Review of Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts

Vietnam in Iaq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts, edited by John Dumbrell and David Ryan, has a publication date of 2007. But the 11 essays in this collection predate the announcement of The Surge. But there is real value to looking at contemporary commentary on the Iraq War. Because just as with the Vietnam War, later claims of new perspectives and revisionist history on the war in general can be checked against publications like this.

As the title indicates, the book explores the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. One striking thing about both is both involved nation-building and counter-insurgency efforts for which the military were not prepared. Overestimation of American power in those particular situation was a particular problem in the initiation of both wars. Sadly, even with the lessons of the Tonkin Gulf incident and other situations in front of them, the Congress of 2002-3 was just as deferential to Presidential claims, though the falsehoods involved with the Cheney-Bush buildup to the Iraq War make the Tonkin Gulf claims look almost honest. At least there actually were enemy boats in the water in the Tonkin Gulf! A contrast to the non-existence of the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" and the equally non-existent operational ties between Saddam and Al Qa'ida.

Trevor McCrisken of the University of Warwick (UK) has an essay on "No More Vietnams: Iraq and the analogy conundrum" that reminds us that making foreign policy by analogy can be a very perilous business, common as it is. The "Munich analogy" as it has been simplified to near-meaningless in the American political vocabulary has become especially treacherous. McCrisken calls attention a very meaningful lesson from the Vietnam War now there to be relearned from Iraq (and, in 2009, from the escalating "AfPak" War):

If there is an ultimate lesson of the Iraq War it is that it reiterates one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War: there are limits to the power of the United States, particularly in terms of the utility of the use of force.

This is a criticism that both military planners and civilian officials need to take very seriously. Not all of them will.

David Ryan Of University College, Ireland, explores a related problem in "'Vietnam', Victory Culture and Iraq: Struggling with lessons, constraints and credibility from Saigon to Falluja". But Ryan is far too impressed with the underlying assumptions of the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, better known as the Powell Doctrine, that aimed at setting prudent conditions for American military intervention. He doesn't seem to grasp that, in practice, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine was largely a justification for the Pentagon to focus its training, equipment and planning on fighting the Soviet Union - even after the USSR no longer existed - and avoiding future counterinsurgency wars. Worse, he seems to buy the assumption that American public opinion is the great weakness of American military might, and that the Powell Doctrine assumption of short, quick wars is still basically the solution to that perceived problem. He at least notices some of its weaknesses, such as the fact that in the "shock and awe" approach at the beginning of the Iraq War, "US tactics and use of overwhelming force on the ground and from the air was counterproductive." If the goal involves the complete conquest and reconstruction of a country, the military strategy has to take that fully into account.

Marilyn Young concludes her essay, "The Vietnam Laugh Track", with an observation about the idea that ending a war short of total victory somehow dishonors the dead:

A final thought: in Iraq, as in Vietnam, many people are convinced that only victory gives meaning to the (American) lives lost. To stop fighting short of victory is to render meaningless the deaths and maiming suffered thus far. More deaths, more grievous wounds are required to one end only: the making meaningful of the deaths and wounding already suffered. After the war, William Ehrhart asked a Vietnamese general what he thought of the Americans as warriors. After politely praising their bravery, the general named what he saw as their military shortcomings: fixed positions, dependency on air support, and ignorance of the country. 'Would it have mattered if we had done things differently?' Ehrhart asked. No, the general replied, 'Probably not. History was not on your side. We were fighting for our homeland. What were you fighting for?' Ehrhart answered, 'Nothing that really mattered'. George Swiers, returning directly from the battlefield to San Francisco in 1970, remembered how he had 'set out to speak to his Fellow Americans. To share with them his hideous secrets, to tell them what went on daily in their names'. For a short time, the message Swiers and other veterans like him brought home to America, aka the Vietnam syndrome, served as a prophylactic against another Vietnam. In the decades that have passed since Swiers' return home, the hideous secrets have been forgotten, or worse, transformed into memories of virtue, sacrifice and service.'

Americans, the late Gloria Emerson wrote, have 'always been a people who dropped the past and then could not remember where it had been put'. This time, they've put it in Iraq. [my emphasis]

Tags: iraq war, lessons of iraq, lessons of vietnam, vietnam in iraq, vietnam war

American prestige and unnecessary wars

Hans Morgenthau is an understandably controversial figure because of his draconian proposals for the future of postwar Germany during his tenure as Treasury Secretary in Franklin Roosevelt's wartime Cabinet. [UPDATE 03/04/2017: As the comment below indicates, this sentence was mistaken.]

But he is also known as a major figure in the Realist school of foreign policy thinking. And while his proposal to "pastorlize" Germany hardly seems to have reflected hard-headed empirical calculation, his reputation fares better in this article from 1965, from the early months of the "Americanization" of the Vietnam War, Vietnam: Shadow and Substance New York Review of Books 09/16/1965 edition (link behind subscription). He wrote, in words that are worth remembering when we hear how terribly humiliated Dick Cheney and John McCain would be if we withdraw from the Iraq War:

The prestige of a nation is not determined by the success or failure of a particular operation at a particular moment in history. Quite the contrary, it reflects the sum of a nation's qualities and actions, of its successes and failures, of its historic memories and aspirations. The pages of history record many examples of nations which, secure in their possession of great power and recognized as such by their peers, have suffered defeat or retreated from exposed positions without suffering a loss in prestige. When was the prestige of France higher: when it fought wars in Indochina and Algeria which it could neither win nor thought it could afford to lose, or after it had liquidated these losing enterprises? And how much did American prestige suffer in the long run from the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, as thorough and spectacular a failure as one would wish only one's enemy to suffer, and as humiliating a revelation of governmental incompetence as one would not want perhaps even one's enemy to reveal? When France demonstrated the wisdom and courage to liquidate two losing enterprises on which it had staked its "honor," its prestige rose to heights it had not attained since the beginning of the Second World War, and the Bay of Pigs has weighed little in the scales of American prestige, heavy as they are with power and success. To say, then, that we ought not to be in Vietnam but cannot leave because our prestige would suffer, is to confound ephemeral fluctuations of public opinion with the lasting foundation of national power and prestige and to think little of American power and of the American prestige which reflects that power.

Yet the same fear that anticipates a disastrous loss of prestige from a temporary setback engenders an overestimation of national power, and a need to transform a losing into a winning position. The sense of inferiority, which underestimates our national power and prestige, calls forth a policy of bluff. Obsessed with the fear of the permanent loss of prestige which we imagine would follow a temporary setback, we have become oblivious to the much more serious loss of prestige which would ensue, and has already ensued, from the continuation and escalation of a losing enterprise. Can anyone who has followed foreign public opinion carefully and with at least a measure of objectivity doubt that our prestige throughout the world has declined drastically since the beginning of 1965? Nobody questions our physical power to destroy Vietnam, South and North. Yet in even so friendly a country as Germany, which depends upon a commitment of our physical power to its defense, there are people within and outside the government who question our ability to honor this commitment when we have sent the flower of our armed forces to Vietnam without having a chance to win. Everywhere people question, sometimes under their breath and sometimes loudly, the wisdom and morality of the government of the United States. And what will our prestige be if hundreds of thousands of American men are bogged down in Vietnam, still unable to win and unable to retreat?

Unaware as we are in general of the nature and the greatness of our power, we have become negligent of its limits in dealing with Vietnam. Thus our judgments and actions are at odds with empirical reality. On the one hand, our knowledge of reality counsels us to liquidate a losing enterprise, and thus we try to negotiate our way out; but the negotiating conditions we stipulate always limp a couple of months behind reality, and thus our attempts consistently fail. For, on the other hand, our policy makers are dominated by a state of mind combining a sense of inferiority with a sense of invincibility, which has made us decide that we cannot afford to retreat and that we must and can win. Since a rational assessment of empirical reality contradicts this decision, we are compelled to disregard reality and to invent a mythological reality which supports our decision. (my emphasis)

Tags: hans morgenthau, lessons of iraq, vietnam war

Arguing over the lessons of the Iraq War: Andrew Bacevich says, bring it on

Andrew Bacevich is following the debate already under way about the lessons to be drawn from the Iraq War: Fighting over who lost Iraq Los Angeles Times 11/07/06 (election day last week). He sees three major narratives emerging so far:

The Bush dead-enders. Although dwindling in number, President Bush's defenders will ascribe failure in Iraq to a loss of nerve, blaming media bias and liberal defeatists for sowing the erroneous impression that the war has become unwinnable. Bush loyalists will portray opposition to the war as tantamount to betraying the troops. Count on them to appropriate Ronald Reagan's description of Vietnam as "an honorable cause." Updating the "stab in the back" thesis, they will claim that a collapse of will on the home front snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Baghdad as surely as it did in Saigon.

The buck-stops-at-the-top camp. Adherents of this second view are currently in the ascendant, attributing the troubles roiling Iraq to massive incompetence in the Bush administration. In a war notable for an absence of accountability, demands for fixing accountability are becoming increasingly insistent. Parties eager to divert attention from their own culpability are pointing fingers. Senior military officers target Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Congressional Democrats who voted for the war and neoconservatives direct their fire against Rumsfeld and Bush. The theme common to all of these finger-pointers: Don't blame us; the Bush team's stupidity, stubbornness and internal dysfunction doomed the American effort.

The conspiracy theorists. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, critics on the far left and far right charged that powerful groups operating behind the scenes were promoting war for their own nefarious purposes. Big Oil, Halliburton, the military-industrial complex and Protestant evangelicals said to be keen on defending Israel all came in for criticism and even grassy-knoll-style paranoia.

Bacevich is not a "simple answers" kind of guy. So it seems to me that he's skeptical about all three strands of explanation and blame-setting right now. But he sees the current emerging debate as the first stage of a very necessary process. I should add that I don't think that he's discounting the elements he mentions as part of the conspiracy-theorist approach, which is perhaps not the best label. Certainly, he himself talks at length about the effect of Protestant fundamentalists on attitudes toward military policy in The New American Militarism (2005).

Like other war critics, he is hoping for an "Iraq syndrome" to become part of American politics to instill in decision-makers a more healthy level of caution than the Cheney-Bush administration demonstrated in invading Iraq:

Figuring out "who lost Iraq?" ought to provide the occasion for throwing out more than a few rascals who hold office and discrediting others — a process that will no doubt get a kick-start with today's midterm elections. With luck, those surviving will be at least momentarily chastened, perhaps giving rise to an Iraq syndrome akin to the Vietnam syndrome, and which at least for a while will save us from another similar debacle.

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, lessons of iraq, stab-in-the-back