Yesterday, the WaPo carried a series of three essays on the parallels between the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq, in which the authors all also tried to draw out some policy conclusions for today.
Robert Kaiser is a longtime WaPo foreign-affairs journo. His piece was titled Trapped by Hubris, Again.
He wrote,
For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18 months covering the Vietnam War for The Washington Post, it is a source of amazement to realize that my country has done this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn’t understand, whose expectations for life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans.
Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders [!], who did not see their country’s fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted [!]. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.
How did this happen again? After all, we’re Americans — practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we’d like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, religious, political and historical realities far different from our own. These failings — more than any tactical or strategic errors — help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq.
I note, first of all, the apparently unconscious– or anyway, unremarked– hubris with which Kaiser writes there about the local politicians “not following US orders” and “not producing the outcome Washington wanted.”
Does the guy have any sense of self-awareness or of irony?
Also, regarding his question, “How did this happen again?” I’d love for Bob Kaiser to go back and reflect much more transparently on some of the journalistic decisions that he himself and his colleagues were making, regarding Iraq, back in 2002/2003. In a well-researched 2004 article in the New York Review of Books titled “Now they tell us” Michael Massing dissected some of the decisions the editors at the WaPo, the NYT, and other major US print media had made in the run-up to the war that had the effect of suppressing and/or hiding the widespread doubts there were even inside large and relevant sections of the US government back then, regarding the veracity of the case the Bushites were making against Iraq.
Massing wrote, in particular, about how two pieces very critical of the Bush case that veteran WaPo intel-affairs writer Walter Pincus wrote in mid-March 2003 were first resisted by his editors– including, I assume, Kaiser– and then, once they were published, were buried deep inside the paper rather than being spotlighted on page 1. Massing added,
The placement of these stories was no accident, Pincus says. “The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think,” he told me. “They’re like writing a memo to the White House.” But the Post’s editors, he said, “went through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference.”
When senior journos at the WaPo and the NYT hurried to rebut Massing’s accusations, the NYT’s rebuttals came from Judith Miller (!) and from a senior NYT editor. The WaPo’s came from Kaiser, who signed off his letter as “Associate Editor and Senior Correspondent.” He huffed, “does Massing really mean to imply that editors who will run a story on A10 somehow lack courage if they won’t put it on A1? That suggestion seems silly.” No it doesn’t at all. Kaiser also said nothing about Pincus’s claim that one of his key doubt-Bush stories was at first resisted completely by the WaPo editors, and was published only after Bob Woodward– of all people– intervened.
… In light of which, Kaiser’s present rhetorical question of “How did this happen again?”, i.e., the 2003 launching of an an ill-considered war, seems disingenuous, at best.
The “lessons” Kaiser draws from the present state of affairs is also extremely half-hearted:
Before initiating a war of choice — and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify — define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success.
But how about this lesson, from Helena Cobban, instead:
Forget about ‘wars of choice’. Forget about trying to sustain– and also ‘justify’– US military dominance over the whole of the rest of the world. Instead of that, let’s find ways to work constructively with other governments to find nonviolent ways to resolve our differences and concerns, and strengthen the international institutions that will help us do that.
Noooo. I guess Bob Kaiser is not quite ready enough to let go of his own “ethnocentrism” or his “certainty of his own country’s superiority” to be able to do that.
… And moving right along, the second essay was a piece of “realist” analysis from Les Gelb and Dick Betts, under the (eminently realistic) title We’re fighting not to lose.
Gelb and Betts long ago co-authored a book about Vietnam. Titled “The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked,” it argued that although U.S. policy in that war was disastrous, the policymaking process performed just as it was designed to. (H’mmm, bad system maybe?)
Now, looking at the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, they write:
In both cases, despite talk of “victory,” the overriding imperative became simply to avoid defeat.
How did these tragedies begin? Although hindsight makes many forget, the Vietnam War was backed by a consensus of almost all foreign-policy experts and a majority of U.S. voters. Until late in the game, opponents were on the political fringe. The consensus rested on the domino theory — if South Vietnam fell to communism, other governments would topple. Most believed that communism was on the march and a worldwide Soviet-Chinese threat on the upswing.
The consensus on Iraq was shallower and shorter-lived. Bush may have been bent on regime change in Baghdad from the start, but in any case a consensus emerged among his advisers that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of securing nuclear weapons capability — and that deterrence and containment would not suffice. That judgment came to be shared by most of the national security community. Congress also saluted early on. The vote to endorse the war was less impressive than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which passed almost unanimously, but many Democrats signed on to topple Hussein for fear of looking weak.
As soon as the war soured, the consensus crumbled. Without the vulnerability of middle-class youth to conscription, and with the political left in a state of collapse since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the antiwar movement on Iraq did not produce sustained mass protests as Vietnam did by the late 1960s. But the sentiment shows up just as clearly in the polls.
Later on, it seems as though both these guys– neither of whom is in any way a specialist on Iraqi or broader Middle Eastern affairs– look as though they’ve “bought”, hook, line, and sinker the mainstream US narrative about the nature of the situation in Iraq:
Vietnam was both a nationalist war against outside powers — first the French, then the Americans — and a civil war. In Iraq, the lines of conflict are messier. The main contest is the sectarian battle between Arab Shiites and Arab Sunnis.
Note: no mention of Iraqis having any “nationalist” motivation to fight against outside powers there, at all.
But also, note this:
In both countries, U.S. forces worked hard at training national armies. This job was probably done better in Vietnam, and the United States certainly provided South Vietnamese troops with relatively better equipment than they have given Iraqis so far. South Vietnamese forces were more reliable, more effective and far more numerous than current Iraqi forces are. [But still, the US didn’t win… Any lessons there? ~HC]
In both cases, however, the governments we were trying to help proved inadequate. Unlike their opponents, neither Saigon nor Baghdad gained the legitimacy to inspire their troops. At bottom, this was always the fundamental problem in both wars. Americans hoped that time would help, but leaders such as South Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu and Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki were never up to the job.
So these two guys– one of whom is the politically very well-connected Gelb– have already completely written off Maliki. Interesting.
Then, here is their best-possible scenario:
With some luck, Washington may yet escape Baghdad more cleanly than it did in the swarms of helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975.
The erosion of confidence in the possibility of a US “victory” in Iraq has evidently now gnawed deep into the country’s policy-making elite itself. Interesting.
… And then, finally, there was Robert K. Brigham, a professor of international relations who last August published a book titled Is Iraq another Vietnam?
His piece in the WaPo yesterday was titled The time to negotiate is now.
He wrote:
Despite President Bush’s call for more troops in Iraq, each day seems to bring closer an endgame there that could echo the one of three decades earlier, with U.S. helicopters landing “inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof,” as Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) recently put it.
That image would seem to bring the United States full circle, retreating from another ill-conceived war and nursing an “Iraq syndrome” much like the Vietnam syndrome that limited U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward.
But there’s a difference: Today’s policymakers have the benefit of the Vietnam experience. It’s not too late to draw on its lessons to ensure a better outcome in Iraq. It’s still possible to snatch victory from defeat — if the Bush administration understands that there is no hope of a narrowly defined military victory in Iraq, and that the best it can wish for is a negotiated settlement that will bring greater stability and security to the region…
As it did in Vietnam, the time has come for the United States to announce a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. No meaningful settlement can take place while Washington is escalating the war. A schedule for phased troop withdrawal would signal to regional players that Washington is interested in a political settlement to the conflict. It would also allow Washington to pressure the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take responsibility for rebuilding Iraq’s civil society instead of enabling a civil war. Finally, as difficult as negotiations might be, it is time to think of the Iraq war in regional terms. Because of the sectarian violence threatening to rip the country apart, it will be impossible to settle the civil war without thinking of Baghdad’s more powerful neighbors, including Syria and Iran.
Granted, the idea of regional negotiations poses significant problems. It could give states such as Syria and Iran more influence over Shiites and events inside Iraq than they deserve. It assumes that the Sunni states can control or isolate the more radical elements of the insurgency. It suggests that most players in the region want to limit the conflict to Iraq. And it relies on a dramatic change in the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel. Washington is unlikely to abandon its long-standing support of Israel — nor should it — but in a balance-of-power peace settlement, Israel will need to enter into negotiations with some of its regional enemies. Nonetheless, it seems that diplomacy is the best hope for the future.
If it needs political cover to engage in regional negotiations, the Bush team could simply refer to the Iraq Study Group report.
Oh yes, so it could… If only the Prez were not still so deeply in thrall to all his unresolved psychological father issues.
Brigham goes on to note many parallels between the ISG report and a secret study CIA Director Richard Helms conducted in 1967 into the possible consequences of a US withdrawal from Vietnam. He writes,
The resulting secret report [in 1967] concluded that the United States could leave without suffering a significant loss in security, global prestige or power. And yet it was six more years before Washington acted on the Helms report.
Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long this time.
I have two reactions to that. Firstly, I am convinced at this point that it will not take anything like another six years before the US withdraws from Iraq. History is unfolding at a steroid-fueled speed these days, thanks in great part to the expansion and democratization of access to near-real-time information and analysis.
Secondly, I don’t believe that the US has any options left, regarding the manner of its withdrawal from Iraq, that will leave its “global prestige” anywhere near as high as it was back in 2002, before that disastrous decision to invade Iraq was taken.
Every day since that ill-fated day in March 2003 when the invasion started, US “prestige” in the world– and all the concomitant political/strategic power that flows from that– has been undergoing a sharp erosion. The only way the US can stanch that continuing bleeding of national power is to find a way to undertake a total and orderly troop withdrawal from Iraq; and the sooner that is done, the less the total erosion in US “power” will be.
That is a perfectly “realist” piece of analysis from me. Beyond that, I would say the interests of the US citizenry as such will be most effectively and sustainably met over the longer term if we work to transform our country’s relationship with the rest of the world from one of hegemonism to one based on the equality of all human persons and on a strong commitment to reciprocity in all international agreements, the pursuit of nonviolent means of resolving differences among nations, and the building of accountable and effective international institutions.
And the sooner the better. No more Vietnams. No more Iraqs. No more hegemonism. Please!
