current debate seem to be almost as much about Vietnam as about Iraq, as Senator John McCain pointed out in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.”¹²

A number of other newspapers also expressed doubt that the Vietnam parallel was valid.¹³ The Washington Post took a more equivocal stance in early October 2003 with an article asking, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam Quagmire?” and answering, “No and yes.”¹⁴ By the end of the month the tone had changed. “Vietnam It Isn’t,” editorialized the Washington Post on October 30.¹⁵

Iraq Setbacks and Shifting Public Opinion Affect the Invocation of Vietnam Parallels

It would take more careful research to identify the exact point at which the fusion of a perception of Iraq as a failure and the escalation of cautionary Vietnam analogies in public discourse took place. They were not uncommon in the months of 2003 following the invasion, but these negative voices were held in check by the unrelenting official optimism from Washington and Baghdad, until fissures began to appear within the administration, the military in Iraq, and the occupation officials themselves. Two related factors combined to intensify the debate over the relevance of Vietnam analogies. The first was the recognition that the hostilities were not merely a moppingup operation and that U.S. military forces were likely to be in Iraq for a long time. From this flowed the second issue about the nature of the war—was it a full-blown insurgency, and if so, what did that mean? The question about the nature of the war had been brushed aside by those in the Bush administration who thought that the U.S. military presence in Iraq would be brief and, therefore, that the nature of the war was an abstract and irrelevant philosophical question. When soldiers and officials realized they were in it for the long term, the Vietnam tropes of quagmire, light at the end of the tunnel, and exit strategies became more prevalent.

At the higher levels it took a while for the realization that there would be no early or easy departure from Iraq to sink in, but the reality became increasingly clear at the lower levels by early 2004. Tom Ricks’s exhaustive account of this period observes that “a year on the ground had brought a new realism to the troops’ assessments of the situation. Few expected overnight solutions anymore, as many troops had in Iraq during the spring of 2003.”¹⁶ As Ricks’s book Fiasco reveals, there was some internal discussion of the specter of insurgency within the Bush administration in the second half of 2003, but top officials dismissed the idea, and it did not become a burning topic until the spring of 2004. It was at this juncture that the issue of how to cope with a growing insurgency surfaced. For nearly a year following the Iraq invasion, the administration maintained that the low-level resistance came from isolated “dead-enders”—followers of Saddam Hussein who had not reconciled themselves to the loss of power and privilege—and outside agitators. The spread of armed opposition to the occupation raised the question of how and why it had happened, and what to do about it. Ricks writes, “By the late winter of 2003–4, it was clear that the U.S. effort, both in pacification and reconstruction was faltering. But it wouldn’t be until spring [2004] that it would become clear just how troubled it was.”¹⁷

If a turning point in the widespread acceptance of the Vietnam parallel with Iraq could be found, it would be in the spring of 2004, specifically in April–May, around the time of the disastrous setback in Fallujah. As argued earlier, “Vietnam” simply was shorthand for “failure,” and it was at this time that the Iraq venture came to be perceived as a failure by the American people; not surprisingly, the press followed close behind. Ricks quotes a military officer in May 2004 as stating that three things had gone wrong that spring. First was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Second was the Marine setback at Fallujah (compounded by political mismanagement from Washington, as Ricks makes clear), which antagonized the Sunni population. Third was “the confrontation with Moqtadr al Sadr which alienated much of the Shiite population. The United States had indeed dug itself into a deep hole and didn’t know how to climb out of it.”¹⁸ It is not surprising that in May...