The president invoked the Vietnam War as a historical lesson to deflect critics who are calling for troop withdrawal, pointing to the massacre and displacement of millions of people in Vietnam as a prediction to the fallout of American withdrawal from Iraq. Partisans have followed the speech as only partisans do, they have either praised or criticized the presidents speech based on their already decided opinion of the war.
Looking outside the political bubble, focusing instead of the strategy of war itself, the president was right to point to Vietnam as a historical guide for current Iraq, there are a lot of similarities and lessons to learn from Vietnam, and at this stage of the events in Iraq both sides of the isle would be smart to take those lessons seriously in a thoughtful, applicable approach in resolving the issues the nation faces in Iraq.
I was born in 1975, so my interpretations of the history and lessons of Vietnam comes from study, not personal experience. This is both good and bad, in study one can miss the larger scope of circumstances that drove the decision process at the time, but experience can also shape a perspective, leading to one forming conclusions prior to study based on a personal level of interaction as opposed to an unbiased evaluation.
The aspect of
Vietnam discussed by the president that begins the discussion is as follows from his speech.
The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
The counter to the president has been to point out that American involvement in Vietnam in the first place was the problem, and use this argument to reinforce that Vietnam was the lesson not to start a war in Iraq. It is a fair argument, in a history class, but thoughtful thinkers looking to the future can't go backward to correct history rather must move forward learning from it. The tendency on the left to go backward is one of the main reasons they can't formulate any strategy whatsoever moving forward, the lefts modern fatal flaw in foreign policy.
The president could have, and probably should have gone one step further, although it probably would have been even more controversial. I
quote form the New York Times regarding the full historical record of the fallout of the Vietnam war.
The record of death and dislocation after the American withdrawal from Vietnam ranks high among the tragedies of the last century, with an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about one-fifth of the population, dying under the rule of Pol Pot, and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese becoming refugees. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps after the war have ranged widely, from 50,000 to more than 400,000, and some accounts have said that tens of thousands perished, a figure that Mr. Bush cited in his speech, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Bush's speech implied a direct relation in consequence between these events and American troop withdrawal, a point Bush made in which I do not agree with. the
Killing Fields in Cambodia, for example, took place in 1975, even though most American troops were gone from Vietnam by 1973. The relation is one of unintended consequence, not direct consequence, and while that sounds like a nuance it is a point that shouldn't be confused.
Barak Obama represents a number of people on the left when saying the
consequence of mass genocide isn't worth keeping troops in Iraq. That statement is incredible, because he is ready to rationalize tremendous cost in life as an intended consequence of withdrawal, and gives no thought whatsoever to the unintended consequences. He should factor unintended consequences into any advice for policy, as should we all, because not long after the US pulled out of Vietnam, while America was weak, the rest of the world capitalized starting with the revolution in Iran in 1979, followed by the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia in December of the same year. In other words, those unintended consequences of Vietnam set in motion the series of events that has directly led to this point in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm sure China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea see very clearly their option for opportunity should the US withdrawal from Iraq, whose actions to capitalize on the retreat of America would represent unintended consequences almost never factored into the Iraq withdrawal discussion. Considering 3, and soon to be all 4, of those nations are nuclear armed, the unintended consequences of American withdrawal from Iraq could make Cambodia's killing fields look very small indeed.
Max Boot contributed his own list of lessons the US should consider from Vietnam as we look at Iraq. His first point is on target. His list is consistent with what I was taught regarding the Vietnam War, and is worth full quotes.
The danger of prematurely dumping allied leaders. A chorus of voices in Washington, led by Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton, is calling on Iraqis to replace Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. Even Mr. Bush and his ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, have expressed disappointment with Mr. Maliki. They have been careful, however, to refrain from any calls for his ouster. That's wise, because we know from our experience in Vietnam the dangers of switching allied leaders in wartime.
In the early 1960s, American officials were frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 1963 the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup against him, in the hope of installing more effective leadership in Saigon. The result was the opposite: a succession of weak leaders who spent most of their time plotting to stay in power. In retrospect it's obvious that, for all his faults, we should have stuck with Diem.
This is on target. Bush turned Iraq into a democracy, and they elected a weak leader. It isn't the first time a democratic nation elected a weak leader, and won't be the last. I also don't think it is the top priority for political change in Iraq that people have made it out to be, the US focus to increase the effectiveness of local political governance at the city and state level is far more important to the reduction of troops than any decisions at the national level. All politics are local, when the local political will exists for a stable and productive Iraq, the national system will be more effective.
The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. In 1968, after Gen. Creighton Abrams took over as the senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, he began to change the emphasis from the kind of big-unit search-and-destroy tactics that Gen. William Westmoreland had favored, to the sort of population-protection strategy more appropriate for a counterinsurgency. Over the next four years, even as the total number of American combat troops declined, the communists lost ground.
By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing.
Following in Abrams's footsteps, Gen. Petraeus is belatedly pursuing classic counterinsurgency strategies that are paying off. The danger is that American politicians will prematurely pull the plug in Iraq as they did in Vietnam. If they do so, the consequences will be even worse, since Iraq is much more important strategically than Vietnam ever was.
This is on point. Petraeus knows the condition of the Army, the hubris to assume he is ignorant to the conditions and preach to him as such is political folly. Petraeus is also fully aware of the strategic situation Iraq represents. He knows his timetables, allowing him to fit the time restrictions of troops into his strategy will result in a more effective strategy, but only if he is given some leverage in the time he has to fully execute his strategy.
Generals are trained to work with what they have, not what they want. As long as he is successful, Congress should be thoughtful in their approach to what Petraeus recommends, because in the end his recommendation aren't going to fit the political desire of either party. What confounds me is how this isn't in the best interest for those in Congress opposed to the war. Progress is measured, set backs at this point can result in the withdrawal of American troops, but one would think as long as there is progress this is much preferred to the alternative, assuming of coarse
the best interests for the US is in fact ones political interest.
The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border. This a parallel that Mr. Bush might not be so eager to cite, because in many ways he is repeating the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, who allowed communist forces to use safe rear areas in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to stage attacks into South Vietnam. No matter how much success American and South Vietnamese forces had, there were always fresh troops and supplies being smuggled over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Something similar is happening today in Iraq. Dozens of Sunni jihadists are entering Iraq from Syria every month. While not huge in absolute numbers, they are estimated to account for 80% to 90% of suicide attacks. The National Intelligence Estimate released yesterday finds that "Damascus is providing support" to various groups in Iraq "in a bid to increase Syrian influence." Meanwhile, the NIE notes, Iran "has been intensifying" its support for Shiite extremists, leading to a dramatic rise in attacks using explosively formed penetrators that can punch through any armor in the American arsenal.
The Bush administration has cajoled and threatened these states to stop their interference in Iraqi affairs, but their pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears. For all of Mr. Bush's reputed bellicosity, he has backed away from taking the kind of actions that might cause Syria and Iran to mend their ways. He has not, for instance, authorized "hot pursuit" of terrorists by American forces over the Iraqi border. Until the U.S. does more to cut off support for extremists within Iraq, it will be very difficult to get a grip on the security situation.
This is
something I have discussed in the past, and a point that will almost certainly come up when Petraeus addresses Congress in September. Congress needs to get engaged, America has been ineffective in countering this strategy in war for most of the last half century, to punt on this problem yet again would have major consequences. This problem goes to the core of the Al Qaeda strategy, that failed or weak states are allowed to be tolerant of terrorism, except in this case we have Iran and Syria exploiting a weaker Iraqi state without consequences, and that is a problem that better be confronted early in the GWOT, or the world will continue to face major problems of constantly countering insurgencies and terrorist support from states over the duration of the long war.
I'm stepping out of my comfort zone for this topic, but there is an interesting discussion taking place over at CDRs place regarding Iraq. For the record, I read Michael Yon and love his work.
