[Vision2020] Iraq and Vietnam: The Parallels are Now Compelling

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

This article was written by a Vietnam vet.  If you don't have time to read it, here is a good summary quotation from faculty at our own War College: 

"The two aspects of Vietnam and Iraq that show the most similarities involve an effort at state-building in an alien culture that is poorly understood by the United States, and the attempt to sustain U.S. domestic support for a prolonged war against an irregular enemy," the war college's W. Andrew Terrill and Conrad C. Crane wrote in a study of the Iraq war.


Analysis: Iraq, Vietnam Have Parallels
Friday, May 26, 2006 1:26 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By CHARLES J. HANLEY

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — The silhouettes that roar through the Baghdad twilight are sleeker than the helicopters of an earlier time. The wind brings dust, not drenching monsoons. The river snaking seaward is called Tigris, not Mekong. And this war's not fought to the wail of Jimi Hendrix's guitar.

But half a world away and half a lifetime later, a long shadow from a long-ago conflict hangs over the U.S. war in Iraq — in its "body counts" and "turning points," its Claymore mines and Kalashnikovs, its "hearts and minds" and "search and destroy," its antiwar voices rising back home.

Steve Budnick felt the "deja vu" when mortar rounds fell as he settled into a civilian job with the U.S. reconstruction agency here.

"That's what took me back, the mortars," the 60-year-old ex-infantryman said. "But these Iraqis can't aim worth a damn!"

"These guys are nothing compared with the North Vietnamese," said Jack Holley, now a U.S. logistics chief, then a young Marine officer. "The NVA would have had us marked and crosshaired."

Unlike the single-minded foe in Vietnam, the anti-U.S. resistance here is fragmented, without a political program. That war was bigger — 543,000 U.S. troops in 1969, facing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fighters, compared with 130,000 Americans here, versus perhaps 20,000 insurgents. It was a disgruntled, draftee U.S. Army then, unlike today's all-volunteer force. And U.S. casualty rates were much higher: an average 19 Americans killed a day over eight years in Vietnam, compared with two a day here.

But for all the contrasts in scale, this U.S. military operation — far from American shores, bent on shaping the political future of another land, facing a resourceful resistance, trying to hand off the fight to local allies, and fast losing support at home — shows important parallels to Vietnam, the last counterinsurgency war fought by U.S. forces.

The parallels are obvious enough to prompt war veterans like the retired colonel Holley to look for lessons from Vietnam. His: U.S. soldiers should fight shoulder to shoulder with Iraqi allies, something he said worked for Marines in Vietnam before all was lost.

Veteran scholars, too, find striking similarities between then and now.

Faulty intelligence helped to justify both wars — the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, during which two U.S. warships off Vietnam mistakenly reported that they'd been fired upon, and Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Even a mirror image of the old "domino theory" is at work in Iraq. In Vietnam, U.S. leaders warned that other Southeast Asian states would fall, one by one, to communism if Vietnam was lost. The Bush administration now presents Iraq as the first in a series of Arab dominoes that will fall to democracy.

Specialists at the U.S. Army War College hear the echoes.

"The two aspects of Vietnam and Iraq that show the most similarities involve an effort at state-building in an alien culture that is poorly understood by the United States, and the attempt to sustain U.S. domestic support for a prolonged war against an irregular enemy," the war college's W. Andrew Terrill and Conrad C. Crane wrote in a study of the Iraq war.

As with Vietnam, approval for the Iraq operation has plunged as U.S. casualties mount.

"Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War," says political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University, an expert on wars and U.S. public opinion.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll in early May, three years after the Iraq invasion, found that 59 percent of Americans now view it as a mistake. It took six years after the major U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam before a similar majority — 61 percent in 1971 — called that war a mistake.

"If history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline," Mueller adds.

What the Americans are trying to do is "Iraqization," training a new Iraqi army to move into the front line against the largely Sunni Arab insurgents, so U.S. troops can pull back.

"As the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down," Bush says.

It's an eerie refrain of another presidential voice. "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater," Richard M. Nixon said in announcing "Vietnamization" in 1969. Four years later, the American withdrawal was complete, and two years after that, in 1975, so was the failure, as triumphant communist forces rolled into Saigon.

A dwindling number of upbeat observers see a potential turning point for Iraq, if the new, elected Iraqi government and growing Iraqi army begin pacifying the country. But Stephen Biddle, a national security specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, contends that "Iraqization" is one lesson that shouldn't be taken from Vietnam.

"In a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire," he writes in the journal Foreign Affairs.

In the worsening civil conflict among Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds, the new army is viewed by Sunni Arabs as a Shiite and Kurdish force and its deployment deepens their hostility. Biddle's solution: Maintain a strong U.S. military presence while Iraq's factions work out a balanced, durable constitutional agreement.

The United States, more and more, is in a Vietnam-like bind in Iraq, many commentators say. It cannot stay; it cannot go.

"The most tragic comparison is becoming more real: In for a dime, in for a dollar," says Gordon Adams, a veteran defense scholar at George Washington University.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who was wounded as an Army sergeant in Vietnam, once favored a further U.S. buildup here. But last year he concluded: "We're locked into a bogged-down problem not dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Veterans sense one difference, in the way the troops are viewed back home, and hope that doesn't change.

Bruce Oliver served three tours in Vietnam, a 20-year-old Marine when he landed there, now a 58-year-old Army National Guard sergeant who just returned home to Georgia after a year's duty in Iraq.

"It's not like Vietnam. When you came home from there people asked you, 'How many people did you kill?'" Oliver recalled. "They treated you like second-class citizens."

For him and other soldiers, the shadow of war is a personal thing, whether old or new, Danang or Diyala, Fallujah or Phu Bai. Budnick turns bitter at the memory.

"We were 'baby killers,' 'drug addicts,' et cetera," the Baghdad-based accountant told a reporter.

Now if things drag on in Iraq, if "negative press" persists, if "push comes to shove," then "it wouldn't take much to turn against the soldiers," he said.

"Like Vietnam."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Charles J. Hanley served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.