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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The Power of the Body Count
After 9/11 and during the war in Afghanistan, the public seemed more willing to accept military casualties than it had at any time since Vietnam. But U.S. deaths in Iraq -- highlighted on newspaper pages and, for the establishment intelligentsia, in the final minute of "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" -- have renewed the collective questioning about the costs and benefits of war.
Even before 22 troops died in two helicopter attacks this month, the public was already shifting against Bush's policy in Iraq. Americans endured years of combat in Vietnam, tens of thousands of funerals, and billions of dollars spent on a failing policy, before turning on the Johnson administration. Today's result is the same, but it's only taken eight months to get there.
A recent Associated Press story noted that "[almost] four in 10 Americans, 39 percent, think the United States made a mistake by sending troops into Iraq -- roughly the same number that said that about Vietnam in the summer of 1967." A majority of Americans also now disapprove of Bush's handling of the Iraq war, and disapprove of his request (now granted) for $87 billion in new spending.
It's not for lack of White House efforts to convince Americans that the battle is as important as any this country has faced since World War II.
Bush said in September that "we will do whatever is necessary ... spend what is necessary" to win in Iraq -- a vow that reminds many Vietnam hands of Kennedy's pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden" to assure liberty around the world.
But Karnow, author of the comprehensive "Vietnam: A History," says Vietnam destroyed the whole notion that victory was worth any price. "Nobody believes that stuff any more," he says.
This careful attention to the body count may also be a direct result of our Oprah-cized culture, which personalizes death more than ever, whether people die in a terrorist attack, an ambush in the Sunni Triangle, or in an airplane crash. Perhaps Americans will never again accept a war that leads to thousands of U.S. casualties.
In today's culture, "one American dying in Iraq becomes the equivalent of 1,000 Americans dying in Vietnam," Karnow says. He remembers visiting an Ohio town that had lost six graduates from the same high school in Southeast Asia. It seemed routine then.
"Now you lose two people," Karnow says, "and next thing you know, it's all over Page One."
The Credibility "Canyon"
Public opinion is also being shaped by growing doubts about the Bush administration's honesty, much as the Johnson and Nixon administrations were undermined politically by a "credibility gap" in the 1960s and 1970s. The White House has forcefully papered over the worst news -- Bush hasn't attended a single military funeral and barred television cameras from recording the return of flag-covered coffins in the U.S.
Gen. John Abizaid, the chief of U.S. Central Command, has insisted his military won't twist the truth. "It's just absolutely essential" that the Iraq war not get "perverted" as it did in Vietnam, "where we didn't really tell the truth," Abizaid told Congress in September. "We've got to tell you the truth every day."
But Caputo says the high command today is "far more aggressive" in selling optimistic pronouncements about the war, in ways that go beyond "light at the end of the tunnel" promises in the 1960s.
Rumsfeld and his acolytes "know goddamned well that what they've been trying to sell to the American people, or the way they've been trying to sell it, is bull," Caputo says.
Karnow compares yesterday's credibility gap to "a canyon" in Iraq.
Gordon Goldstein, coauthor of an upcoming autobiography of McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, argues that the Bush administration's authority was hurt by its early efforts to obscure debate about the basis for a war and what a U.S. occupation might look like. Now they have to deal with the backlash, he says.
"There was no strategy to generate public support for an engagement that would be long and costly and difficult," Goldstein says. "They didn't sell it that way in Vietnam and they haven't sold it that way in Iraq."
Just as there are questions about the reasons for war and, indeed, whether it's a quagmire, Maraniss points out that, as in Vietnam, we also don't know what entails victory.
"With Iraq, President Bush declared 'Mission Accomplished' and yet American soldiers keep getting killed every day," Maraniss says. "With Vietnam, the Nixon administration sought 'Peace with Honor' and declared peace was at hand long before the U.S. disengaged from the war."
Vietnam historians remember, too, how critics of that war, too, were labeled unpatriotic and even helpful to the enemy.
"This is a direct parallel to Vietnam: You fool yourself, you lie to yourself," Galloway says. "And eventually you become convinced by your own lies. I hope that we do not go that way in Iraq with this administration; this country really can't afford it."
The Road Ahead: Dead ends, blind alleys and cul-de-sacs
While some people compare Iraq to Vietnam, others suggest parallels that are different, but similarly grim: Iraq for the British (1920-1932); Algeria for the French (the 1954-1962 war of independence); Afghanistan for the Russians (1979-89); Lebanon for the Israelis (1978-2000). That is, futile, bloody sinkholes where militarily superior nations didn't have a prayer of victory against a determined local foe.
According to Halberstam, Bush's war architects believed they could reshape history with might, just as the engineers of the war in Southeast Asia did. In his book about Vietnam, "The Best and the Brightest," Halberstam cites a maxim from Ralph Waldo Emerson that he believes still reflects today's reality: "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind."
The Vietnam experts suggest that the administration could, and should, do much more to help itself by swallowing its distaste for a powerful United Nations presence, and by trading away the spoils of occupation for the support of other nations.
"Find some way, even if it means not giving contracts away to friends, of giving business to the French, German and Russian firms -- of internationalizing this campaign to rebuild and reconstruct Iraq," Caputo says. Otherwise, "I just see us there for years and years, an unending commitment."
Then again, it's almost certainly too late to ask for help.
Absent significant groveling, the U.S. probably won't see cooperation from France, Germany, Russia or the United Nations as long as Bush is president. They have every incentive to let him suffer the consequences of his father-knows-best approach, and no incentive to deploy troops into a chaotic security situation.
If the United States can't change its fate, if the White House refuses to admit its faults and address allies' concerns, we'll have to manage the long-term consequences. Chief among the downsides, we may not have help against actual terrorists. The U.S. needs allies, and their intelligence services, to conduct an effective war against al-Qaida.
The current fight in Iraq is supposed to enhance U.S. national security. Ellsberg argues that not only does it not do that, but instead places the nation at greater risk of attack.
"We're not fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here," Ellsberg says. "We've made the home front more dangerous while adding a front in Iraq." He describes today's war as "irresponsible, reckless and dangerous" -- even worse than Vietnam.
In the 1980s, Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and later Colin Powell, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President George H.W. Bush during the Persian Gulf War, outlined what became known as the Powell Doctrine.
Before sending troops into battle, American leaders must have broad and durable support from Congress and the public; must commit enough resources to win the battle; must set clear political and military objectives; and must have a clear exit strategy.
This doctrine was a product of the American experience in Vietnam. From the standpoint of political and military planning, it summarized what had gone wrong, and prescribed a potential solution -- use caution beforehand, and overwhelming force if need be.
But Bush administration neoconservatives ignored the concerns of people, including Powell, whose worldview was shaped by Vietnam, and dismissed them as "wimps," Halberstam says. Similarly, he says, hawks dismissed warnings about Southeast Asia "because they hadn't been there."
In retrospect, the doctrine that governed U.S. military policy from the 1980s until Sept. 11 failed to define the crucial factor that, in the end, forces presidents to defend their conduct of all wars, large or small, defensive or humanitarian, successful or not.
Is it in the United States' national interest to expend these resources, in this way, right now?
After a more than a decade of hubris and death in Southeast Asia, we realized that the answer was a resounding no. We will have to wait, probably for many more years and many more deaths, to answer that question in Iraq.
