Strategic blindness: Learning the wrong lessons from Vietnam

John Kerry, having finally decided (at least for this week) that knowing what he does now, he would not have taken the country to war in Iraq, does not appear to understand how his comments on the current situation in Iraq damage US interests and endanger the lives of American troops.

In Vietnam, where US soldiers last faced guerilla warfare waged by political insurgents, our opponents knew they could not prevail militarily against the US' superior resources and advanced weapons. Rather than try to achieve a military victory, the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese allies focussed on a political strategy of destroying the American people's willingness to fight. Over time, as US casualties mounted and domestic opposition to the war grew, they succeeded in driving US soldiers out of their country, clearing the way for the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam.

Our enemies in Iraq are trying to pursue the same strategy in that country. While they have no hope of taking on US soldiers in head-to-head combat, if they can succeed in causing enough US casualties and weaken domestic political support for the war, the US will leave Iraq.

This is why comments like the ones Kerry made yesterday in response to interim Prime Minister Allawi's speech before Congress (which Kerry was too busy to attend in person) are harmful. By painting a bleak picture of the situation in Iraq for the American people and deriding the decision to have gone to war in the first place, Kerry encourages the terrorists who believe that if they kill enough US soldiers, the country will tire of its commitment to Iraq and withdraw.

The wrong lessons

I believe that much of the current division of American opinion over the Iraq is due to partisans on both the right and the left holding contradictory conclusions about the "lessons of Vietnam" and trying to apply those lessons to Iraq.

The liberal conventional wisdom about the war in Vietnam is that it was an unjust, unwinnable war and the more than 58,000 US soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam died for nothing or, even worse, in support of an unjust cause. The true heros of the war were those Americans who protested against the war and refused to support their government in waging the war, perhaps even leaving the country or going to prison to avoid the draft.

On the right, the war was also seen as a failure, in that it did not succeed in defending South Vietnam from domination by the communist North, reduced American prestige around the world, and was a colossal waste of US "blood and treasure" to use that wonderful Churchillian term.   However, in spite of the corruption and brutality of our South Vietnamese allies, most conservatives viewed the fight to defend the South against communist aggression as a noble cause. This view was reinforced when after the 1975 victories of communist regimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, more than three million people risked their lives to become refugees over the following two decades. Untold numbers of others were executed, put in resettlement or reeducation camps, or otherwise perished.

As for the war being "unwinnable", most military analysts, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, now believe that the US military had made significant progress in terms of defeating the insurgency in the South. The 1968 Tet Offensive, while a military disaster for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army (the NLF), was a huge political success in terms of turning US domestic opinion against the war. When Nixon allowed US forces to deny NLF forces sanctuary in Cambodia and resumed bombing of North Vietnam, the balance of power shifted against the North. The US was then able to negotiate a "peace agreement" in Paris with the North Vietnamese that guaranteed the South's independence and allowed the US to withdraw its forces. However, when the US (distracted by Watergate and thoroughly sick of Vietnam) failed to react to North Vietnam's blatant violations of the Paris agreement, the South was unable to stand alone against the more powerful Northern forces.

Conservatives therefore believe that if the US had only been more determined to enforce the terms of the Paris agreement (for example, by threatening to resume bombing the North if violations continued), the humanitarian disaster that followed the North Vietnamese victory could have been avoided.

Vietnam's painful memories

In the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the 1975 collapse of the Saigon regime, Vietnam remained a painful subject for many Americans. The war was associated in many people's minds with a host of problems, including the rise of the mass youth protest movement, "stagflation", the collapse of the stock market, rising unemployment, the rise of OPEC and a diminution of American prestige throughout the world. The atmosphere at the time was perhaps best captured by films like Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), which portrayed the war as a tragedy which destroyed the lives of many good men for no apparent reason and the US military as being led by evil incompetents.

During the 1980s, the tacit ban on public discussion of the war began to slowly disappear. Many books were written describing the Vietnam experiences of American soldiers, like Michael Herr's Dispatches or Phillip Caputo's Rumor of War. But America never really had a debate about the war's goals and aims: was it a botched attempt to uphold the noble goal of defending freedom in South Vietnam or a complete mistake, based on ignorance, anti-communist paranoia and economic self interest?

Containment meaningless in multi-polar world

One reason why this historical debate never occurred was that the world changed during the course of the war. At the beginning, the world was seen as a bipolar, manichean place: the "free world" versus monolithic communism. In this context, the strategic doctrine of "containment" was broadly accepted on a bipartisan basis. From this perspective, the war in Vietnam was merely the latest campaign in the post-WWII struggle to prevent communist expansion. (Remember the "domino theory"?)

In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China, and the world was revealed to be a more complicated place. China and the USSR had nearly come to war over border disputes during 1970... China and Vietnam fought a nasty border war in 1978. Suddenly, the notion of "containment" (which had led to the American role in Vietnam, beginning in the early 1960s) was hopelessly quaint. The product of a bygone era, if that era had ever truly existed.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

This lack of historical perspective has come back to bite us on the ass in Iraq in that different sides of the debate over American policy towards Iraq have learned different -- and contradictory -- "lessons" from the war in Vietnam.

Conservatives think that criticism of the war effort in Iraq strengthens the morale and political strength of the insurgents who are trying to drive the Coalition out of Iraq. Liberals believe that protesting the war is a moral imperative because the sooner the US withdraws its troops the sooner US soldiers will stop dying (and killing) in a hopeless war that cannot be won.

One side or the other will be proven right by history. For the sake of the people of Iraq and the entire middle east, I just hope that we don't see a repeat of the humanitarian disaster that befell Southeast Asia at the conclusion of that war.