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Op-ed: The ghost of Vietnam

Ahmad Faruqui

Erroneous thinking has led to the current Iraq war, which featured a totally unrestrained air war and a march onto Baghdad, but has still not yielded a victory

Early into the Iraq war, American forces engaged in deadly skirmishes with an invisible enemy. Elsewhere, few welcomed the troops as heroes. Analysts questioned whether sufficient forces had been deployed to fight the war. James Webb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, drew a parallel with the quagmire in Vietnam.

Then the war began to go well as suddenly as it had begun to go bad. Baghdad was taken in three weeks. War proponents crowed that the new doctrine of ‘shock and awe’ had worked and proclaimed that the ghost of Vietnam had been scourged. They said that, unlike Vietnam, President Bush had laid out clear and achievable objectives that were well understood by the troops in the field and supported by the folks back home. On May 1, Bush declared an end to major combat operations. An elated Jay Garner, America’s first proconsul in Iraq, declared that ‘If President Bush had been president we would have won’ the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, more Americans have died since major combat operations ended in Iraq than were killed during the operations. Major William Thurmond, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, acknowledges that US forces are now encountering ‘a different environment’ than during the war. “The enemy now is much more malicious and attacks from the shadows,” he said. Since the war began on March 20, almost 300 Americans have died and more than a thousand have been wounded.

The tenor of the war has changed, prompting the US to enlist other countries’ help. High on the list are Muslim states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Turkey, but they are reluctant to join the US for fear of justifying the occupation. Complicating matters, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has said that the war would continue until weapons of mass destruction are found. This points to a war of indefinite duration, not unlike the Vietnam War.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has refused to provide cost estimates to the Congress, saying they would be speculative. In May, the Pentagon predicted that the number of US troops would fall to 30,000 by September. As September begins, the deployment exceeds 140,000 and is costing the US taxpayer a billion dollars a week.

With the sudden rash of terrorist explosions that have caused massive casualties, conservative US writers are asking Washington to hand over the country to Iraqis and get out. Bernard Lewis has recommended that the US appoint a leader such as Ahmad Chalabi. However, this won’t do much for US credibility. The resemblance with the Vietnam War is hard to miss.

On September 2 (today) in 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed independence from 80 years of colonial French rule. Citing the American Declaration of Independence, he said that all the peoples on the earth were equal from birth. He hoped that the Allies would not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam, and clearly conveyed the resolve of the ‘entire Vietnamese people to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty’.

The Allies ignored him. The French fought him tooth and nail for eight years before being vanquished at Dienbienphu in 1954. Concerned that Vietnam would fall to communism, the CIA launched a covert war through a puppet regime in Saigon. A decade later, a frustrated President Johnson presented the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to Congress, alleging that North Vietnam had attacked American naval vessels. A panicked Congress passed the resolution swiftly on August 7, 1964. Johnson immediately ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. Within a few months, the first American troops had landed there to protect a huge American airbase at Danang. In his Texan drawl, Johnson thundered: “No one should think for a moment that we will be worn down, nor will be driven out.”

However, as months turned into years, Johnson despaired of being able to create his ‘Great Society’ at home. In February 1968, he denied General Westmoreland’s request for another 200,000 troops. Finally, realising that the war on which he had staked his career could not be won, Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

On June 8, 1969, President Nixon announced the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam. However, while seeking to negotiate a truce with Hanoi, Washington kept fighting the war. Nixon was determined not to be the first American president to have lost a war. In the end, even though American forces won all their battles, they lost the war. On April 30, 1975, an American chopper plucked off the last Marines from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.

Some drew the wrong lessons from the war. Nixon believed that he had won the war but it was Congress that lost the peace. In fact, when Congress blocked aid to South Vietnam, it accurately reflected the sentiments of the American people who wanted the war to end. Senator John McCain, during his presidential bid in 2000, said that America fought the war with one arm tied behind its back. He argued it was a mistake to not carry the ground war into North Vietnam and wage a totally unrestrained air war. Such erroneous thinking has led to the current Iraq war, which featured a totally unrestrained air war and a march onto Baghdad, but has still yielded no victory.

To his credit, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, conceded that the Vietnam War was morally wrong. He cautioned that America had not learned its lessons from the war, which included understanding the mindset of the adversary, never unilaterally applying military power, and understanding that there are some problems for which there may be no solution.

Similarly, General Anthony Zinni, former head of CENTCOM, acknowledged that even a superpower has significant limitations on where and how it can use force, especially if it’s a democracy. For example, it was a mistake to prepare the South Vietnamese army as a conventional force to fight an unconventional war. “We tried to apply our technology to places where it didn’t fit.”

Barbara Tuchman called Vietnam America’s march of folly. The US lost the war, not because it had insufficient resources but because it failed to use them wisely. She wrote, “The power to command frequently causes failure to think.”

The ghost of Vietnam continues to haunt America’s foreign policy establishment as it pursues a military occupation that is neither supported by the people of Iraq nor by people anywhere outside of the US. And, as the latest polls show, it is losing support even in the US.

Dr Ahmad Faruqui is an economist and author of “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan”. He can be reached at faruqui@pacbell.net

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