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08/31/2007: "Vietnam and Iraq: Two Kinds of Quagmires"

Another Bright Shining Lie

Up until recently President Bush has always rejected any comparisons between the war in Iraq and Vietnam. Vietnam was a quicksand that swallowed 58,000 of our soldiers and along with them our willingness to fight. Up until recently Bush wanted to distance himself from that sad period in our history.

But on August 22, Bush did an about face in a speech in which he implied that we should never have left Vietnam: “Whatever your position in that debate, 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’s remarks have a noble ring to them. The aftermath of Vietnam wasn’t pretty. Without our protective presence, fear of the new communist regime sent hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese refugees into exile. The “boat people” who abandoned everything fled across the South China into overcrowded refugee camps for months, sometimes years, before starting new lives across the world.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began one of the most horrifically effective genocidal campaigns in the history of the world. They evacuated the entire capital city of Phnom Penh and moved people into the re-education camps that Bush referred to or slave labor in the killing fields. Twenty-five percent of the population died.

If we leave Iraq, says Bush, similar devastation will result.

It’s a noble position, but it doesn’t face reality, and Bush will now run into a buzz saw of disagreeable facts coming from historians.

After the French lost to the Vietnamese in 1954, we gradually became entwined in the civil question of who would govern that far off nation—the Chinese-sponsored communists in the north or the West-inspired democrats in the south. Republican presidents Truman and Eisenhower followed by Democrats Kennedy and Johnson and then finally Nixon kept upping their bet that we could win that war. We couldn’t.

Bush wants to redeem the U.S. for that tragedy. But the truth is–we couldn’t win.

In 1969, U.S. troop levels in Vietnam peaked at 543,000. Compare that to today’s surge-fed troop count of 160,000 in Iraq. Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a war fought mostly in the villages and countryside. We carpet-bombed much of the country; we led massive sweep and destroy missions. We defoliated thousands of acres of jungle. To disrupt supply lines from North Vietnam, we also invaded and heavily bombed neighboring Cambodia. Napalm became a weapon of terror to burn villages. Thousands of Vietnamese citizens were re-located off their lands far from their family homes.

Over 2 million Americans served in that war. Fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives and 304,000 more were injured. We fought for nearly 15 years, and still we lost. Our enemies the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army lost over 2 million men as we fought a war of attrition to kill as many of them as we could. Still, we couldn’t win.

Now President Bush implies that we could have won, we should have won, if we had just stayed the course. To copy the title of Neil Sheehan’s book about the tragedy of Vietnam, that’s another Bright Shining Lie.

Yes, Cambodia became hell on earth, but historians make the argument that it was our bombing of Cambodia that helped drive people to support the Khmer Rouge. It was the Vietnamese who toppled the brutal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in 1979.

Vietnam and Iraq do have one thing in common. Often we don’t know who the enemy is. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was prompted to say that we had to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people because our forces were constantly walking into ambushes that could only have been possible with the help of the villagers we were trying to protect.

President Bush is finally right to state the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. As in Vietnam, our soldiers are constantly driving into ambushes of roadside bombs. Responding to this psychological terror, their combat techniques in an urban zone only add to the hostility of the population. We need to win hearts and minds in Iraq too, where most people must surely want peace and stability. But we’re not winning.

In calling for a gradual pullout of our troops starting next spring, this administration has already tacitly begun another parallel with Vietnam, where we needed three years to bring those 543,000 U.S. troops home.

Bush can also follow Nixon’s example by beginning serious negotiations with the powers of the region to prevent Iraq from its careening course back to the Dark Ages. With the Sunnis and the Shias and Al Queda all hating each other—and the Kurds in the north–it looks like a much tougher task than Vietnam. I pray that the effort be successful.