NYT: Those Striking Vietnam Parallels with Iraq
Todd S. Purdum, in the NYT (1-29-05):
Not quite 38 years ago, enmeshed in a drawn-out war whose ultimate outcome was deeply in doubt, Lyndon B. Johnson met on Guam with the fractious generals who were contending for leadership of South Vietnam and told them: "My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election."
George W. Bush's birthday is in early July, but his broad goals for the Iraqi elections on Sunday are much the same as the Johnson administration's in 1967: to confer political legitimacy and credibility on a government that Iraqis themselves will be willing and able to fight to defend, and that American and world public opinion will agree to help nurture.
"I think one lesson is that there be a clear objective that everybody understands," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times this week, reflecting on the relevance of Vietnam today. "A free, democratic Iraq, an ally in the war on terror, with an Iraqi army, all parts of it - Iraqi forces, army, national guard, border guard, police force - able to defend itself. Secondly, that people understand the connection between that goal and our future."
But the difficulties of achieving such objectives, then and now, have led a range of military experts, historians and politicians to consider the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to warn of potential pitfalls ahead. Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.
"We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning," Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of this war's most vocal opponents, warned in a speech here on Thursday. "We thought the skill and courage of our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would lead to victory in war and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam. In the name of a misguided cause, we continued in a war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve."
Mr. Kennedy said that there would be "costs to staying and costs to leaving" Iraq, but that at least 12,000 American troops should leave immediately to signal the United States has a clear exit strategy. That is a version of the famous advice that Senator George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, gave Johnson: declare victory in Vietnam, then leave.
Prof. Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air Force's Air War College in Alabama, said he seldom provoked controversy when he warned his audiences of military commanders about the potential parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.
"There was a time when if you mentioned Iraq and Vietnam in the same breath, you were automatically considered antiwar and very pessimistic about our prospects there," he said. "And of course those arguments were used in the beginning by people who opposed the war. But all the more reason to take a sound and hopefully unbiased look at what comparisons there are and are not."
He is quick to point out that finding similarities is far from saying the ending will be the same. "The issue of creating a legitimate government in Iraq, and the domestic political sustainability of our policy in Iraq, are the two major areas of interface with our experience in Vietnam, where we failed," Professor Record said. "That doesn't mean we're necessarily doomed to failure."
But, he added, "the challenge of Vietnamization" - the Nixon administration's
policy, begun in 1969, of phasing out American forces and turning war responsibilities
over to the South Vietnamese, "is akin to Iraqicization." In Vietnam,
unlike in Iraq, the United States "already had in place a rather large
South Vietnamese army and security force" on which it could rely, instead
of having to create one from scratch.