Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

The Real Lessons of the Vietnam-Iraq Analogy

by Katie Mounts [contact information]

by Travis Sharp [contact information]

September 11, 2007

In a stunning shift of logic and rhetoric, President Bush recently decided that parallels should be drawn between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. While it is irrefutable that there were violent - even genocidal - years in Cambodia following American disengagement from Indochina, Bush's decision to draw connections between Vietnam and Iraq is surprising at best, deliberately misleading at worst.

THE FOG OF WAR?

Bush asserted in a speech August 22 at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Convention that America's mistake during Vietnam was not its engagement in a peripheral guerrilla war fighting against insurgents on their home soil (a task the United States and other great powers throughout history have found especially difficult to execute). Nor was it the continuation of a war that could not be won militarily. Rather, according to Bush, America's mistake in Vietnam was leaving. The lesson for Iraq, he concludes, is to stay the course.

The President criticized American withdrawal from Vietnam for the resulting upheaval that plagued Southeast Asia. "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," Bush told the VFW convention.¹

Bush's sudden willingness to draw parallels between the two conflicts, following years of rejecting what have been unfavorable comparisons, has raised eyebrows among military experts. For example, retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, Senior Military Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, points out that:

Bush is drawing false analogies to support his case for staying the course in Iraq. What I learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces trained for conventional military warfare cannot successfully conduct counterinsurgency operations in a foreign country whose language and culture we do not understand. There's no U.S. military solution to the insurgency in Iraq; withdrawal of our combat troops is essential to a political solution.²

In a March 2007 article in the Huffington Post, General Gard and retired Air Force Colonel Richard Klass offered a much more critical assessment of the Vietnam-Iraq analogy. According to Gard and Klass, both wars were started by presidents apparently looking for a fight and were erroneously set in the context of a wider struggle. Adequate popular support was elusive, and counterinsurgency strategy was ill-developed and its beginning badly timed. Gard and Klass concluded that "The war in Iraq seems to have reached the same point where we were in Vietnam in 1967."³

Retired Brigadier General John Johns, a counterinsurgency expert who helped craft Army counterinsurgency doctrine during and after the war in Vietnam, argues that U.S. combat forces are simply ill-equipped to successfully execute a sustained counterinsurgency campaign. General Johns writes:

Much of the current debate on what went wrong in Iraq is focused on tactical errors, deficiencies in military force structure and training, and errors made by the "Coalition Provisional Authority." The Army has revised its [counterinsurgency] doctrine and has swung the pendulum back toward configuring the force for this kind of warfare. This is a mistake; the kinds of wars we have fought in Vietnam and Iraq cannot be won by U.S. combat forces. [emphasis from Johns]⁴

General Johns instead recommends that the U.S. in the future stay in an advisory role during any counterinsurgency operation:

The central lesson for the American people and our military leaders is: don't let our political leaders put our military forces in this kind of situation again. If there are circumstance where genuine national interests dictate that we help a country put down an insurgency, then do it with advisory teams of highly skilled advisors. The Pentagon leadership needs to avoid swinging the pendulum back too far in configuring our forces to perform a constabulary function. [emphasis from Johns]⁵

Even if one accepts Bush's sudden fondness for Vietnam comparisons and his disregard of these negative parallels, his interpretation of post-withdrawal developments in Indochina lies somewhere between misleading and false. He misreads history by directly tying the American withdrawal in Vietnam to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, under whose reign an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians - around 15% of the country's total population - would die.

Evidence indicates that members of the Khmer Rouge were fanatical ideologues during their student days in Paris in the 1950s. They were determined to destroy Cambodian society and exterminate those they perceived to be part of the bourgeois establishment. Thus, American involvement in Vietnam did not single-handedly transform the Khmer Rouge into killers, as some have argued. Henry Kissinger compares this line of reasoning in his seminal book Diplomacy to contending that "the Holocaust had been caused by American strategic bombing of Germany."⁶

The larger point is not that American actions in Vietnam transformed members of the Khmer Rouge into genocidal killers, but that the Khmer Rouge may never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam. It was American intervention in Vietnam that destabilized Indochina and laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Khmer Rouge. They may have been dedicated to a violent ideology from the very beginning, but the U.S. presence in Vietnam set in motion a cycle of events that allowed the Khmer Rouge to seize control of Cambodia's government.

Instead of expressing a tenuous "American-withdrawal-caused-genocide" argument, one lesson Bush might glean from the tragic emergence of the Khmer Rouge is the importance of maintaining economic assistance during and after a military withdrawal. Assistance to South Vietnam went from $2 billion in 1972, to $1.4 billion in 1973, to $1 billion in 1974 (despite quadrupling oil prices), and finally to a proposed terminal grant of $600 million in 1975. Even worse, aid for Cambodia was cut off completely in order to, in Kissinger's words, "help save lives - a euphemism for abandonment, and a grim joke in light of the genocide that followed."⁷

If Bush truly wanted to implement the lessons of Vietnam, he would work to ensure that economic aid to Iraq does not evaporate if and when the U.S. withdraws. Helping the estimated 4.2 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been displaced within it would be a good start. This should include pressing the State Department to make good on its promise to resettle 7,000 Iraqi refugees by September 2007, only 190 of whom had been successfully resettled so far by early August.⁸

GROWTH IN TERRORISM

Sadly, one analogy from Vietnam can be legitimately extended to Iraq: Just as the Vietnam War provided the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, so too has the war in Iraq provided the conditions for breeding international terrorism.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Al Qaeda was not even operational in that country. In its analysis of links between Iraq and terrorist activity, the 9/11 Commission reported that it found no evidence of a "collaborative operational relationship" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Nor had they "seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."⁹

Times certainly have changed. Today, Iraq is a hotbed for terrorist activity, and support even among moderate Muslims for the radical Islamic movement has intensified as a result of ongoing U.S. involvement in Iraq. A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, endorsed by sixteen American intelligence agencies, found that "The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."¹⁰

General Gard has echoed this point, characterizing the global war on terror as a "...war of ideas, in which the insurgents and the established order compete for the allegiance of the population. Success requires capturing the moral high ground." Following the September 11 attacks, the international community agreed that the U.S. had not just the legal right, but the moral obligation, to eliminate the Taliban's active involvement in cultivating terrorists in Afghanistan. This moral high ground was unfortunately soon sacrificed to the unjustified and internationally unpopular invasion of Iraq, an act for which the U.S. continues to pay dearly in lives, in money, and in American strategic interests.¹¹

Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress's Terrorism Index, a survey of more than one hundred Republican and Democratic foreign policy experts, found the war in Iraq to be the root cause of pessimism about U.S. national security. Of those surveyed, 92% - including 84% of self-described conservatives - said that the war in Iraq is negatively affecting U.S. national security. The group of experts gave the overall handling of the effort in Iraq an average score of 2.9 on a 10-point scale. Over half believe that President Bush's troop surge in Iraq is having a negative effect on national security, and almost 70% support troop redeployment within the next 18 months.¹²

The Terrorism Index also found that an overwhelming 84% of Americans believe the U.S. is not winning the war on terror. This is the highest percentage since September 11, 2001 and a 9% increase over the past six months.

CONCLUSION

The consequences of a U.S. withdrawal will have uncertain consequences for the Iraqi people, but there are steps the U.S. can take - like helping to resettle Iraqi refugees and working diligently to prevent Iran from exercising de facto control over the Iraqi government - that would mitigate the fallout from a U.S. withdrawal.

According to Bush's VFW speech, "The experts sometimes get it wrong." That is true, but so is this: the experts don't always get it wrong. With the Terrorism Index's findings that 84% of Americans believe the U.S. is losing the war on terror and 92% of experts believe the war in Iraq is damaging our national security, Bush is increasingly isolated in believing that staying the course in Iraq is the way to defeat terrorism and ensure the future security of the United States.

The lesson that President Bush ignored in his VFW speech is that American withdrawal from Vietnam actually made the U.S. stronger. We rebuilt American prestige in the region and the world once that divisive war - abhorred by the world then as much as the Iraq war is now - was over. Indeed, while the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, we eventually won the peace: American investments and visitors are most welcome in Vietnam today.

If the United States were to withdraw militarily from Iraq, we would have a new opportunity to rebuild our prestige and our military and become stronger over time. If Vietnam taught us anything, it is that this process will not be easy and will bring a great deal of pain both for Iraqis and Americans. But it is a process of recovery and growth that must begin with all due speed.

NOTES

1. President George W. Bush, speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention (August 22, 2007).

2. Authors' email correspondence with Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA ret.), September 1, 2007.

3. Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA ret.) and Col. Richard Klass (USAF ret.), "Deja Vu in Iraq?" Huffington Post (March 9, 2007).

4. Brig. Gen. John Johns (USA ret.), "Counterinsurgency Operations: Mission Impossible," Council for a Livable World (March 16, 2007).

5. Ibid.

6. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York: Simon & Schuster (1994), pp. 694.

7. Ibid., pp. 697.

8. For more information, see Gen. Joseph Hoar (USMC ret.), "Abandoned at the Border," New York Times (August 31, 2007).

9. 9/11 Commission, "9/11 Commission Report," July 22, 2004, pp. 66.

10. National Intelligence Council, "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," National Intelligence Estimate (April 2006), pp. 2.

11. Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA ret.) and Brig. Gen. John Johns (USA ret.), "Iraq: Where Do We Go From Here?" Keene Sentinel (July 1, 2007).

12. Foreign Policy magazine and Center for American Progress, "The Terrorism Index," September/October 2007.