Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson: Viet Not
[Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson are, respectively, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.]
... The Vietnam comparison represents the culmination of a series of tendentious analogies waged by senior American officials to justify the continuing military presence in Iraq. General David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq, repeatedly bruits about the British counterinsurgency effort in Northern Ireland as a successful model for the American enterprise in Iraq. But that model is easily invalidated: British troops in Northern Ireland peaked at 30,000, against active Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers numbering perhaps 500 (which yields a soldier-to-insurgent ratio of 60 to one); coalition forces in Iraq now stand at roughly 170,000, facing over 30,000 Sunni insurgents alone, for a ratio of less than five to one. And whereas Protestant "loyalist" terrorism in Northern Ireland was almost exclusively pro-British, broadly pro-state Iraqi Shia militias have targeted American troops as well as their Sunni enemies. Because the Northern Irish conflict was small and containable, claiming on average fewer than 40 British troops a year–P.J. O’Rourke once dubbed Northern Ireland "heck’s half-acre"–it was relatively easy to manage politically over the course of 25 years. Obviously, Iraq is not.
Undaunted by subtlety, the U.S. command in Iraq has glommed onto other models, like the 1950s British suppression of the Chinese communist insurgency in Malaya and the defeat of the bloody Salvadoran insurgency in the 1980s. These too are readily distinguishable. In Malaya, the British did an artful job of managing political and economic incentives, but they faced only an ideological minority of an ethnic minority, most of whom did not actively oppose the British and the ethnic Malay majority; the British likewise enjoyed an overwhelmingly superior force ratio. In El Salvador, there was a viable central government steeped in Western political traditions to defend, a relatively small number of insurgents, no sectarian dimension, and an operational requirement of less than 100 American military advisers. This made a "market solution" involving heavy economic aid and incentives singularly appropriate. Furthermore, in Northern Ireland, Malaya, and El Salvador, those whom we generally regard as the good guys won. The British government and the pro-British Northern Irish majority tamed the IRA sufficiently to open it to a political deal; UK-backed Malays prevailed over Chinese communist insurgents; and a pro-Western government remained in place in El Salvador at the expense of Soviet-supported rebels. The fact that these stories ended so well may explain the appeal of these purported Iraq precedents.
The Vietnam War has a different and more insidious relationship to the American psyche, one all the more seductive and resonant today because it does in fact bear objective similarities to the Iraq War. Both were major, large-scale American engagements against unexpectedly tough adversaries. Over time, both were met by dwindling public support. But there are also obvious differences. The Vietnam War evolved from a guerrilla insurgency into a major conventional conflict, while the Iraq War has taken just the opposite course. And Vietnam’s crowning characteristic is that the good guys lost. Indeed, the Vietnam War is often cast as the first American defeat. As such, it cries out for redemption of a cause betrayed. It is this last, highly emotive and nationalistic impulse, rather than the war’s pedagogical utility, that the Bush Administration seeks most acutely to exploit in implicitly vowing "never again."
The Vietnam syndrome was supposedly behind us, exorcised by the end of the Cold War, the swift victory in the first Gulf War, and the successful military intervention in Kosovo at the end of the last century. Yet, the ability of the Bush Administration to use Vietnam to amp up fears of American disempowerment (jingoistically enshrined by the popular post-Vietnam T-shirt blurb, "Good Soldiers Betrayed By Gutless Politicians") shows that the nation has not come to terms with how the Vietnam War was lost. This misreading of history not only reopens old divides between hawks and doves, but more perniciously can lead to disastrous policy choices....
Read entire article at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
... The Vietnam comparison represents the culmination of a series of tendentious analogies waged by senior American officials to justify the continuing military presence in Iraq. General David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq, repeatedly bruits about the British counterinsurgency effort in Northern Ireland as a successful model for the American enterprise in Iraq. But that model is easily invalidated: British troops in Northern Ireland peaked at 30,000, against active Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers numbering perhaps 500 (which yields a soldier-to-insurgent ratio of 60 to one); coalition forces in Iraq now stand at roughly 170,000, facing over 30,000 Sunni insurgents alone, for a ratio of less than five to one. And whereas Protestant "loyalist" terrorism in Northern Ireland was almost exclusively pro-British, broadly pro-state Iraqi Shia militias have targeted American troops as well as their Sunni enemies. Because the Northern Irish conflict was small and containable, claiming on average fewer than 40 British troops a year–P.J. O’Rourke once dubbed Northern Ireland "heck’s half-acre"–it was relatively easy to manage politically over the course of 25 years. Obviously, Iraq is not.
Undaunted by subtlety, the U.S. command in Iraq has glommed onto other models, like the 1950s British suppression of the Chinese communist insurgency in Malaya and the defeat of the bloody Salvadoran insurgency in the 1980s. These too are readily distinguishable. In Malaya, the British did an artful job of managing political and economic incentives, but they faced only an ideological minority of an ethnic minority, most of whom did not actively oppose the British and the ethnic Malay majority; the British likewise enjoyed an overwhelmingly superior force ratio. In El Salvador, there was a viable central government steeped in Western political traditions to defend, a relatively small number of insurgents, no sectarian dimension, and an operational requirement of less than 100 American military advisers. This made a "market solution" involving heavy economic aid and incentives singularly appropriate. Furthermore, in Northern Ireland, Malaya, and El Salvador, those whom we generally regard as the good guys won. The British government and the pro-British Northern Irish majority tamed the IRA sufficiently to open it to a political deal; UK-backed Malays prevailed over Chinese communist insurgents; and a pro-Western government remained in place in El Salvador at the expense of Soviet-supported rebels. The fact that these stories ended so well may explain the appeal of these purported Iraq precedents.
The Vietnam War has a different and more insidious relationship to the American psyche, one all the more seductive and resonant today because it does in fact bear objective similarities to the Iraq War. Both were major, large-scale American engagements against unexpectedly tough adversaries. Over time, both were met by dwindling public support. But there are also obvious differences. The Vietnam War evolved from a guerrilla insurgency into a major conventional conflict, while the Iraq War has taken just the opposite course. And Vietnam’s crowning characteristic is that the good guys lost. Indeed, the Vietnam War is often cast as the first American defeat. As such, it cries out for redemption of a cause betrayed. It is this last, highly emotive and nationalistic impulse, rather than the war’s pedagogical utility, that the Bush Administration seeks most acutely to exploit in implicitly vowing "never again."
The Vietnam syndrome was supposedly behind us, exorcised by the end of the Cold War, the swift victory in the first Gulf War, and the successful military intervention in Kosovo at the end of the last century. Yet, the ability of the Bush Administration to use Vietnam to amp up fears of American disempowerment (jingoistically enshrined by the popular post-Vietnam T-shirt blurb, "Good Soldiers Betrayed By Gutless Politicians") shows that the nation has not come to terms with how the Vietnam War was lost. This misreading of history not only reopens old divides between hawks and doves, but more perniciously can lead to disastrous policy choices....