Is Iraq like Vietnam? Lessons learned.

This is the last of three posts to examine the question "Is Iraq like Vietnam?" The catalyst for the series was the President's recent speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, where he invoked this historical analogy:

" ... one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'"

He explicitly asserts that the lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that the U.S. withdrawal precipitated a bloodbath, chaos, and massacres for the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, and we should now apply that lesson to Iraq. In the first post of this series we conclude it is the wrong question to ask about future steps in Iraq. The second post questioned the historical basis for the President's claim. In this post we turn back to the question of legacy and "lessons learned."

There were indeed important lessons to be learned from Vietnam. We don't have to speculate about those lessons. There is no more committed "learning organization" than the United States Military. Every battle, every decision in every conflict is parsed and analyzed to extract lessons that can be applied to making our fighting forces more effective. You don't need to read all of the military and historical scholarship to glean the real lessons of Vietnam. That task has already been done.

The lessons of Vietnam were distilled into a doctrine by the Secretary of Defense, refined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepted and embraced by the Commander in Chief. The SECDEF was Caspar Weinberger. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was General Colin Powell. The President that accepted and acted on the distilled lessons of Vietnam, was George Bush - George Herbert Walker Bush. Republicans one and all. The distilled wisdom of the United States military on the lessons learned from Vietnam, became known as the Weinberger Doctrine, and the Powell Doctrine.

The Powell doctrine was informed by Colin Powell's experience in two tours of duty in Vietnam. These quotes from his 1995 memoir My American Journey resonate eerily today, and foreshadow the true lessons of Vietnam. From chapters 4,5,6 entitled "It'll take half a million men to succeed", "Coming home", "Back to Vietnam":

“The powers that be seemed to believe that by manipulating words, we could change the truth. We had lost touch with reality. We were also deluded by technology. The enemy was primitive, and we were the most technologically advanced nation on earth. It therefore should be no contest.” P145

“In the years between my first and second tours, the logic of Captain Hieu’s explanation - the base is here to protect the airstrip, which is here to supply the base - had not changed, only widened. We’re here because we’re here…”

“War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support; we should mobilize the country’s resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to win. In Vietnam, we had entered into a a halfhearted half-war, with much of the nation opposed or indifferent, while a small fraction carried the burden.”

“I came to reexamine my feeling about the war … We accepted that we had been set to pursue a policy that had become bankrupt. Our political leaders had led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anticommunism, which was only a partial fit for in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism, and civil strife beyond the east-west conflict. Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses … the military failed to talk straight to its political superiors or to it itself. The tip leadership never went to the Secretary of Defense or the President and said, “The war is unwinnable the way we are fighting it.”

Last year DWSUWF was prompted by this book to write General Powell an open letter and ask a few questions:

"General Powell, How different is this Vietnam rationale, than the current rationale for our continued presence in Iraq as articulated by the President – We’re there now because it will be worse if we leave? Does the war in Iraq have the understanding and support of the American people? Have the country’s resources been adequately mobilized? Has anyone been asked to pay the price, beside the military and their families? Have our political leaders led us into a war in Iraq for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anti-terrorism, which is only a partial fit for Iraq?” Is the Iraq war “unwinnable” the way we are fighting it?"

All rhetorical questions, of course. We never received a reply, nor did we expect one, but one must wonder whether the answers could have and should have been found by this administration before we went to war in Iraq, by simply reviewing the distilled lessons of the Vietnam War:

From Wikipedia:

The Powell Doctrine, is a journalist created neologism, named after General Colin Powell in the run up to the 1990-1991 Gulf War. It is based in large part on the Weinberger Doctrine, devised by Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of Defense and Powell's former boss.

The questions posed by the Powell Doctrine, which should be answered affirmatively before military action, are:

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

How difficult would it be to apply these questions to Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afganistan and Iraq?

My assessment (Self imposed rule - no "maybe's" allowed - must be yes or no answers):

Weinberger/Powell Doctrine	Vietnam 1968	Gulf War 1990	Afgan. 2002	Iraq 2003	Iraq 2007
1. national security threat?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes/No*	Yes
2. clear attainable objective?	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
3. risks/costs fully analyzed?	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
4. non-violent policy tried?	No	No	Yes	No	No
5. plausible exit strategy?	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
6. consequences considered?	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
7. American people support?	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
8. wide international support?	No	Yes	Yes	No	No

* It depends. If Saddam had WMD's, then there was a real security threat. Nevertheless, by mid 2003, the "attainable objectives" of eliminating that threat and effecting regime change had been attained. Unattainable objectives ("Democratize the Middle East") were then added. Reasonable minds can disagree with my evaluation. I'll be happy to defend my choices in the comments.

Heh. Looking over the chart, it is apparent the President is right. Iraq really is like Vietnam. A final exercise is let to the reader - On the topic of lessons learned from Vietnam - Compare and Contrast:

The George Bush speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention on August 22, 2007 quoted at the top of this post, invoking the "legacy of Vietnam" while ignoring the distilled lessons of Vietnam.

Vs.

The George Bush speaking at the "8th Annual Reunion of Our Victory in the Desert" Feb. 28, 1999:

It was only after all peaceful means failed, he said, "that we had to fight..."I'll never forget," he said, when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell "came over and said it was time to end the fighting -- mission accomplished. I said, 'Do [Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf and the commanders agree.'" Bush said that within 30 seconds Powell had Schwarzkopf on the phone assuring him that the mission had been accomplished. "I don't believe in mission creep," he continued. "Had we gone into Baghdad -- we could have done it, you guys could have done it, you could have been there in 48 hours -- and then what? "Which sergeant, which private, whose life would be at stake in perhaps a fruitless hunt in an urban guerilla war to find the most-secure dictator in the world? "Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho?" he asked. "We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power -- America in an Arab land -- with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous." Bush said, "We don't gain the size of our victory by how many innocent kids running away -- even though they're bad guys -- that we can slaughter. ... We're American soldiers; we don't do business that way." ... Bush said his memory of Vietnam influenced his thinking during the Gulf War. He recalled that politicians during the Vietnam War kept changing the conditions under which U.S. forces fought -- bombing halts and cease-fires... We didn't want any man or woman put into harm's way," Bush said. "We worked hard to form an international coalition..." - George H.W. Bush

There were indeed lessons to be learned from Vietnam.

One George Bush heeded those lessons.

One did not.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: Colin Powell, 1975, Vietnam, George Bush, Iraq, surge, Gulf War, Powell Doctrine.

Is Iraq like Vietnam? Dubious history.

In the last post, we examined the question "Is Iraq like Vietnam?" , concluding it is the wrong question to ask about our involvement in Iraq. In the next two posts we address the President's analogy directly.

The President's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, made this comparison of Iraq to Vietnam:

" ... one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'"

Contrary to the President's assertion, it is indeed a "mistakable" legacy, dubious history, and a poor analogy. Particularly if this assertion is meant to communicate, as has been asserted by many bloggers and columnists, that the 1975 Congressional vote to cutoff funding for Vietnam was the primary cause of the death of millions of Cambodians at the hands of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. The first step in deconstructing the President's version of history, is to separate the Vietnamese and Cambodian horrors that followed our withdrawal.

For the purposes of this post, we will stipulate that a direct consequence of the 1975 vote was hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese displaced, killed, and imprisoned after Saigon fell. These were the 'boat people' and victims of 're-education' camps' that the President references. It did happen but it did not have to happen that way. We could have planned better to support those who supported us. But as bad as it was, it still must be seen in the context of a fifteen year war, where two to three million Vietnamese and 52,000 Americans lost their lives. Such is the grisly calculus of war. Continuing American involvement after 1973 or 1975 does not mean that fewer Vietnamese lives or even the lives of our Vietnamese supporters would have been lost. After 15 years of American involvement in the fighting in Vietnam, it is hard to imagine how a better outcome would have resulted from an additional two or five or ten or fifteen more years of American intervention, as implied by this speech.

Nevertheless, what happened in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon happened to our shame. But the blame does not fall exclusively on the shoulder of the Democratic Congress that voted to cut off funds. That guilt must also be shared by the Republican Commander-in-Chief, Secretary of State, and administration that set the wheels in motion for that vote and its consequences.

Consider this transcript of a taped conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office in August 1972:

Kissinger: If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it's the result of South Vietnamese incompetence. If we now sell out in such a way that, say, within a three- to four-month period, we have pushed [South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van] Thieu over the brink... even the Chinese won't like that. I mean, they'll pay verbal-- verbally, they'll like it--

Nixon: But it'll worry them.

Kissinger: But it will worry everybody. And domestically in the long run it won't help us all that much because our opponents will say we should've done it three years ago.

Nixon: I know.

Kissinger: So we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which-- after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.

Actual events did not stay precisely on Kissinger's schedule. This conversation took place in August, 1972. The Paris Peace Accord was signed five months later in January, 1973. Saigon fell a little over two years later, in April, 1975. Duplicity and domestic political gamesmanship by a Republican President and his Secretary of State set the timetable for the fall of Saigon. The Democratic Congress was an accessory to the crime. There is plenty of blame to go around.

As an interesting aside, we learned in September of last year, courtesy of Bob Woodward, that Henry Kissinger was again on the case:

"He said Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, has been telling Bush and Cheney that 'in Iraq', he declared very simply, 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.' This is so fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will."

Kissinger's views apparently had evolved by November, when asked in a BBC interview "whether military victory in Iraq was still possible?" Kissinger responded:

"If you mean, by 'military victory,' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

I found no comfort in learning that Henry Kissinger was also advising this administration, but I digress. Back to the President's dubious history lesson.

The use of the words 'killing fields' by the President in this same context (Congressional vote for withdrawal equates to bloodbath and massacre) is a bridge too far. Those words are a specific reference to the massacres that took place in Cambodia under the Pol Pol led Khmer Rouge regime. The assertion that there is a direct cause and effect link between Congress voting to cut off funds for Vietnam in 1975, and the millions who died in Cambodia is dubious at best. Nevertheless, it has been seized on by many right-of-center bloggers and columnists as a justification for continuing our occupation of Iraq. Examples:

• "Vietnam, as in we fled and millions are now dead." - PeejZ at RightVoices
• "Millions died and many countries were in turmoil.Once more, it seems the ‘lessons of Vietnam’ need to be learnt once more, but not the lessons the left have us believe." - Fairfacts at No Minister
• "So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people." - Mark Steyn in OC Register
• "Things were worse in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge liquidated over a third of the population, over two million people were murdered, while the rest of the population were used as slave labor. That is what happened when we abandoned South Vietnam, at the insistence of the Democrats who ran Congress." - Squatty at Kowabunga
• "...withdrawal does not mean putting the whole sorry mess behind us and returning to peace. Rather, it means great loss of life and of American credibility" - DC Innes at Principalities and Power
• "if we let Saigon happen to Baghdad. Let the death camps, the boat people and three decades of war happen all over again." - Lee at Postpolitical
• "2 million Cambodians were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge as a result of America's betrayal in Southeast Asia" - Jon Roth at GOP Bloggers
• "By injecting the aftermath of Vietnam into the post-Iraq War debate, President Bush opened the refrigerator door — and that sent the apologists for Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot scurrying." - Don Surber at DailyMail.com

Let us start with few indisputable facts. In 1975 a Democratically controlled Congress voted to cutoff funding for Vietnam. That is a fact. Later that year Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army. That is a fact. In 1975-79 as many as two million Cambodians died at the hands of their own government under the despotic hand of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government. That is fact.

The fallacy is stopping with those facts and ignoring others when drawing the conclusion that the Congressional vote in 1975 is responsible for the death of two million Cambodians. The bloggers linked above do not stop there, but claim that Congress cutting off funding for Vietnam in 1975 is pretty much responsible for every bad thing that has happened in the world since 1975, including the Iranian hostage crisis, both Iraq wars, Saddam Hussein, 9/11, Valdimir Putin's poor fishing technique, and Rex Grossman unable to hold on to the football in last years Superbowl, et.al.

The problem with that formulation, is that these bloggers ignore inconvenient facts that undermine the argument. With those facts, we can come up with a whole host of other reasons for what happened in Cambodia. Take your pick:

• In 1975 Congress voted to cutoff funding for Vietnam that ultimately led to the death of two million Cambodians in 1975 -79 at the hands of the Khmer Rouge government.
• In 1972 President Nixon and Henry Kissinger planned a withdrawal they knew would lead to the failure of the South Vietnamese government and ultimately led to the death of two million Cambodians in 1975 -79 at the hands of the Khmer Rouge government.
• In 197o Cambodian leader Prince Sihaounok was deposed by pro-American general Lon-Nol in a coup widely understood to have been engineered by the CIA. He was perceived as an American puppet further fueling the Khmer Rouge insurgency which ultimately led to the death of two million Cambodians in 1975 -79 at the hands of the Khmer Rouge government.
• In 1969 President Nixon ordered the carpet bombing of supply lines in Cambodia, with over 540,000 tons of American bombs killing between 140,000 and 500,000 civilians, fueling popular Cambodian support for the Khmer Rouge that ultimately led to the death of two million Cambodians in 1975 -79 t the hands of the Khmer Rouge government.
• In 1968 with 25,000 American dead in Vietnam, SECDEF Robert MacNamara, the architect of the Vietnam war, quit or was fired after informing LBJ that the war was not winnable. He chose to not share that insight with the American people until writing his memoirs some 30 years later. As a consequence, the war continued for another five years costing 27,000 American lives and ultimately led to the death of two million Cambodians in 1975 -79 at the hands of the Khmer Rouge government.

Which of these where most responsible for the Cambodian massacres? Who knows? Yes, there was a bloodbath in Cambodia and there was suffering in Vietnam. But it is not clear that there was a direct causal relationship between the cutoff in funds in 1975 and the bloodbath in Cambodia. It is not clear that we would have or could have prevented the genocide in Cambodia if we stayed. It is easier to make the case that the bloodbath was not a consequence of leaving Vietnam too early (after over a decade of war and 52,000 American lives), but because we left Vietnam too late. Indeed, one can as easily extract a lesson from Vietnam that the risk of a bloodbath increases the longer we stay. There is no historical certainty here.

The assertion that the "killing fields" in Cambodia were a consequence of a Congressional vote to cut off funds for Vietnam is bad history, and a false analogy for Iraq. Obviously, if the history itself is wrong, extracting an analogous lesson for Iraq from that falsity is complete fantasy. Does this mean there is no risk of a bloodbath in Iraq should we leave? Of course not. That risk is real. As we begin our withdrawal from Iraq, as we inevitably must, we should strive to do so in a responsible way and minimize the likelihood of a bloodbath.

A bloodbath in Iraq is not certain, but there is no guarantee that a bloodbath will not occur.

There is no guarantee that we can prevent a bloodbath from happening.

Not if we stay.

Not if we go.

For the next and last post in this series, we will revisit the question of what lessons were learned from Vietnam. We will reference the lessons that were researched, codified, and understood by the military strategists that studied that war, and the military leaders who were soldiers in that war. Soldiers like General Colin Powell.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: Colin Powell, 1975, Vietnam, George Bush, Iraq, surge, Henry Kissinger, Powell Doctrine.

Is Iraq like Vietnam? Wrong question.

Last week the President formally announced the designated autumn 2007 argument for justifying a continuing US military presence in Iraq.

" ... one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields' ..."

The Designated Argument: Since the Democrats voted to cut off funding for Vietnam in 1975, and massacres occurred in Cambodia, irresponsible Democrats were to blame and Congress must continue to support the President to avoid the same outcome in Iraq. The argument is usually illustrated in blogs by the iconic photo of the helicopter evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon seen at the top of this post.

This is not a new argument. It has been a staple on right-of-center blogs and comment threads since Republicans realized there was a possibility of losing their congressional majorities in the mid-terms. It was used last year to argue why it was so vitally important for the Republicans to retain majority control in Congress [October 2006 RedState example here*]. We have already seen how effective that argument was with the American electorate in the midterms. It will be equally ineffective now. The argument is intellectually bankrupt for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, we will hear it over and over again before, during, and after the Petraeus report next month.

The Wrong Question. The Right Question.
The primary problem with invoking Vietnam as a reason to stay the course in Iraq, is that the argument is a red herring. Arguing whether presumed actions and consequences in 1975 Vietnam are applicable to 2007 Iraq is a fundamentally unresolvable and ultimately unknowable argument. It serves only to distract attention from the real question. The real question is not "Is the 1975 Congressional cutoff of funds for Vietnam an appropriate historical lesson for 2007 Iraq? The real question is "Can we trust the judgment of this President and this administration to understand/predict the consequences of any military decision or action in Iraq?

The primary responsibility of the President of the United States, is the role of Commander in Chief with the responsibility of protecting the security of the United States. My view, like most Americans, is that the President should be afforded wide latitude and the benefit of the doubt when assessing whether military action is required to meet a threat to our country or our people. I believe that it is not only reasonable, but incumbent on the American people to support the President if he determines there is a threat. That is his job. that is what we elect him to do.

President Bush was given that latitude by the American people through their elected representatives in Congress in October 2002. I supported that decision. In November,2002 - 70% of Americans supported taking military action to remove Saddam Hussein if diplomacy failed, based on the representations of this administration that Iraq and Saddam Hussein represented a real threat. By June of this year, only 30% of Americans supported the war in Iraq and 66% believed the war was either a mistake in the first place, or badly mismanaged. This President and this administration lost the confidence and support of the American people for one simple reason - They demonstrated unequivocally that they do not deserve that support.

This is the key point - the confidence the American people placed on the judgment of this president and this administration in 2002 proved to be misplaced. The threat was not imminent. The stated rationale for the war was wrong. Over the course of the occupation, the administration moved the goalposts (objectives for the war) again and again. The nature and resilience of the enemy was misunderstood. The planning for the occupation was non-existent. The force structure deployed to maintain stability was inadequate. Bad decisions were piled on bad decisions. Dogma took precedence over analysis. Political loyalty took precedence over competence. Failures of civilian and military leadership were not recognized by the administration in a timely manner and action to replace that failed leadership came far too late.

For these reasons and more the American people have lost confidence in the ability of this president and administration to competently prosecute this war. The critics of the war are not to blame. The architects and strategists for this war are to blame. If it is incumbent on the American people to support the president when a threat is identified, it is equally incumbent on the administration to be right about the reasons for war, and demonstrate competence in prosecuting the war. Failing that, the administration has no right to expect to retain the confidence of the American people in their judgment on matters of war.

The question is not whether leaving Iraq will create a bloodbath like Vietnam. The question is whether the American people can trust the judgment of this President and administration to make that assessment.

The verdict of the majority of Americans is in, and the answer is no. This administration has forfeited any expectation of retaining the confidence and support of the American people in their judgment on war. As a result, we have no alternative but to substitute the collective judgment of our representatives in Congress, until such time as we elect a new president. This is not optimal, in fact, it is a very, very bad substitute. We just have no other choice.

This is not to say, that the Petraeus "surge" strategy should be dismissed out of hand as the appropriate strategy now. Personally, I am highly dubious. For me to support it, I have to hear that Congress supports it, as I have no confidence in this President to make a correct war decision. The "surge" debate in Congress will be contentious, heated, with strongly expressed views on both side. That is the way it should be. That is the way our government is designed to work. But arguments comparing a 1975 cutoff of funds for Vietnam to 2007 Iraq will not be persuasive.

That said, and despite Kevin Sullivan's reasonable admonition, it is worth considering the factual basis of the rhetorical question in the title of this post - to explore whether, which and how lessons extracted from the Vietnam experience can be applied to Iraq.

Over the next couple of posts, we'll stage that question by casting two actors who had major roles to play in both the Vietnam and Iraq theater - Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell.


*NOTE: This example is, coincidently, the very comment exchange that caused RedState to ban DWSUWF, a state that continues to this day, despite my conversion to Republicanism and supporting a Republican for President in 2008. It is a puzzlement.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: divided government, Colin Powell, 1975, Vietnam, George Bush, Iraq, surge, Henry Kissinger, Powell Doctrine.