Justifications for War: Dominoes and WMD

In the Cold War crucible of the 1960s, and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans had an overwhelming sense of anxiety about potential foreign threats to their safety. Presidents Johnson and Bush responded by sending thousands of troops into combat with solid public support and without significant political opposition.

The now-discredited "domino theory" -- that a Communist takeover of Vietnam could lead to "fighting in Hawaii ... and San Francisco," as LBJ put it -- convinced Americans that victory in Southeast Asia was essential to our national security.

Bush, in laying out the broadest justification for war in Iraq, offered a sort of reverse domino theory: that by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the U.S. could promote the establishment of democracies in a region now dominated by autocratic regimes -- many of which encourage the anti-American sentiments of their people.

As the New York Times' David L. Sanger wrote in September, Bush "has made the Middle East what Southeast Asia was to the nation of his youth: a place where dominoes could not be allowed to fall, where a vicious ideology could not be permitted to take hold and spread."

The more immediate justification for the Iraq war was, of course, weapons of mass destruction -- biological, chemical and nuclear -- which, Bush argued, could be used against the United States or its allies.

(While the White House often says that Bush never used the word "imminent" to describe the threat, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's warning, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," made the point quite urgently.)

To the historians of Vietnam, the White House's justifications for war in Iraq present an astonishing parallel to the falsehoods of the 1960s. They particularly see similarities between the administration's dire warnings about weapons of mass destruction and (still unproven) ties between Iraq and al-Qaida, and Lyndon Johnson's inflation of a minor skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 into a causus belli used to persuade Congress to send ground troops to South Vietnam.

Author Philip Caputo, a Marine lieutenant who spent 16 months in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, agrees that there's conceptually a "broad parallel" between America's unwarranted response to "what we saw as Soviet expansionism, and now what we call worldwide terrorism."

He is even more disturbed by what he calls "the fraud of Iraq," the insistence that WMD and Iraqi ties to al-Qaida demanded a U.S. invasion. "This administration was so eager, almost lusting, to go to war with Iraq," says Caputo, who wrote the memoir "A Rumor of War." The administration was "deceiving itself and grasping at whatever little intelligence straw floated down the stream to justify what they wanted."

"The same was true in Vietnam," adds journalist Stanley Karnow, who arrived in Southeast Asia in 1959 as a correspondent for Time magazine. American leaders sought "to depict Ho Chi Minh as part of a whole global terrorist network, and if we don't defeat him, we'll be fighting on the beaches in Waikiki. That's a similar bit of nonsense."

Robert McNamara -- the Sequel

There are some eerie similarities between a certain defense secretary today, and his doppelganger of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, who served under Kennedy and Johnson. Rumsfeld and McNamara do look alike, with their 1950s Brylcreem-slick hairdos, but the comparison goes far beyond that. Galloway, who as a journalist earned the Bronze Star for rescuing wounded soldiers in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, says that Rumsfeld, like McNamara, is a "control freak" who ran his own show as a CEO and now ignores the nation's more cautious generals.

"Some of this reminds me (so much) of McNamara I can hardly stand it," Galloway says. "If it keeps up like it's going, Rumsfeld is going to make McNamara look good."

Ellsberg, who sees McNamara (his former boss at the Defense Department) as a more tragic, tortured figure, thinks Colin Powell may be playing a similar role in the Bush administration. Both, he says, are "paying the price of being part of an unnecessary, wrongful war."

No one has yet been cast in the devil's advocate role of George Ball, an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Ball consistently argued, as early as 1961, against sending U.S. troops to Southeast Asia and warned that the U.S could never succeed in the "treacherous quicksands" of Vietnam. His bosses never followed his advice, but at least they didn't fire him for it, either.

On the Ground: Early Vietnam

As upsetting as it is that a few U.S. soldiers die nearly every day, administration officials have argued, with some justification, that these are relatively small numbers. After all, hundreds of U.S. troops died each week at the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

And, as the Pentagon likes to point out, resistance to U.S. occupation is focused in one region of the country, Saddam's stronghold, the Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad. For now, Iraqi guerrillas are a tiny fraction of the population and can't be compared to Vietnamese armies and their popular support.

That doesn't mean the current situation on the ground can't deteriorate to Vietnam-era proportions.

Galloway compares Iraq today to South Vietnam in 1963, when local Vietcong attacked American troops with ambushes and mines. Killing a few soldiers or knocking down a few helicopters in smaller strikes emboldens those who oppose U.S. occupation, as it did in Southeast Asia where opposition intensified over the years, he says.

In that vein, Iraq's guerrilla fighters are steadily improving their capabilities, moving up from shooting individual soldiers and planting roadside landmines, to firing rockets at troop-transport helicopters. They are also expanding their territory; the Italian military police compound, wrecked by a car bomb on Nov. 12, was south of Baghdad in a region that had been mostly peaceful. Similarly, the two Black Hawk helicopters that crashed this weekend, after one tried to avoid hostile fire, were in Mosul, a friendlier city in Northern Iraq.

In their daily patrols, as they did in Vietnam, American soldiers face confusion about who is enemy and who is friend. For evidence of the fog of war, one has only to look at U.S. soldiers' shooting of 10 newly minted Iraqi policemen in mid-September, or the Nov. 9 killing of the U.S.-appointed mayor of Sadr City in Baghdad.

The White House has repeatedly assured the public that the United States will win this conflict. But the recent bloody attacks, and the Pentagon scramble to call up reservists for yearlong tours, leaves a contradictory impression: that this occupation is already squeezing the military to its limits. "There's definitely a concern that we're going to be there for some god-awful long period," says Caputo, "and that eventually, everything there could become unglued."

Some war critics -- including some troops and their families -- have already expressed a sense of frustration that the U.S. isn't able to simply stamp out the opposition. In Vietnam, that entailed destroying the village in order to save it -- a mistaken strategy the military hasn't repeated in Iraq. But Iraqis have complained, to the Washington Post, that in the Sunni Triangle, U.S. troops have closed markets and detained family members (including women) of men suspected of attacking Americans. That approach didn't win the hearts and minds in Southeast Asia, either.

Author David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter in Vietnam, says the Bush administration repeated a crucial error of the past when it assumed the U.S. could control Iraq with raw military power -- just as Presidents Johnson and Nixon believed they could bomb the Vietnamese into submission.

Because of arrogance and ideology, Halberstam says, Bush and his advisors failed to heed what he calls the "undertow" -- the complex historic, cultural, and racial issues that limit the military's clout in postcolonial nations such as Vietnam and Iraq.

Before invading Iraq, the White House wrongly predicted that, as Cheney said, U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators." Now Halberstam wonders if the United States can inspire Iraqis to have faith that America offers the best opportunity for their freedom.

"Is our cause popular enough [in Iraq] to generate the intelligence we need to stamp out the other side?" Halberstam asks. "In Vietnam, it couldn't be done."

Halberstam points to another critical, and tragic, similarity between Vietnam and Iraq: The losing battle for support among the population we're ostensibly trying to aid. The tragedy is that U.S. troops might have been welcomed as liberators, as predicted -- but the Bush team has so badly mismanged the occupation that, for the average resident of the Sunni Triangle, daily life is in many ways more difficult now than it was under Saddam. Combine that with nationalism, suspicion of American intentions and the injured pride of an occupied people, and you have a recipe for disaster.

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