Friday, Jul 4, 2008
As White House denials grow insistent, some of the sharpest thinkers of the Vietnam generation see stark parallels with the war in Iraq.
Nov 17, 2003 | Helicopters are blown out of the sky by unseen enemies. Car bombs are detonated by guerrillas who seem to melt into the night. Casualties among U.S. troops and their allies are mounting by the day, and so are worry and mistrust among American voters. In Washington, top officials in the administration of George W. Bush insist there's no comparison between Iraq and Vietnam -- yet to judge by their actions, they have recently come to the nightmare realization that the parallels are real.
Abruptly, last week, Bush and his top advisors scrambled to change the dynamic of the 8-month-old conflict in Iraq: They abandoned their vow to make a slow, steady transition to democracy. Instead of moving ahead with plans to write an Iraqi constitution, they're rushing into elections. Desperate to bring more troops home before Election Day next November, they've enrolled untested Iraqis in an Evelyn Wood course in speed-policing.
And meanwhile, the CIA is warning that the U.S. is nearing a tipping point in Iraq, with more Iraqis losing faith in their liberators and edging closer to support for a guerrilla insurgency.
Is Iraq the new Vietnam? Partisans on the left and right have argued the issue since before the war began, and now the question is seeping into the mainstream. Both the White House and war critics know that it's a high-stakes debate, because success in the region -- and Bush's chances for reelection -- will depend in great part on whether skittish voters believe that the current conflict is another tragic, costly, unwinnable quagmire.
But as the Bush denials grow more insistent, some of the brightest and most critical thinkers of the Vietnam generation -- journalists, historians, soldiers and policy analysts -- are seeing stark similarities between the two wars. They defined the popular understanding of the Vietnam era with their works of journalism, memoir and history, and in a series of interviews with Salon they expressed amazement that the United States seems to be blundering its way into another misadventure that soaks up our financial, political and human resources.
"Vietnam is, I'm sorry to say, quite relevant here," says Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the famed Defense Department study of American decision-making in Southeast Asia, to newspapers in 1971.
"We have clasped the tar baby to our bosom," says Joseph L. Galloway, senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers and coauthor of "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," an acclaimed account of a crucial battle in Vietnam. "We cannot afford to cut and run. We cannot declare victory and walk out. Our whole policy in the Middle East is wrapped up in this thing -- so we can't afford to lose but we can't afford to win either."
It's tempting to conclude that Iraq is another Vietnam just because of the helicopter crashes, the dozens of daily attacks on U.S. troops, or footage of average Iraqis celebrating American deaths with charred wreckage in their hands. But that may be too simple.
Consider, also, that President Bush just weeks ago was telling the nation, in Vietnam-worthy doublespeak, that the daily ambushes against U.S. troops were proof of American success. And that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reminded us, after 15 soldiers lost their lives when their helicopter was shot down, that casualties in this war are inevitable, even "necessary."
The term "exit strategy" arose from the quagmire of Vietnam, and the U.S. plainly doesn't have one for Iraq, either. Pentagon officials, high on American military might, continue to tout the effectiveness of U.S. military superiority, but have consistently underestimated the capabilities of Iraqi guerrillas.
Any one of these can be summoned as a strand of proof but, in the end, it's the sum total of what's happening in Iraq -- the combination of these many elements -- that argues that Iraq is Vietnam redux.
The United States volunteered to fight the Vietnam War, too, in the context of a global war against an evil enemy, communism. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon told Americans that a small country halfway around the world was essential to American security. U.S. leaders ignored that region's long opposition to occupying forces. They lied to get troops into the war, and lied throughout the war. Defying reality, they insisted the U.S. was making "progress" as the situation deteriorated, and blamed critics for encouraging "the enemy."
Historian David Maraniss, author of the recently released "They Marched Into Sunlight," about the Vietnam War circa 1967, says he has a "basic sense of history repeating itself."
"Circumstances change," Maraniss says, "but human nature tends to remain the same, and so people and governments find themselves repeating the mistakes of the past."
Different Wars, Differences of Opinion
It's important to acknowledge the substantial differences between the Iraq and Vietnam wars, not least their scope and duration.
The Vietnam War lasted for 16 years, from 1959 to 1975. At its height in the late 1960s, more than half a million U.S. troops were deployed in Southeast Asia. More than 58,000 Americans died there.
The Iraq War began nearly eight months ago, on March 19, and now involves about 130,000 U.S. troops. U.S. troops have also volunteered for military duty, while most were drafted to fight in Vietnam. As of Sunday night, the death toll had climbed to at least 416, including the 17 killed in the Black Hawk helicopters in Mosul this weekend. That's more deaths than in the first three years of Vietnam.
Vietnam was a jungle; Iraq is a desert. The U.S. inserted itself into a civil war in Vietnam; the U.S. toppled a dictator in Iraq. If he is alive, Saddam will never be a Ho Chi Minh to most Iraqis, who welcomed an end to one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. And the Iraqi guerrillas and leftover Baathists fighting U.S. occupation do not have help from a global power, as China and the Soviet Union aided Vietnamese Communists.
These are not minor distinctions. And there are honest differences about whether comparisons of the two conflicts are relevant.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served two tours in Vietnam, has called attempts to make a Vietnam-Iraq comparison "rather bizarre historical allusions."
Vice President Dick Cheney hasn't answered the Vietnam question, but recently disagreed with the description of U.S. occupation as a quagmire. "The fact is," he said in September, "most of Iraq today is relatively stable and quiet."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also refuses to accept the premise. "A lot of critics have been consistently saying it's a quagmire and we're -- we're bogged down," he said in September. "The truth of the matter is that -- that we're not." But in a private Pentagon memo leaked last month, Rumsfeld undermined his own optimistic statements, conceding that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan would be "a long hard slog."
And that's where the Vietnam parallel begins to emerge, even among Republicans. Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam veteran, sees "some parallel tracks," including the difficulty of "getting out," and the lack of international support for U.S. policy.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam POW, decried the Vietnam analogy early on, but has inched toward making the link. He recently advised Bush to send more troops to Iraq or risk "the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam," and described the administration's positive spin on events there as "a parallel to Vietnam."
Former Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat who lost both legs and his right arm in Vietnam, considered the parallels in an essay for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His conclusion was blunt: "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."
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