Kolko emphasizes the continuity between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars in the aspect that policymakers in both cases chose to ignore available intelligence based on their policy preconceptions and on the desire to believe their own propaganda. He makes some important points, though his generalizations tend to understate the drastic nature of the fraudulent war propaganda concocted to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In the case of the Vietnam War, he cites the memoir of CIA analyst George Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (2001), and the CIA-published analysis by Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968 (1998), to illustrate how solid analyses of the situation in Vietnam and of likely problems in the war were largely shunted aside by key decision-makers.
One case particularly strikes me in Kolko's essay, the cooking of intelligence about the enemy "order of battle" (available forces) in late 1967:
The most serious consequence of these deceptions was the so-called order-of-battle controversy before the Tet offensive began in January 1968. The lower the numbers the more progress the American military could claim, and so they refused to count the various local forces - roughly 300,000 men disappeared [from the count, not from the field] because admitting their existence, General Creighton Abrams argued in August 1967, would produce a "gloomy" conclusion.There's a lot in those two paragraphs, so they're worth unpacking a bit. First, it's important to keep in mind that the prevalent view among the officer corps came to be that the US and South Vietnam won militarily during the Tet offensive. But they were defeated by the weak-kneed, soft-hearted, Will-deficient civilians back home who withdrew their support for the military's consistently successful military campaign. This view of the Tet offensive is a key part of the stab-in-the-back narrative of the Vietnam War, a narrative which has poisoned the American political language about war.
The CIA objected to a point but eventually had to accept the distortions; both Allen and Ford are very detailed on this particular controversy. Ultimately, General William Westmoreland unsuccessfully sued CBS for allowing a leading CIA specialists on the order to battle to expound his views. But the Communists during the Tet offensive had far large military forces than most American official believed they did, and their stunning attacks changed American politicians' and, even more ominous [from the Johnson administration's viewpoint], public perceptions of reality. The Tet defeat, Allen insists, was much greater because of the "overblown psychological campaign in the fall of 1967," which was also essential for Lyndon Johnson's reelection ambitions. The falsified data, in the end, were believed by those seeking initially to manipulate public opinion, and the Tet defeat was the beginning of the end for the protracted American effort to win the Vietnam War.
The military's conventional script on that point is not entirely wrong. The Vietcong/NLF (National Liberation Front) uprising did not achieve the military results the Communists had hoped. US and ARVN (South Vietnamese Army)forces were able to retake lost ground. And the NLF infrastructure was badly damaged and never fully recovered.
But the strength and breadth of the uprising did catch military commanders by surprise for the reasons Kolko mentions. They were not getting good battlefield intelligence in many ways. And the temptation to inflate results and present a rosy picture of success building upon success wound up even misleading the misleaders themselves.
We also have to keep in mind that war is ultimately a political event, though that doesn't mean that our glorious generals should be able to duck blame for their own failures and misconduct. In the case of Vietnam, theoretically it would have been possible to prevent a Communist takeover in South Vietnam for another 10, 20, maybe 30 years after 1968. But carrying on US participation in that war for that much longer would have had enormous consequences. Every war involves some calculation of costs and benefits, and the Vietnam War was no different. An better earlier calculation of those costs and benefits might have led to less US involvement in that conflict. But the implicit notion in the stab-in-the-back excuse is that the war should have been continued indefinitely until North Vietnam and the NLF gave up any aim to control the southern half of the country. And that was never going to happen.
What the Tet offensive did do was to force policy-makers and the public to face the fact that the amount of progress civilian and military leaders had been claiming was false. Which led enough of the public and Congress to change their thinking on the costs and benefits of the war so that an early exit of American troops became a higher priority. What the defenders of the stab-in-the-back excuse typically try to avoid is the role that the loss of credibility of the military leadership among the American public was based on the over-optimistic and even knowingly false reports that those leaders were presenting. And as a result of turning a blind eye to that aspect of the problem, they tend to conclude that more secrecy and better control of the media would avoid problems like that. When what was needed was a reorientation of the military's attitude toward such practices.
Kolko's comments on the Iraq War looks at some similarities of mistakes, without trying to equate the two situations. Daniel Ellsberg commented around the start of the Iraq War that there was a huge difference between Vietnam and Iraq. Vietnam was largely jungle terrain while Iraq is desert, he said, and the language that none of the Americans understand in Iraq is Arabic rather than Vietnamese.
As Ellsberg was suggesting, some similar problems were inevitably going to be encountered. Kolko cites the seemingly-bottomless faith in Technology to make the US armed forces invincible. "But as in Vietnam, technology was exceedingly fallible in Iraq, and logistics also became even more of a nightmare because no close ports exist in Iraq." That logistical problem may well become far more acute before this war in Iraq is over.
What has also happened in practice, though the rhetoric was perhaps updated a bit for the Iraq War, is that the key role of internal politics in the country where the battlefields are located is decisive. Generalizations like this are tricky, because size matters. When St. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983, there was every expectation that US forces could overwhelm any opposition they encountered in that nation of 30,000 or so inhabitants. But in both Iraq and Vietnam, the failure to fully appreciate the need for an effective, credible local government as a partner for a counterinsurgency to be successful has been notable. Our Savior-General Petraeus has been careful to say that there is no purely military solution possible. But that's not stopping our war fans from declaring The Surge a success based on its alleged military accomplishments, even though internal political reconciliation in Iraq appears to be farther away than ever. Although even most Republicans were able to restrain their enthusiasm a bit more effectively that Lindsey Graham, who declared The Surge to be "the most successful counterinsurgency operation in military history." Which is certain to become one of the most-quoted phrases about the Iraq War once the US manages to extricate ourselves from this disaster.
Kolko writes of the Vietnam War, "Leaders in Washington thought this interpretation of events in Vietnam [about the importance of Vietnamese politics] was bizarre, and they paid no attention when their experts reminded them of the limits of military power." Allowing for a touch of hyperbole on Kolko's part, this is a reasonable description as a high-level generalization. He continues, "The importance of Vietnamese politics was slighted, escalations followed, and the credibility of American military power - the willingness to use it and win no matter how long it took or how much it cost - became their primary concern."
Kolko's essay is also a reminder of how long a majority of the American public have been expressing serious reservations and/or outright antiwar sentiments about the Iraq War. As he writes of the situation of two years ago, "in late 2005 nearly two-thirds of the public disapproved of the president's handling of the situation in Iraq and 58 percent believed he had not given good reasons for keeping troops there." Although his insistence on the continuities of error from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War leads him to understate the more drastic deception of the Cheney-Bush administration, his observation about the "credibility gap" that both created is on the mark:
In both Vietnam and Iraq the public was mobilized on the basis of cynical falsehoods that ultimately backfired, causing a credibility gap. People eventually ceased to believe anything Washington told them. Countless lies were told during the Vietnam War, but eventually many of the men who counted most were themselves unable to separate truth from fiction. Most American leaders really believed that if the Communists won in Vietnam the dominoes would fall and the Chinese would dominate all Southeast Asia. The Iraq War was initially justified because Hussein was purported to have weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda; no evidence whatsoever for either allegation existed beforehand or has been found.On that last point about the possibility US troops remaining for years, I would say that it's true. But I don't see any reasonable prospect of an indefinite US presence. The American troops will eventually have to leave. Hopefully, they can leave in an orderly, planned withdrawal taking their equipment with them. But an eventual out-and-out military collapse is not completely unthinkable. It would be a disgrace if our policymakers allow such a situation to develop.
There are about 160,000 American and foreign troops in Iraq (over 260,000 if support troops in the region are included) at the time of this writing [around the end of 2006] - far more than Bush predicted would remain by this time - but, as in Vietnam, their morale is already low and sinking. Bush's ratings in the polls have fallen dramatically, especially as he has run up huge budget deficits and ignored domestic issues, such as health insurance, that greatly determine how people vote. He needs many more soldiers in Iraq desperately. Depending on the resistance or geopolitical context in the region, substantial number of American forces may remain in Iraq for many years. (my emphasis)
We always need to keep in mind that historical comparisons have their limits. And they can be misleading. The German commentator Peter Scholl-Latour may well be correct in suggesting that the French war in Algeria, which ended with Charles de Gaulle's decision in 1962 to withdraw French troops and accede to Algerian independence, could be a much better parallel to the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq.
Tags: gabriel kolko, iraq war, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war
No comments:
Post a Comment