A Real Iraq-Vietnam Analogy
06/30/2005
Kenneth G. Davenport,
San Diego Union-Tribune
Even before the war in Iraq began over two years ago, opponents of the U.S.-led invasion have used a singular word to conjure up fear in the minds of Americans: Vietnam. Such is the state of our collective memory of the almost 10 years we spent fighting in Southeast Asia that the utterance of this single word generates an immediate, visceral reaction - none of it positive. The Vietnam War, linked as it is to 58,000 American deaths, the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, is now code word for the foreign policy of folly.
Perhaps it should be so. For whatever your political persuasion, it is difficult in the bright glare of hindsight to see much redeeming value in the sacrifices we made as a nation in Vietnam. We committed our men and material to a war under pretenses that now seem dubious at best, even if the overall goal - the containment of international communism - was a good one. As with so many things, the devil was in the details: a substantial misunderstanding of the nature of the communist threat in Vietnam, a complete miscalculation of the risks and difficulties of a Southeast Asian land war and, in the end, an underestimation of the American people's willingness to stay the course.
If some of the above sound familiar, it should - for these are the kernels of the Vietnam-Iraq analogy as it has been put forward by Bush administration opponents. At the core is the notion that Vietnam - like Iraq - was a quagmire, from which we were unable to extricate ourselves. In the absence of a strategy to "win" decisively, we were left to muddle through, without clear goals and objectives, and - most importantly - without a clear definition of what it actually meant to achieve victory.
While major elements of this were true in Vietnam, the reality of policy-making was much more complex, linked closely to the domestic political factors that constrained decision-making to well-defined limits. The quest for "guns and butter" led to what Daniel Ellsberg, the notorious leaker of the Pentagon Papers, called a "stalemate machine": small incremental steps that led, in the end, to nowhere.
Ultimately, the cumulative effect of stalemate led to a steady swing in public and political opinion against the war in Vietnam. It is hard to remember now, but the war had enjoyed widespread public support in the early years, both of our commitment of ground forces into South Vietnam in 1965 and later, of our widening the war by bombing the North in 1966-67. It is conventional wisdom that the turning point was the Tet Offensive in January 1968 - where the Johnson administration's public pronouncements of progress met face-to-face with a widened enemy offensive into the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and other heretofore "safe" areas.
In the wake of Tet, public and congressional opinion began to forcefully turn against LBJ, constraining further military options on the ground. Dogged congressional supporters of the president began to speak out against the war on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The principal architect of American strategy in the war, Robert S. McNamara, turned against U.S. policy in public comments and congressional testimony. Even Walter Cronkite, from his perch as the overseer of the nation's truth, came out publicly against the war, forcing LBJ out of the 1968 election and into a self-imposed exile.
Cronkite, it turns out, toppled a president long before the "Rathergate" episode of the last election. All of which leads us to the current debate now beginning to take shape in Congress over our commitment in Iraq. While shrill ranting on the left (think Ted Kennedy) has become commonplace, more significant are self-professed "moderates" like Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin comparing the U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, Stalin's terror in the Gulags and Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields. Leaving aside the historical revisionism (and absurdity) implicit in such an inane comment, for which Durbin has apologized, it does represent a clear ratcheting up of criticism and pressure on the Bush administration to reverse course.
Of course, partisan demagoguery in American politics is now de rigueur, and it would be one thing if such comments were limited to the left wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, rumblings within the Republican Party in both the House and Senate have begun to send worrisome signals to the Bush administration that fissures arestarting to form in the president's own party, and even within his administration. Talk of closing Gitmo, broached by the president himself, lends credence to the claims by opponents that there is something amiss in our approach to the war on terror.
The drum beat has started. Will it culminate in a crescendo, causing the United States to withdraw its forces, letting the nascent Iraqi government fend for itself against and increasingly violent insurgency?
Finally, the prospect of a real Iraq-Vietnam analogy.
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Davenport ('90) is principal of Davenport Advisory Group, a management consulting firm in San Diego. He has taught courses on the Vietnam War for Chapman University.
