[Marxism] Vietnam and Iraq

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, January 29, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS
Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and
Vietnam
By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 - Not quite 38 years ago, enmeshed in a drawn-out war
whose ultimate outcome was deeply in doubt, Lyndon B. Johnson met on Guam
with the fractious generals who were contending for leadership of South
Vietnam and told them: "My birthday is in late August. The greatest
birthday present you could give me is a national election."

George W. Bush's birthday is in early July, but his broad goals for the
Iraqi elections on Sunday are much the same as the Johnson administration's
in 1967: to confer political legitimacy and credibility on a government
that Iraqis themselves will be willing and able to fight to defend, and
that American and world public opinion will agree to help nurture.

"I think one lesson is that there be a clear objective that everybody
understands," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times this
week, reflecting on the relevance of Vietnam today. "A free, democratic
Iraq, an ally in the war on terror, with an Iraqi army, all parts of it -
Iraqi forces, army, national guard, border guard, police force - able to
defend itself. Secondly, that people understand the connection between that
goal and our future."

But the difficulties of achieving such objectives, then and now, have led a
range of military experts, historians and politicians to consider the
parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to warn of potential pitfalls ahead.
Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are
no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed,
but are instead bubbling to the top.

"We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning," Senator
Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of this war's most vocal opponents,
warned in a speech here on Thursday. "We thought the skill and courage of
our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would
lead to victory in war and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam.
In the name of a misguided cause, we continued in a war too long. We failed
to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very
presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out
to achieve."

Mr. Kennedy said that there would be "costs to staying and costs to
leaving" Iraq, but that at least 12,000 American troops should leave
immediately to signal the United States has a clear exit strategy. That is
a version of the famous advice that Senator George Aiken, a Vermont
Republican, gave Johnson: declare victory in Vietnam, then leave.

Prof. Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air Force's Air War
College in Alabama, said he seldom provoked controversy when he warned his
audiences of military commanders about the potential parallels between
Vietnam and Iraq.

"There was a time when if you mentioned Iraq and Vietnam in the same
breath, you were automatically considered antiwar and very pessimistic
about our prospects there," he said. "And of course those arguments were
used in the beginning by people who opposed the war. But all the more
reason to take a sound and hopefully unbiased look at what comparisons
there are and are not."

He is quick to point out that finding similarities is far from saying the
ending will be the same. "The issue of creating a legitimate government in
Iraq, and the domestic political sustainability of our policy in Iraq, are
the two major areas of interface with our experience in Vietnam, where we
failed," Professor Record said. "That doesn't mean we're necessarily doomed
to failure."

But, he added, "the challenge of Vietnamization" - the Nixon
administration's policy, begun in 1969, of phasing out American forces and
turning war responsibilities over to the South Vietnamese, "is akin to
Iraqicization." In Vietnam, unlike in Iraq, the United States "already had
in place a rather large South Vietnamese army and security force" on which
it could rely, instead of having to create one from scratch.

Stanley Karnow, who covered the Vietnam War and diplomacy as a journalist
and wrote the exhaustive "Vietnam: A History," said, "You've got to be very
careful about drawing analogies." But, noting recent polls that show
overwhelming public concern that Mr. Bush has no clear plan for getting out
of Iraq and deep skepticism that elections there will reduce the violence,
Mr. Karnow added: "You are beginning to see the public turning off on Iraq.
The same was true in Vietnam."

Anthony Lake, who as a young Foreign Service officer was vice consul in Hue
and went on to serve as national security adviser under Bill Clinton, now
teaches a graduate course at Georgetown University on Vietnam. His
students' final assignment this year is to assess the parallels and
dissimilarities between Iraq and Vietnam. Perhaps the most troubling
comparison, in his view, is the lack of an achievable political goal.

"In Iraq, at the beginning, there was simply an assumption that in terms of
a political goal, there would be immaculate democracy and rose petals," Mr.
Lake said. Now, he said, that the administration is "setting as a goal is
enough training and enough combat support so that there will be enough
stability that we can leave. The paradox is that as long as we're there,
we're fueling the very insurgency, or the very conflict which we say has to
end before we can depart."

Michael Rubin, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
who recently returned from Iraq, published an op-ed piece in the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz on Friday in which he noted that Arab television in
Baghdad routinely showed archival footage of American diplomats fleeing
Saigon, as if to suggest that whatever Mr. Bush may say about America's
staying power, "it is weak."

It is easy enough to catalogue all the important differences - some of them
obvious, others less so - between Vietnam and Iraq. For one thing, American
involvement in Vietnam began with more public support and greater agreement
among the military, the government, the media and academia that fighting
communism in Southeast Asia was a worthy goal. Precisely because of the
Vietnam experience, the current war in Iraq began in spite of considerable
domestic doubt about its wisdom and necessity.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two wars is that for more than
two years in Vietnam, the Johnson administration steadily escalated
American involvement, while from the beginning, the Bush administration has
been intent on limiting the number of American troops in Iraq. Only a
handful of voices in Congress have called for increasing the troop
presence, and there is virtually no public support for doing so.

On Friday, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who served in
Vietnam, recalled in a speech here how J. William Fulbright, then chairman
of the foreign relations committee, was criticized almost 40 years ago for
holding hearings on Vietnam while a president of his own party was in
power. He said Fulbright explained that he had done so in hopes of building
a true consensus in the long run even at the risk of dispelling a false one
in the short run.

"Today, we must not be party to a false consensus in Iraq or any foreign
policy issue," Mr. Hagel said, in urging an exit strategy that relies on
increased training for Iraqi troops and stepped up diplomacy and
burden-sharing. "Hopefully Iraq will someday be a democratic example in the
Middle East. But Iraq could also become a failed state. We cannot let this
happen."

There are, of course, a handful of people in central policy positions now
who played important roles in the Vietnam era, and presumably the
applicable lessons are not lost on them.

In 1973, John D. Negroponte, now Mr. Bush's ambassador to Baghdad, was
Henry A. Kissinger's special assistant on Vietnam. Mr. Negroponte protested
that the peace agreement that allowed North Vietnamese forces to remain in
the South after the American withdrawal would leave the situation
"basically unresolved," Mr. Karnow recounts in his book. But Mr. Kissinger
was unmoved, asking: "What do you want us to do? Stay there forever?"

In Iraq this week, the top American commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr.,
offered a similar view. "We cannot stay here forever in the numbers that we
are here now; I firmly believe that," he told reporters. "The Iraqis have
to take ownership of this."

While Mr. Bush has taken pains not to spell out any timetable for the
withdrawal of American troops, American military commanders have said that
after the elections on Sunday, their principal mission will become the
training of Iraqi forces. The prevailing view among even conservatives who
supported the war from the start is that such a handover must begin.

"It's rough in a place like Iraq, where you can always point to all the
problems and weaknesses that the Iraqi security forces have," said Max
Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who strongly
supported the Iraq invasion. "They're never going to be as good as the
Marines or the 101st Airborne, so it's always going to be easy to say, 'We
don't trust these guys.' But we're going to have to try."

He added: "What was disastrous in Vietnam is that we were suffering a lot
of casualties with no obvious gain. We're not quite in that situation in
Iraq, but you can certainly see a building sense of frustration about
whether we're making progress."

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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