At the end of the
first Gulf War in 1991, President George H W Bush,
flanked by then secretary of defense Richard Cheney and
chairman of the joint chiefs Colin Powell, proudly
proclaimed that the "Vietnam syndrome" had finally been
licked. Is it any wonder then that President George W
Bush, surrounded by the same advisors, refuses to
recognize that Iraq increasingly resembles that
traumatic Asian conflict? In mid-April 2004, Bush flatly
declared: "The analogy [between Iraq and Vietnam] is
false."
I served a tour of duty in Vietnam in
1970-71, and returned in the late 1980s for the first of
several prolonged visits. Based on my experience, Iraq
today looks more and more like the Vietnam I knew
firsthand as an army intelligence officer more than
three decades ago.
Strategy and tactics
First, there are the obvious strategic and
tactical similarities. American troops are fighting a
guerrilla war in Iraq. The terrain is difficult, and the
insurgents know it better than we do. The enemy attacks
at a time and place of its own choosing, avoiding troop
concentrations where US firepower can be brought to
bear. Urban warfare has become the norm, with insurgents
staying close to US troops, often engaging civilians to
support or shield their operations. As a result, the
uncertain battleground of Iraq poses enormous challenges
for American soldiers seeking to separate combatants
from civilians without alienating most Iraqis. We face
in Iraq, like we did in Vietnam, an enemy who refuses to
play by our rules, and is clearly willing to die for his
beliefs.
Before we finished in Vietnam, we had
dropped more bombs on Indochina than had been dropped on
the remainder of the world in all the wars to that time.
The US military continues to believe in the might of
firepower. But it also wrestles with the difficult task
of establishing the appropriate balance between winning
hearts and minds with aid and reconstruction and using
force to root out insurgents. In Iraq, we have moved
from "shock and awe" to building schools and hosting
soccer games. We're now back to block-to-block searches
of cordoned cities.
In the process, the US
military has generally refused to account for civilian
casualties in Iraq, in part because they are frequently
huge. As in Vietnam, 600 dead or dying Iraqis too often
appear as 600 "insurgents" in army press accounts. The
refusal to acknowledge civilian casualties, while
meticulously accounting for our own, has another
downside. It suggests to Iraqis that American lives are
more important than those of the people we supposedly
came to liberate.
Throughout the Vietnam War,
especially in the early years, American officials
deliberately misrepresented the enemy. Vietnamese
nationalists were ignored with all opposition labeled
communist or with the delightfully pejorative phrase
"Vietcong". In Iraq, the Bush administration has once
again written nationalists out of the script. Insurgents
are variously labeled "dead-enders", "fanatics",
"thugs", "militants", "terrorists", or "outsiders",
despite growing evidence that a large percentage of the
Iraqi people are opposed to the US occupation. Recent
intelligence reports suggest that support for the
insurgents is widespread and growing. In some areas,
Sunni and Shi'ite groups are joining forces, at least
temporarily, in a common cause - killing Americans.
There is also a failure in Iraq to understand
and empathize with local mores and culture or the role
of Islam in Arab society. The military has too few Arab
language specialists and those experts in government
with good knowledge of Iraq's history and culture were
marginalized from the Pentagon's planning of the war and
the peace, just as we failed to comprehend the Buddhist
culture of Vietnam. The bombing of a mosque in Fallujah
in April is a recent case in point. Suicide bombers in
the Middle East, like Buddhist self-immolations in
Vietnam, are incomprehensible to the average American,
nestled in a comfortable suburb with a good-paying job.
Plunging into a maelstrom of political and religious
rivalries, we have too often depended in Iraq on the
counsel of a few self-serving Iraqi exiles and Arab
intellectuals experienced in manipulating Western
arrogance and ignorance.
There was no real plan
for victory in Vietnam, and there appears to be none for
Iraq. The June 30 date for the transfer of sovereignty
back to the Iraqi people, in particular, makes no sense
except in the context of Bush's desire to be rid of Iraq
before the US elections in November. When asked why it
is so important to pretend to return sovereignty to the
Iraqis on June 30, no one in the administration seems to
have an answer. What is clear is that no viable
political body has been created or identified in Iraq in
the last year with the domestic political support
necessary to take charge and run the country after the
turnover. Unless the White House adds credibility to the
June 30 transfer, it is also clear that the other dates
detailed by the president in his April 2004 press
conference, dates leading to a permanent Iraqi
government by December 2005, have no meaning whatsoever.
Iraq's Tet offensive? In this regard,
the April 2004 insurrection in Iraq could well have a
political impact on the Bush administration similar to
the impact of the 1968 Tet offensive on the Lyndon
Johnson administration. The Tet offensive exposed the
consistently positive US message in Vietnam to be a lie.
In turn, the savage attacks of Iraqi insurgents almost
40 years later dealt a heavy blow to the credibility of
the Bush administration. In both cases, events on the
ground suggested that the US government, not only was
not in control, but didn't have a plan.
A
parallel can also be drawn to the now discredited domino
theory, which suggested that the fall of Vietnam would
lead to a communist takeover of all of Asia. Bush
promised a similar domino effect in the Middle East in
which the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a
resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the
flowering of democracy throughout the region. The
failure to install democracy in Iraq will likely lead to
a long winter of autocracy in the Middle East before
other states even attempt meaningful democratic reforms.
Wars of choice Vietnam and Iraq were
both wars of choice. And they are also similar in that
deceit and misrepresentation were employed by the US
government, first to engage US forces and then to keep
them there. Bush took us to war on the grounds that
Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had
ties to al-Qaeda. No weapons of mass destruction have
been found and no ties to al-Qaeda have been discovered.
We were also told our troops would be greeted with open
arms and flowers, which didn't last long, and that Iraqi
oil would pay for most of the reconstruction. Now we're
told we're in Iraq to nurture democratic
self-government, while political reconstruction is also
going badly.
In retrospect, it is clear we had
no idea what we were getting into when we marched into
Vietnam, and the same appears true in Iraq. In reference
to Vietnam, Johnson pledged in April 1965: "We will not
withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a
meaningless agreement." Four decades later, Bush
pledged: "We've got to stay the course and we will stay
the course" in Iraq.
The American people - and
the Iraqi people - deserve better than this. They are
entitled to a well thought-out, credible plan, detailing
how the administration expects to achieve its objectives
in Iraq. A realistic plan is also a prerequisite to
engaging fully the international community in
reconstruction efforts, a necessity the Bush
administration has only belatedly come to recognize.
Reviewing what went right - and wrong - in Vietnam might
be a good place to start when creating such a plan.
Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for
Foreign Policy in Focus, has published widely on Middle
Eastern issues. His latest book on the region is
Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife
(Penn Press, 2002).
