Iraq and Vietnam

by Cliopatria

The HNN homepage has an article by Marilyn Young discussing the wisdom of using comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq in the classroom. In Young's words,"If you happen to be teaching a course on the Vietnam War and you happen to read the newspapers regularly, opportunities to connect the past to the present without undue risk of presentist violations abound. You can, for example, lead a class through a close examination of the analogies in constant play in the press"; or in the development of a"quagmire"; or in the disillusionment of the US forces on the ground.

I agree that teaching students both about how policymakers used historical analogies and how students themselves can employ historical analogies comes with the territory when teaching courses in US foreign relations. But the Young piece (quite beyond its unusual and unconvincing sourcing) scarcely serves as a model in this effort.

It would be hard to argue that the Bush administration didn't politicize intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war or badly botch the postwar planning by basing policy on a best-case scenario without any fallback plans. Yet the critique of the academic anti-war movement has been, if anything, more shrill, and the Vietnam analogy of which Young seems quite fond strikes me as misguided.

The differences between Iraq and Vietnam are considerable, making comparisons tricky at best and misleading at worst. A few off the top of my head:

(1) Vietnam was a creeping commitment; in the Iraq war, the number of US troops has been basically static. (2) The US army in Vietnam was mostly conscript; the US army in Iraq is technically all volunteer and de facto mostly volunteer. (3) In Vietnam, the US ally never was a legitimate government in a conflict that at least began as a civil war, while the other side did have such a regime; in Iraq, at least after the elections, the US ally does represent a legitimate government, while the other side has no such regime. (4) The war in Iraq was much more controversial--internationally, in Congress, and among the American public--than was the conflict in Vietnam at a comparable stage. (5) Constitutional processes were followed in the war in Iraq, whereas in Vietnam, no President ever submitted to Congress a resolution intended to authorize the war. (6) From a realpolitik standpoint, a precipitate US withdrawal from Vietnam (say, the Aiken strategy) would have caused no harm and almost certainly would have benefitted the United States; that certainly cannot be said with the Iraq scenario. (7) In Vietnam, the enemy was receiving support from two superpowers; the Iraqi enemy has no such international state-based backing. (8) The international and domestic media is far more skeptical about US foreign policy now than at a comparable stage in the Vietnam War, when few dissenting voices existed.

This is not to say anything one way or the other about the merits of the war in Iraq. But we ill serve our students by making historical comparisons that might serve a political agenda but don't hold up well under scrutiny.

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Ed Schmitt - 5/10/2005

"From a realpolitik standpoint, a precipitate US withdrawal from Vietnam (say, the Aiken strategy) would have caused no harm and almost certainly would have benefitted the United States; that certainly cannot be said with the Iraq scenario."

I'm not sure how you can make this assertion so confidently on either point. How do you define "no harm" in realpolitik terms regarding Soviet and Chinese assessments of American resolve if the U.S. had withdrawn quickly? Certainly few policymakers at the time assessed the situation thusly. And how can you say with certainty that a strongman like Hussein will not rise out of the situation in Iraq if the U.S. pulls out, creating a similar situation to what existed previously? Also, would not the savings of billions of U.S. dollars being spent on troops, infrastructure, etc., be of some benefit? Again, this is not to advocate any position, just to suggest there are plausible other ways to see this.

Andre Mayer - 5/10/2005

What is certainly legitimate and useful is examination of how the Vietnam experience affected Iraq. As RKCJ notes, constitutional processes were followed in the Iraq case; this is at least partly because those processes were strengthened as a result of Vietnam -- although those changes may have been less effective than one might wish. Similarly, the extensive use of national guard units in Iraq descends from the Total Forces concept devised (as I recall) by Generals Abrams and Wheeler with goals that included (a) providing more mature junior officers so as to avoid misconduct, and (b)tying the Army morer closely to mainstream America so as to force poltical leaders to solidify support for the commitment of troops. Again, it's not clear that this has worked.

Maybe it's my reading pattern, but I must say that I have seen very little discussion of the second point, in particular.

Greg James Robinson - 5/10/2005

In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that Marilyn Young was one of my dissertation advisors at New York University, and I much appreciated her generous support. However, I do not recall that we ever had any substantive conversations about the Vietnam War, and I have not been in touch with her for quite some time (no doubt I should write her!)

Greg James Robinson - 5/10/2005

I certainly concur that we should be wary of facile historical comparisons. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. said once, it would be a very useful study to examine the nefarious uses of the Munich anthology in post-World War II America. However, I think we may be ignoring useful parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, and possibly somewhat overstating the differences between the two.
First the obvious parallels: 1) In both cases American intervention was justified through false estimates of enemy capabilities and attacks (or preparations for attacks) on the United States; 2) In both cases, the United States went to war without the sanction or approval of the United Nations or major NATO allies, weakened the nation’s international partnerships, and attracted international condemnation as the aggressor; 3) Both are unconventional military situations, where the United States “won” the war in terms of pitched battles, but where a military occupation was insufficient to defeat an insurgency; 4) In both cases the identity of the “enemy” is by no means certain, and the other side controls large, if shifting, swatches of territory within the country, a factor that helps lead to frustration, and arguably to atrocities, on the American side; 5) In both cases, the White House provided multiple predictions of imminent victory that proved to be overly optimistic; 6) In both cases—and these may be the only wars on record where this is true—numerous troops have stated publicly that they do not know what they are doing or why, really, they are there. One could even, slightly tongue-in-cheek, add; 7) Both times, in the first Presidential election where the war was an important issue, the Democrats, after being shaken up by the success of an antiwar candidate, divided between opponents of the War and a candidate who was a moderate supporter, were defeated for the White House.
Can we also say with confidence that the all the differences KC Johnson finds between the wars are so important? 1) It is true that the number of American troops has remained static, and not vastly expanded as in Vietnam—in part because the lack of a conscript Army limits the size of the force that can be committed--and this indeed makes a big difference. However, both conflicts seem to represent quagmires, situations where there is no way to achieve victory or withdraw the troops without prompting collapse of the US-backed regime; 2) There were popular elections in South Vietnam, in which large percentages of eligible voters participated; while the Iraq election was certainly an important step in the right direction, people voted for electoral lists and not candidates. In any case, the regime is still fragile, to say the least; 3) Although Vietnam, unlike Iraq, was indeed provided military supplies by the Soviet Union and China (only the first of which might properly have been considered a superpower), it is difficult to see how this adds a distinctive character to the war. In neither the Iraq nor Vietnam War did Russian opposition deter US intervention, in both cases Russian-American relations remained positive despite the conflict; 4) It is difficult to speak of what “stage” the War in Iraq could be said to be at, compared to the Vietnam War, so comparisons as to the level of controversy are difficult. Perhaps the best way to think of the “stage” might be to say we are currently 14 years after the first American intervention and 6 months after the first Presidential election that could be considered a referendum on the war. This would put us in May 1969, when there was already large-scale resistance, international opposition, and media scepticism.

Manan Ahmed - 5/10/2005

You are right, KC. I think that Vietnam analogies are lazy and false for all the reasons you point out. In fact, there is little to be said about pedagogy that relies on "Present day X can be understood as historical Y because of this or that reason".

What is really interesting to me, however, is her quote from John Burns: "there were snatches of dialogue from Apocalypse Now". I don't know if you saw the documentary Gunner Palace, but I was stuck by how influential Apocalypse Now and PS2 was to the young soldiers in Iraq. There is def. something to be investigated about the cinematic Vietnam in the real Iraq.