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Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 by the Boston Globe
How Will the Iraq War End?
by H.D.S. Greenway
On one level, of course, there is no comparison between America's lost
war in Vietnam and the current enterprise in Iraq. After all, Vietnam is in
Southeast Asia and Iraq is the Middle East. That conflict was fought in rain
forests, this one in desert towns. One was fought by draftees, this one by a
volunteer army. The list goes on.
Yet, although the Bush administration takes pains to deny it, the
comparison keeps creeping into the national conversation, and the most
obvious link is the word ''quagmire." For the dwindling band of reporters
who covered the war in Vietnam, a trip to Baghdad cannot help but bring
forth ghosts.
America fought in Vietnam to contain communism. In this war the
reasons for fighting keep shifting, but the central idea seems to have been
to create a friendly democracy in the heart of the oil-producing Middle East
that could transform the region by example.
Forty years ago the ''best and the brightest," as David Halberstam
called them, got us into Vietnam to prevent other neighboring countries from
falling like dominoes, or so the theory went. The best and the brightest
this time around believed in a domino theory in reverse -- the
transformative power of democracy. Lots of talk about an ''Arab Spring" by
prowar professors is beginning to sound a little hollow, however.
Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. Neither Saddam Hussein nor
Ho Chi Minh threatened the United States directly, but in both cases our
leaders in Washington took the road to intervention to further perceived
American interests. In Vietnam, however, there really was a communist
threat, while in Iraq, Islamic extremism was not a problem before we got
there, nor did Saddam Hussein possess the means to harm us.
In Vietnam then and in Iraq now, the administration finds itself
engaged in a war it is unable to win and reluctant to lose. The American
people are walking away from this war, as they did in Vietnam, and the Bush
administration knows that staying the course is not a long-term option. The
recently announced troop drawdown is a reflection of this domestic pressure,
not conditions in Iraq.
But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on
until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails -- such as
that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home. In
Iraq, war is actually helping Al Qaeda to recruit terrorists to one day
attack us at home.
Both Vietnam and Iraq saw monumental miscalculations on the part of
our war leaders. Hubris played a big role in both. It seemed inconceivable
to both Johnson's and George W. Bush's defense departments that these weak
opponents could stand up to America's modern arms. In both cases it was
thought that the Americans could prevail quickly and go home.
As Richard Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, recently wrote:
''Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence
failures and possibly outright deception." To deception, add willful
self-deception as well. For in both wars there was a tendency to ignore
those who could tell our government about what Vietnam and Iraq were about.
Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, would confess years later that
he didn't know anything about Vietnamese culture and history, but as far as
I know he hasn't confessed that he went out of his way to ignore people who
could have informed him as to the difficulties ahead.
Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to ignore the advice of
those who knew something about Iraq. In both cases any information that
would get in the way of doctrine was unsought and unheard.
America's former viceroy, Paul Bremmer, and his young ideologues ran
Iraq in blissful ignorance. I am told that making sure that there was no
room for abortion in Iraq's Constitution was a goal -- likewise a flat tax
for Iraq. John Negroponte's team would later call Bremmer's people ''the
illusionists."
Consider the author of ''The Assassins' Gate," George Packer's account
of briefings in Baghdad: Daily press conferences ''about the coalition's
intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on
occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made
a day or a week earlier. . ." Packer might have been describing the ''5
o'clock follies" briefings in Saigon.
Likewise, in Saigon of old, there were bright young people working
long and hard hours to have the Vietnamese do things in the American way
totally removed from the reality of the country around them.
That being said, however, compared to Iraq there were quite a few
Vietnamese speakers among the Americans who got themselves out and about in
the countryside in Vietnam. In comparison, Americans in Iraq live in near
total isolation with few Arab speakers and very little contact with Iraqis
outside their fortified compounds. The civilian theorists and intellectuals
that came to power with George W. Bush, and promoted this war, had almost to
a man no military experience. They had ''other priorities" than to fight for
their country, as Vice President Cheney so famously put it.
Although President Bush is finally admitting to some problems in Iraq,
Washington's dreary drip of propaganda has the same Vietnam-era ring. The
famous ''light at the end of the tunnel" of the Vietnam War is reflected in
all the overly optimistic statements from the Bush White House about the
Iraq insurgency's bitter-enders and last gasps.
Today the training of an Iraqi Army is being pushed at a frantic pace
so that we can withdraw, much in the same way President Nixon's
''Vietnamization" was supposed to prop up Vietnam so that we could bring our
armies home.
It is not that there is no progress being made in Iraq. There is. But
the question is, as it was in Vietnam: What does this progress mean for our
ultimate goals? In Vietnam it became all to clear that no matter how many
wells we dug or schools we built, there would be Vietnamese who might drink
from the wells and accept the schools, but remain adamantly opposed to
Americans in their country.
The same strikes me as true in Iraq. It is perfectly logical for an
Iraqi to have opposed Saddam yesterday and oppose us today. As nationalism
became our adversary in Vietnam, more so than communism, so is nationalism
in Iraq growing against us.
US troops, with their reliance on fire power, caused great destruction
and loss of civilian life in both wars. The Nixon administration also
agonized about how atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam would hurt
the war effort, and how the information could be contained. The Bush
administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib horrors are hauntingly similar.
Melvin Laird wrote that, in Vietnam, ''elections were choreographed by
the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than
dictators in the garb of statesmen." It may be too early to make that same
judgment in Iraq, but it is clear that too many Iraqi politicians are cast
in the same mold as were our Saigon politicians.
And that old chimera the ''body count," which the Americans first
avoided in Iraq, is creeping back into usage -- as if the number of
insurgents we killed today had any bearing on whether we are actually
winning the war.
Likewise the search-and-destroy missions that General William
Westmoreland employed in Vietnam seem to be in vogue today in Iraq. But then
as now, the insurgents melt away before our armies and come back again when
we have passed on. And somehow they always seem to know when we are coming.
It was interesting for someone like me who spent years in Vietnam to
meet even US generals in Iraq who are too young to have fought in Southeast
Asia. But then as now, it is clear that this protracted war is putting
tremendous strain on the US Army. It was something that General Creighton
Abrams worried about aloud to me in Saigon, and it worries our military
commanders today. It took years for the US Army to recover from Vietnam, and
it will take years for it to recover from the strains put upon it in Iraq.
But the most haunting parallel to me is that it will be possible to win
every battle in Iraq and yet lose the war.
US involvement in Iraq will not end with American helicopters flying
from the roof of the embassy. But it may end badly with Iraq split among
ethnic and sectarian warlords, empowering those who wish America ill --
destabilizing the Middle East rather than transforming it.
Or Iraq could emerge united with some kind of representational
government. But ultimately, all that will be up to the Iraqis, not the
Americans, who do not, and cannot, control events. Once again, as in
Vietnam, we are learning the limits of American power.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© 2005 The Boston Globe
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