Editor’s Note: This was run late yesterday afternoon. Since the writer was a reporter in Vietnam, we’re re-running this today out of its normal order. There ARE newer posts below this, so please keep scrolling.
Parallels between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam are back in vogue these days.
People who believe that there is no light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq already are referring to an approaching “helicopters on the roof momentâ€? in Baghdad, an analogy to the last helicopter lifting off from atop the American embassy in Saigon in April 1975 as the U.S. beat an ignominious retreat. Meanwhile, President Bush finally made it to Vietnam the other day — the country, not the war.
There are apt comparisons between all wars. People are killed. People are taken prisoner. There are winners. There are losers. And sooner or later, Hollywood gets into the act and profits from the bloodshed. But valid comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are few.
Here’s why:
THE RAISON D’ETRE
The Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation, first against the Chinese and later against the French. Then the Americans came big footing in at the invitation of the South Vietnamese government on a mission that ostensibly was to halt the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia but changed with the political season. Despite the fuzziness about the mission, the U.S. had a pretty good idea of who it was fighting for – and against.
The Iraq war could not be more different. The Americans came big footing in uninvited, toppled the Saddam Hussein regime, thought they’d be greeted as liberators, hand each Iraqi a gift certificate to use at their new local Wal-Mart, install a democratically elected government that would be a beacon of hope in the Middle East, and be home in time for dinner. The U.S. is having a helluva time figuring out who it’s fighting for, and sometimes the people it thinks it’s fighting for are fighting against it. But there is one big similarity: The U.S. mission has been ill defined and also has changed with the political season.
THE INSURGENCY
Vietnam was a war of insurgency from the outset with the National Liberation Front’s Viet Minh guerrilla army and later the Viet Cong (VC) in the van, although North Vietnam’s People’s Army (NVA), bankrolled by Russia and China, played a dramatically larger role as the conflict dragged on. By the time the U.S. bailed, the little guys wearing funny bamboo hats and sandals made from tire treads had pretty much fought the mightiest military in the world to a stalemate despite the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops.
In Iraq, it is because of a horribly botched occupation and shortage of Wal-Mart gift certificates that an assortment of insurgents, including remnants of Saddam’s army, former Fedayeen, Al Qaeda terrorists and other hair-on-fire Muslim fanatics, are now front and center. Bankrolled by Iran and Syria and flush with the Saddam era munitions that the U.S. never had the smarts to police up because it was so busy looking for non-existent WMDs, the insurgents have pretty much fought the mightiest military in the world to a stalemate.
As historians will note, Iraq war planners and commanders pretty much turned a blind eye to the principal lesson of Vietnam – that its soldiers had to master counterinsurgency warfare. Then there is the matter of troop levels: There weren’t enough troops in 2003 and there sure aren’t enough troops now.
NATURAL RESOURCES
Vietnam and Iraq could not be more different socially, culturally and ecologically, but they share a common resource — black gold.
An unspoken justification for U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to protect valuable South China Sea oil fields, and to a lesser extent French rubber plantations.
Early on, Iraq’s vast oil reserves were an unspoken justification for the invasion, but as the primary rationales for war withered and died as they came under scrutiny, the abundance of oil became a proxy.
VIETNAM THEN & IRAQ NOW
The current round of analogizing about the two wars was prompted by a column by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times in which he compared the situation today in Iraq to the 1968 Tết Offensive.
President Bush more or less agreed, but Friedman was only half right.
The Iraq-Tết analogy works insofar that the Viet Cong and NVA scored a propaganda coup in the U.S. with their coordinated surprise offensives on Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities on Tết Nguyên Ä?án, the 1968 lunar new year.
Despite President Johnson’s repeated assurances that the war was going well, opposition against it had been growing. January 1968 saw the highest number of U.S. dead in the three-year-old war, and Tết marked a turning point for a growing and increasingly influential antiwar movement. By the end of March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election, and that fall Richard Nixon rode to victory and the White House by promising to get the U.S. out of Vietnam. He just didn’t say when.
Despite President Bush’s repeated assurances that the war is going well, the Iraq insurgency’s successes got the U.S. public’s attention at a crucial time. There is no antiwar movement to speak of, but the war became a major issue (some would argue the major issue) in the run-up to the mid-term elections. Republicans fearful of losing their congressional seats acted like deer caught in headlights, while Democrats used the war as a cudgel, although like Nixon they also were and are being vague about when they would get the U.S. out.
Where the analogy collapses is in a second important respect:
While Tết was a propaganda triumph for the Commies, it was a military defeat and none of the objectives of the VC and NVA were attained. The war raged on through 1968 and 1969 and then stopped and started through cycles of diplomacy, peace talks, bombing campaigns and bombing halts until the U.S. eventually was worn down and quit South Vietnam. The South was soon reunified with North.
DRUM ROLL, PLEASE . . .
This begs a very big question: Will the Iraqi insurgency’s pre-election propaganda victory be coupled with a military victory?
It is too soon to tell. The war has been a ragged series of stops and starts, not a linear progression, and the White House and Pentagon promise yet another tactical shift in the weeks ahead. So anyone willing to predict the future based on the past is . . . well, an ass.
My own take is that it looks pretty good for the insurgents.
In any event, it took the VC and NVA a decade to wear down the Americans. The insurgents may be able to do so in considerably less time.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH
The photograph above, taken by the great Eddie Adams during the Tết offensive, is considered to be one of the two most famous images of the Vietnam war. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, wanted to make an example of a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain. Adams, an Associated Press photographer, won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, which helped turn U.S. public opinion against the war.Click here for my personal story about the other most famous photograph.