November 19, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I
By Richard Miniter
(Note: The following is the first of a two-part excerpt from Mr. Miniter's new book, "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine The War On Terror')
"The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable." -George Lucas, Star Wars creator
Thundering South from Baghdad in a Black Hawk helicopter in November 2003, I was strapped into the rear seat closest to the door.
There was nothing to do except watch the brightly lit landscape speed by. As we approached the landing zone near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the helicopter passed over a boy herding goats. He looked up?-and waved.
Belted in to my left was a reporter from a major American daily. He leaned over to shout into my ear. "Vietnam!"
With the helicopter engine at full throttle and wind roaring in, conversation was impossible. I couldn't ask him what about Iraq reminded him of Vietnam. So I searched the ground for some sign of Vietnamese terrain. I had been in Vietnam only a few years earlier and was instinctively looking for a broad, muddy river crowded with boats, a thick canopy of trees whose trunks were hidden in shade even at noon, or the colossal red-brick ruins of French colonialism. I saw none of that. Instead, there were flat-roofed, single-story buildings sprouting new satellite dishes, dots of green vegetation carefully fed by irrigation, and a hot expanse of boulder-strewn sand. Even the crewman at the machine gun, just forward of me, was in desert camouflage, not Vietnam-era jungle fatigues. Perhaps the reporter meant that the shadow of the helicopter, now undulating over the parched croplands and silvery irrigation ditches, was reminiscent of Vietnam. But there were no Black Hawks in the skies of Vietnam.
On the ground, the reporter told me that he had no real memory of Vietnam. (In fact, he had graduated from Yale in 1994.) All that he knew of the Vietnam War was Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and a series of television documentaries featuring helicopters, rice paddies, and the music of the Rolling Stones. Now, in Iraq, he said he felt like he was "living inside a movie."
That same movie seems to be running inside the heads of scores of foreign correspondents, television pundits, think-tank experts, and armchair historians. It is a misconception at home on both the Left and the Right; everyone from Senator Ted Kennedy (Iraq is "George Bush's Vietnam") to Pat Buchanan ("While U.S. casualties in Iraq, five dead a week, do not approach the 150 we lost every week for seven years, in Vietnam, the home front does call to mind 1968 and even the early Nixon years.")4 has raised the specter of an Indochinese quagmire.
Although both terrain and technology couldn't be more opposite, this tired comparison between Vietnam and Iraq lives on.
Perhaps the comparison is unavoidable. The Vietnam War was a formative experience for the baby boomers, the largest generation in American history. It dominated the newscasts of the three television networks nearly every night for eight years, from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution to 1973 negotiations in Paris. Even when the war was popular?-and, yes, it was popular in the early years?-it dominated the national conversation. "The Ballad of the Green Beret," a pro-war song, was a charttopping hit in 1966. Later, when the draft divided America and antiwar protesters filled the streets, Vietnam remained Topic A. For the people who were of voting age during the war, allowing it to slide gently into history is difficult. Now they are perched in high positions?-guiding news coverage, shaping the agenda in Congress, and setting the curriculum in classrooms across the country?-and can ensure that the Vietnam War is never treated like the Korean conflict, a vital piece of Cold War history with limited lessons for today.
Even the officer corps of the American military, even those who were born after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, are haunted by Vietnam. It was the last time that the U.S. military fought a protracted war against insurgents and the first time the press and the public turned against a military operation overseas. Officer training reflects the "lessons of Vietnam" and, in private conversations, officers tell me that they worry about "another Vietnam."
What exactly is "another Vietnam"? While hard to define precisely, the specter of it appears whenever the U.S. military is sent overseas. Remember when the war in Afghanistan was supposed to be "another Vietnam"?
Less than three weeks into the ground war in 2001, the legendary New York Times columnist R. W. Apple asked: "Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not."
The Los Angeles Times warned: "The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one."
In Britain, the Financial Times ran a two-part article on the war in Afghanistan titled "Ghosts of Vietnam." The Guardian, Britain's centerleft daily, summed it up with this headline: "This is our Vietnam." One of the icons of American liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote "Are We Trapped in Another Vietnam?" in the Independent (London): "Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban's rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgments."
Even the Australians?-whose nation sent troops to Vietnam in the 1960s?-thought they were in a time warp. "The war itself in [Afghanistan] has already begun to create a certain déjà vu of the Vietnam variety," Mike Carlton wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. "You can almost hear the hoots of laughter from Hanoi."
Then there was the former spokesman for the Australian Defense Department, Adrian D'Hage, who warned that the campaign against the Taliban had "an eerie echo of Vietnam, when Australian soldiers were sent to fight the Vietcong." The war, he complained, was "being planned by generals who have learned little, if anything, from history."
All of these learned gentlemen completely overlooked the many essential differences between the Vietnam and Afghan wars. The Vietnam War was a contest of superpowers. In 2001, all the leading powers were united against the Taliban and bin Laden. The Taliban had no superpower (or even regional power) to train, arm, fund, or defend themselves. "The differences between the Soviet Union's situation and ours are dramatic," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained. "The Soviets wanted that country. We don't. They lived in the neighborhood. We don't. They had a superpower opposing them. We don't."
Finally, the war in Afghanistan had an unquestionable legitimacy because the United States had suffered an unprovoked and surprise attack that slew thousands of innocents. Even today, four years into the global War on Terror and the nascent antiwar movement, the legitimacy of the war in Afghanistan is rarely questioned. (Indeed, a major argument against the Iraq War contends that it is a distraction from completing the Afghan War.)
Afghanistan, while still a troubled and violent land, has not become another Vietnam. It should stand as a warning to all of those who see "another Vietnam" in every foreign fight. Yet, like so many warnings, it went unheeded.
Then, in 2003, it was Iraq's turn to be the next Vietnam.
Of course, there are some striking similarities between the Vietnam conflict and the war in Iraq. Both were marked by terrorism against civilians and local government officials, featured massive counter-insurgency operations, and were multi-year wars in which final victory seemed elusive. Both conflicts were characterized by attempts at nation-building in cultures and countries where democracy had yet to firmly take root and faced significant opposition by an antiwar movement at home. And that is where the parallels end.
Perhaps the definitive side-by-side comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq wars appears in a monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), a Defense Department think tank. In "Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights," Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and W. Andrew Terrill, a former Army officer and Middle East specialist at SSI, made an exhaustive study of the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
The two authors are uniquely qualified. Record served as an assistant province adviser in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and as a national security adviser to Democratic senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen. He is the author of six books and a dozen monographs, including "Why We Lost in Vietnam." Terrill was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve in the Middle East and is an acknowledged expert on the Iran-Iraq War and terrorism.
Drawing historical comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq is tricky, as Record and Terrill note:
Summarizing by historical analogy is an inherently risky business because no two historical events are completely alike and because policymakers' knowledge and use of history are often distorted by ignorance and political bias. In the case of Iraq and Vietnam, extreme caution should be exercised in comparing two wars so far apart in time, locus, and historical circumstances. In fact, a careful examination of the evidence reveals that the differences between the two conflicts greatly outnumber the similarities. This is especially true in the strategic and military dimensions of the wars. There is simply no comparison between the strategic environment, the scale of military operations, the scale of losses incurred, the quality of enemy resistance, the role of enemy allies, and the duration of combat."
Drawing on their monograph and an array of published material, as well as a recent trip of my own to Iraq, let's investigate whether Iraq is really "another Vietnam."
The Battlegrounds are Different
Vietnam and Iraq are vastly different societies. The Vietnamese nation has existed for centuries; its people have a long history and well-formed national identity. Vietnamese nationalism was hardened and sharpened in wars against the Japanese and French empires.
On the other hand, Iraq was born when the colonial powers of Britain and France decided to stitch together three Ottoman Empire provinces in the aftermath of World War I. Many Middle East specialists wonder, even now, if the Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish populations really see themselves as Iraqis. Iraq has long been riven by ethnic and religious strife. Certainly Iraqi nationalism seems to diminish the farther one travels from Baghdad. In the western hinterland, many of Iraq's residents freely migrate across borders, and loyalty is still to family, tribe, and Islam?-not Iraq.
Iraq's nationalism, which is quite real in the major cities, did not emerge naturally from the Arab people inhabiting Mesopotamia. Instead, it was forged by Saddam Hussein as a top-down tool to hold the nation together. Whatever the qualities and merits of Iraqi nationalism, it is distinctly different from its Vietnamese counterpart.
The Progression of the War is Different
In Vietnam, American troops met a guerrilla force that developed into a mechanized, regimented army capable of fielding as many as 80,000 men in a single campaign.
Iraq is Vietnam in reverse. Saddam Hussein's tanks were abandoned and his predominantly Shi'ite conscripts fled to their homes, replaced by an insurgency that rarely deploys more than four men at a time.
The Vietnamese and Iraqi Insurgencies are Different
The Vietnamese Communists advanced a clear economic, political, and military program supported by a complex ideological dogma. The enemies of Iraqi democracy do not attempt to indoctrinate their fellow Iraqis, but only kill, maim, and terrorize them. The Communists offered a utopian goal for the war: after a final victory, peasants would enjoy a more prosperous, more equal life in a united and independent homeland. The Iraqi guerrillas seem to want nothing beyond the exit of America and its allies and promise nothing. The insurgents do not even promise peace, if they should prevail.
The Vietnamese insurgency was tightly controlled through a rigid hierarchy directed by a central authority, while the one in Iraq is segmented into three clusters. The largest faction is staffed by former intelligence officers and Ba'ath Party loyalists; a second faction is a motley collection of Shi'ite front groups, identifying with Muqtada al-Sadr and most likely run by Iranian intelligence officers; and a third strand, probably run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is made up of elements of al Qaeda who have journeyed into Iraq to wage jihad. So the Iraqi insurgency is not a centralized tool of an enemy power, but three separate movements run by agents of three different powers. This may not be good news for the U.S. military, but it is not a repetition of Vietnam.
In Vietnam, the insurgency was largely rural and peopled by peasants. In Iraq, it is largely urban and waged by well-schooled sons and daughters of the middle class. As a result, the manpower pool for insurgents was greater in Vietnam than it appears to be in Iraq today. The Communists could count on recruits from the peasantry, which accounted for roughly 80 percent of the total population in 1965. With a total membership of fewer than two million in 2003, the Ba'ath Party amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the total Iraqi population. It is a minority even among the roughly 20 percent of Iraqis who call themselves Sunni Arabs. Al-Sadr's forces and other radical Shi'ite militias number less than 5,000. The al Qaeda fighters?-apparently led by al-Zarqawi?-are foreigners and number less than 2,000, according to allied estimates.
The size of the enemy forces in Vietnam was much greater. The total number of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong grew from 300,000 in 1963 to 700,000 in 1966 and peaked at roughly one million in 1973, the year the U.S. decided to withdraw. Even the largest estimates of the total number of insurgents in Iraq put their strength at between 5,000 and 20,000 people. Currently, the U.S. alone has more then 130,000 troops in Iraq.
In Vietnam, the enemy was willing and able to take immense losses. The Vietnamese government announced, in April 1995, that their nation had lost 1.1 million dead in their war against the Americans. The military dead alone accounted for 5 percent of the North Vietnamese population and the pockets of South Vietnam controlled by the Communists. As Record and Terrill note, "No other major belligerent in a twentiethcentury war sustained such a high military death toll proportional to its population."
The entire Iraqi insurgency doesn't even amount to 5 percent of the population. To sustain losses equivalent to that of the Vietnamese Communists, the Iraqi insurgents would have to sacrifice many times their total number, which is impossible unless the insurgency finds a way to grow.
