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20 November, 2007
Bush’s VietnamPresident Bush has never been accused of being a scholar, but his failure to learn the right lessons about Vietnam is costing human lives. Republicans prefer the World War II metaphor for the occupation of Iraq, and they press that comparison no matter how absurdly wrong it is. Even the neocons can see the parallels between the old war in Southeast Asia and the new war in the Middle East. It’s an uncomfortable reality that they would prefer to ignore. Worse than failing to learn the right lessons from Vietnam, Bush has learned the wrong ones. Last year, when asked if there were lessons to take from Vietnam that could be applied to Iraq, he said “Yes. One lesson is, is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.” On the surface that is ridiculous. Instant success? We pulled out after twenty years, yet we wanted instant success? Bush has bought into a Conservative myth about Vietnam. Bitter at the withdrawal of troops without crushing every last enemy, apologists for Johnson and Westmoreland insist that the failing was in Washington, not in the jungles of Vietnam. Weak politicians held the troops back, and we would have achieved victory if only the military had been allowed to take the necessary action with the resources they needed. The war was escalated by a Democrat and ended by a Republican, yet the blame falls on Liberals who caved into popular pressure. The Conservative analysis of Vietnam is wrong, but understandable. As Americans, we don’t like the word “lose” attached to any of our endeavors. At the time, the democratic West was in an epic contest against the communist Soviet Union, and any failure could be seen as a setback in the Cold War. This myth that we would have eventually won in Vietnam if only we had stuck with it is derived from psychology and ideology, not from the facts. The American military pounded away at that little country for twenty years, and 58,000 Americans sacrificed their lives to the cause. Escalation after escalation yielded the same results. Americans won all the battles, but the Vietnamese were fighting a different kind of war. They believed they were fighting for their independence, and they were prepared to fight to the last man. The idea that somehow, after all that time, blood, and treasure devoted to it, Vietnam would have somehow turned around if we had just thrown more at it, is impossible to believe. Would another twenty years have done it? Forty? Yet the President of the United States believes this myth, and he is acting on the false lessons from it. Iraq is not Vietnam. It is perfectly legitimate to point out the differences between the two wars, as Christopher Hitchens has done. Iraq has a religious element that Vietnam did not have. The death toll in Iraq is nowhere near what was seen in Vietnam. We are not caught in a security dilemma against a super power. Such concessions, while important, do not diminish the similarities between the two wars. No two historical events are exactly the same, but that does not mean that the lessons from one cannot be applied to the other. The most salient similarity between the two conflicts is that our enemy is fighting a different war than we are. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there is a civil war that is raging underneath the American occupation. Both the Vietnam myth and the decision to invade Iraq come from the false confidence of militarism. Both war and politics are too often compared to sports, where you root for your favorite team to win no matter what, and you front an air of confidence even if the outcome is uncertain. The problem is, when a sporting event ends, everybody goes home alive and you plan another game next week. The decision to go to war carries such a heavy cost that the greatest weight must be given to the reasons. Overconfidence at the outset of war leads to words like “bring it on,” “cakewalk,” and the claim that we would be “greeted as liberators.” It is a false bravado, and it costs lives. Anybody can be wrong. I argued against invading Iraq in the first place, but I could have been wrong just as easily as the pro-war Bushies. The wisdom of my position can be seen in the situation we would have faced if the outcome had gone the other way. I didn’t think Saddam Hussein had WMD, but suppose I was wrong. Suppose he did. Had we not invaded, we still had a regime of inspectors in the country searching for them and hampering his efforts to build more. Invading Iraq still would have been an option if real evidence had turned up down the road. In the meantime, our resources would still have been available in the fight against Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still running around breathing free air, which is absolutely unacceptable. To be sure, it would have been very difficult to capture him in Afghanistan in any event, but we would have had a much better chance had the bulk of our military stayed in the hunt. Even better, the good reputation of the United States following the tragedy of 9/11 would have been intact, and more countries would have been willing to aid us in the war on terror. That would have been the down-side of following my recommendations, even if I had been wrong. What, then, was the up-side of invading Iraq had George W. Bush been right about Hussein’s WMD? We would have eliminated one threat, a threat that had theretofore been isolated and contained, that had not attacked the United States, and had no ties to 9/11. We would still have been stuck with exactly the same post-invasion problems that we face today. We’re locked in. Invading Iraq eliminates dozens of other options. “You break it, you own it,” as Colin Powell warned. Tellingly, the up-side of invading Iraq looks remarkably like the down-side. The only difference is that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and our credibility around the world has been damaged. As the occupation of Iraq drags on, Bush continues to apply the wrong lessons from Vietnam. You can call this year’s escalation a “surge” if you want to, but the truth is that it was an escalation that would have made Lyndon Johnson proud. In the 1960s, Robert McNamara tried to put the best possible spin on the situation for the press. Now, John McCain tells us that Baghdad is a lovely place for an evening stroll. In the meantime, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are thrown into the meat grinder. Bush, like Johnson, will leave his mess for future administrations to clean up. We’re not in a traditional war anymore, we’re in an occupation. You can’t win or lose an occupation. You can either stay or go. There will be negative consequences either way, just as there were in Vietnam. If we stay, we face the same negative consequences we would face if we left, but upon that pile we heap the bodies of American soldiers, American’s good name, and resources that could be diverted to threats elsewhere in the world.
© 2007 Bryan Lower
(1) http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1560609,00.html
© 2007 Bryan Lower
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