IRAQ AND VIETNAM

Comparisons between America’s involvement in Iraq today and America’s involvement in Vietnam four decades or so ago (has it really been that long?) are popular. Some of the comparisons are compelling, others strained. Here are three that are compelling, at least to this cranky old guy.

First, in both instances the United States attempted to control a far corner of the planet with a relatively small number of troops. Superior technology was supposed to offset the lack of manpower. It ultimately didn’t in Vietnam, and the experience thus far in Iraq has not met the initial optimistic expectations of those at the top of the command structure.

Which leads to the second similarity between the two conflicts: the top of the command structure, specifically the policy makers and implementers in the White Houses and upper reaches of the Defense Departments of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush. In both instances, those recommending and making policy seemed guided as much by hope for a successful outcome as by realistic, in-depth, hard-eyed, historically knowledgeable calculations of the likely costs and potential benefits. In both instances, the Department of Defense was led by a successful titan of the corporate world, an arrogant, number-crunching, efficiency expert who proved to have little understanding of the messy, nasty, brutal, dehumanizing nature of war.

And for the third similarity, in neither instance was there a universal belief that the nation was fighting for its immediate survival, as in World War II. Thus the national leadership was, and is, in a weak position to defend setbacks, apparent lack of progress, and misjudgments and mistakes that cost the lives of American soldiers. In the dark early days of World War II, Winston Churchill rallied the British people with words such as:

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . . .

And on another occasion:

[T]he Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. . . . Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: “This was their finest hour.”

The limited nature of their wars and the disagreements about the necessity of those wars to the survival of the nation precluded Presidents Johnson or Bush from such stirring appeals, even assuming such appeals were within their capabilities, or more accurately the capabilities of their speechwriters. Instead, rather than talking bluntly to the American people about the conflicts, rather than admitting setbacks and mistakes, all too often the motivational messages from the Johnson and Bush White Houses were, and are, when not outright distortions, little more than pabulum, centered on such phrases as “the light at the end of the tunnel,” we are “making progress,” we must “stay the course,” and the insurgency is in its “last throes.” Moreover, the messages were then and are now based on dubious domino theories: if we don’t stop the commies in Vietnam, all Southeast Asia will fall under the hammer and sickle; if we don’t stop the terrorists in Iraq, all Islam will fall under their sway.

Here endth the lesson.

DSH