| Subject: Iraq=Vietnam... I told you so! |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 10:34:35 04/15/04 Thu
In reply to:
Tammie
's message, "The War" on 08:12:21 03/22/03 Sat
Mounting casualties and growing guerrilla resistance. Skepticism about the justification for going to war in the first place. No clear strategy for finishing the job and coming home.
Critics say they hear echoes of the most divisive war of the 20th century in the first war of the 21st.
Is Iraq becoming another Vietnam?
"The analogy is false," President Bush said Tuesday night at his news conference in response to the first question.
But a year after the fall of Baghdad, some see growing parallels. They say U.S. policymakers are repeating mistakes of the Vietnam era, among them relying on military might to achieve political ends and delivering unrealistic predictions of the war’s cost and duration. The questions that ended Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second term in 1968 have the potential to threaten Bush’s re-election in 2004, they say.
"The Vietnam War started as a guerrilla war and then escalated into a conventional war; in Iraq, it started as a conventional war and now it’s deteriorated into a guerrilla war," says Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about the Vietnam conflict. "Now we have the same problem we had in Vietnam: How do we get out?"
There are big differences, of course. The Vietnam War lasted more than a decade and took 58,000 American lives; the U.S. death toll in Iraq after 13 months is less than 700. Johnson said Vietnam was fought to stop the spread of communism; it was one chapter in a superpower showdown. Bush calls Iraq part of a war against a shadowy network of terrorists who have targeted the United States.
At his news conference, Bush said comparing Iraq to Vietnam "sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy." The Iraq conflict has lasted "a relatively short period of time," he said, and it would be "unthinkable" to leave before a stable democracy had been established.
Some military experts who served in Vietnam agree. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey spent most of his 20s fighting in Vietnam after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he now teaches. "There is almost no political, military or strategic relevance in comparing Vietnam to this struggle," he says.
But some historians, political scientists and congressional Democrats argue that a Vietnam-style quagmire is developing in Iraq.
The comparison has power because, 30 years after it ended, the war in Vietnam continues to stand as a symbol of a foreign policy gone awry. That war divided the nation and helped define attitudes toward presidential authority and the use of force ever since. Because of the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq, foreign policy will again play a significant role in this year’s election after more than 20 years when it mattered less.
"Now, after a year of continued strife in Iraq, comes word that the commander of forces in the region is seeking options to increase the number of U.S. troops on the ground if necessary," Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia said last week on the Senate floor. In 1964, as a junior senator, he voted to authorize military action in Southeast Asia. "Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam."
"I happen to know something about Vietnam," Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, retorted in his own Senate speech. He called it "a totally false comparison." The United States has the military capability and political will to prevail in Iraq, he said. And he warned that failing to do so -- by leaving abruptly, as in Vietnam -- would have disastrous consequences.
Not so then, maybe so now
Some analysts say the Vietnam analogy, overdrawn when the U.S. invaded Iraq last year, has become more credible. As in Vietnam, the war has put the United States at odds with some of its closest allies in Europe. In both cases, U.S. policymakers created problems by failing to understand and acknowledge the history and culture of an unfamiliar region. Mistakes made at the beginning about the level of military force necessary and the political challenge of persuading local leaders to support the U.S.-led effort created a dangerous spiral as conflict continued.
Among other similarities:
U.S. forces against a guerrilla insurrection: "We’ve been treating this until now as a series of incidents -- Saddam (Hussein) loyalists and this or that," says Bruce Jentleson, director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke. He is a former State Department official in the Clinton administration and author of "With Friends Like These: "Reagan, Bush and Saddam."
In recent days, there have been reports of collaboration between rival Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq, united by their opposition to the U.S. occupation. While Vietnam had fewer ethnic divisions than Iraq, Jentleson says, animosity there to foreign powers including the United States helped build support for Hanoi and the Viet Cong.
A disputed rationale for going to war: Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush cited as justification Saddam’s stores of chemical and biological weapons and his program to develop nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell detailed the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in his pre-war address to the United Nations. Vice President Dick Cheney suggested ties between Saddam and al-Qaida, the terrorist network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
But since Bush declared an end to major combat operations a year ago, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. He has acknowledged there is no concrete evidence of links between the Sept. 11 attackers and Saddam. Powell now says that the most dramatic evidence he presented to the U.N. turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.
Larry Berman, a political scientist at the University of California at Davis, says it is "fair to begin to ask" if the administration’s justification for invading Iraq could be likened to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
Congress passed the resolution authorizing military action after the Johnson administration reported that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had twice attacked U.S. destroyers. That account is now considered dubious. The North Vietnamese did hit a destroyer with machine-gun fire. But the second alleged attack probably never happened. Johnson expressed his own doubts about it weeks after the resolution was approved, according to a tape released in 2001. In 1995, Vo Nguyen Giap, who had been North Vietnam’s military commander during the Vietnam War, acknowledged the first attack and denied the second.
Overly optimistic predictions about the task ahead: Critics say the Bush administration has portrayed the situation in Iraq and the prospects for establishing a stable democracy as more positive than they are. Before the war, Cheney predicted U.S. forces would be greeted as "liberators." Last May, Bush declared major combat operations over. But a year later, the level of warfare is increasing. Last week, the deadliest week for U.S. forces since major combat was said to be over, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the uprising the work of thugs and extremists.
Berman, who has studied presidential decision-making during Vietnam, says Bush is creating the same sort of "credibility gap" that bedeviled President Johnson. In a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll last month, 53 percent of those surveyed said that Bush has misled the public for political reasons.
Even McCaffrey, who rejects the comparison with Vietnam, says the Bush administration needs to be more forthright with Americans.
Is this a quagmire?
The U.S. forces in Iraq differ from their counterparts in Vietnam in a fundamental way. During Vietnam, there was a draft. The threat of being drafted was one factor behind the massive protests on college campuses that marked the Vietnam era. "While there were a lot of rationales for opposing the war, the underlying one was "save my ass,’ " says James Reckner, a Vietnam veteran who is director of the Center for the Study of the Vietnam Conflict at Texas Technical University in Lubbock.
In Iraq, the U.S. forces are all-volunteer, though they include National Guard and Reserve units that never expected to be deployed on such duty.
The war in Iraq now commands majority support. In the latest USA Today poll, 56 percent said it was "worth it" to go to war in Iraq. That’s more support than the first Persian Gulf War had while it was going on in 1991. Experts say the sense of peril created by Sept. 11 has made the public more willing to accept the human and financial costs of war.
Still, the Vietnam War also had strong public support at first. A Gallup Poll in early 1965 found 64 percent saying the United States should "continue its present efforts" in Vietnam. By the summer of 1967, surveys showed growing doubts; four in 10 thought Vietnam had been a mistake. Public opinion reached a turning point against the war in February 1968. By late 1969, self-described "doves" outnumbered "hawks" 55 percent to 31 percent.
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