Tom Friedman:
Richard Cohen:
Still waiting for the David Ignatius version.
Saying Iraq is "no Vietnam" is about as silly and simplistic as saying it is just like Vietnam. The problem for the neolibs is that the differences may not be nearly important as the similiarities -- particularly on the American end of the war.
As my last few posts (not to mention the events of the past week) indicate, the competence and strategic skill of the military and civilian officials running this war don't seem to be noticably superior to that of their Vietnam War predecessors. If those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, these guys appear to have gotten life sentences.
Even on the ground in Iraq, the advantages supposedly enjoyed by the Coalition may not be decisive. Cohen, for example, cites the lack of jungle cover:
In Vietnam, the war on the ground was waged in the South, but supplies and manpower came down the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail from the North. Iraq has no triple-canopy jungle to screen a supply line. It's an arid, desert country where a goat can be spotted from the air.
The problem is that the Sunni insurgents don't need to move large amounts of supplies and manpower down a Ho Chi Minh-style trail. Unlike the North Vietnamese Army, they're not trying to hide regular infantry units in the jungle. At this point, they're not even trying to field platoon or company strength detachments of irregulars, ala the Viet Cong. They're either operating in squads, staging simple hit-and-run attacks or planting land mines that kill and/or wound a few Americans at a time (the death of a thousand cuts) or they're staging small but spectacular operations like the rocket attack on the Rashid hotel -- attacks designed more for propaganda purposes than anything else.
Result: The American eye in the sky can look at all the "goats" it wants. What it's not going to see are the insurgents, who spend 90% of their time blended into the civilian population. Humint (human intelligence), not spy satellites, is the key to fighting this kind of war. And that's exactly what the Americans don't have.
Secondly, and maybe more importantly, the insurgents already are sitting on truly huge, hidden stockpiles of munitions, and appear to have plenty of money to buy whatever else they need.
This may be unprecedented in the history of insurgent warfare. Off hand, I can't think of another guerrilla movement in recent history that has had such direct and plentiful local access to the basic tools of the trade: AK-47s, RPGs and lots of high explosives. Maybe the Taliban -- which isn't such a positive "metric" for our other war in Afghanistan.
In any case, this appears to have been the fatal flaw (or one of the fatal flaws) in the neocons' assumption that a serious guerrilla movement was impossible in Iraq because it would lack an outside "sanctuary." Or as Wolfowitz put it in a June interview with the Washington Post:
I think it is worth emphasizing that these guys lack the two classical ingredients of a victory in a so-called guerrilla war if that's what you want to say they're conducting. They lack the sympathy of the population and they lack any serious source of external support.
The first part is obviously untrue -- at least in the Sunni Triangle and the more militant pro-Baathist districts of Baghdad. And, as I said, the latter part may be irrelevant, at least in the short run. It's offset by the fact that the Baathists had years to plan, prepare and lay in the logistical support for a protracted guerrilla war.
The moral of the story, I suppose, is that "different" doesn't automatically mean "better." No, Iraq is not Vietnam. But this war is very much like the Vietnam War in at least one key way -- it can also be lost.
The different people, different country, different time, different weapons, different motives, different world order, different super power, different politics, different strategy, different objectives, different allies, different enemies isn't the same.
It's not Vietnam, any more than Vietnam was Korea which wasn't a thing like World War II.
This is how knives are brought to gun fights.
Reading Wolfowitz's quote from June made me laugh so hard, I nearly fell off my chair:
"(...) They lack the sympathy of the population and they lack any serious source of external support."
Hmmmm ... lemme think who else might fit that description ... *snicker* ... oh, the short-sightedness and idiocy of it all. Un-fucking-believable.
Oh, Billmon, Thank you, Thank you for being there.
Well right off the bat, having been a college student during Vietnam, yeah this is not Vietnam because we are not going to be in the dark for years and years about what is going on thanks to the internet and people like Billmon.
And yes it could be just like Vietnam if and when it starts affecting you (more of you) in a very direct way (will I send my child, or will I be on the bus to Cananda with he or she)then is will be just like Vietnam. And that will be decided by leave soon or leave later.
And there's no draft - yet!
And there's unlikely to be one anytime soon, as it would pretty much spell the end of Bush's chances at a second term.
Which leaves me to wonder -- what happens in March of next year when the troops that are in Iraq right now have to be rotated out? Will we have enough new enlistees ready to replace them? Or will there be a new Iraqi Army in place by then, and if so, how reliable will it be?
I wouldn't call the Iraq insurgency unprecedented in any way. There's actually a very recent precdent for it, but it's not Vietnam: it's Lebanon.
That one didn't work out so well as I recall.
It's not Lebanon, it's Afghanistan. I'm going to be blogging some 4th Gen Warfare at Kos this weekend, it isn't new, and we can learn some lessons for political campaigns from it. It's as old as Sun Tzu.
Does anyone know the "cure" to reading a Friedman piece ... I feel very dirty after being exposed to his straw man argument.
How did he win those Pulitzer's again - and are we sure he didn't have a ghost writer that has since died?
Forget all this for a moment. Go outside and look north. There is an amazing display of Aurora Borealis right now, over the Northeast US at least. I am north of Boston, and there are shimmering curtains of deep red, streaks of milky white, and a hint of other colors, constantly shifting.
Check it out. Beautiful.
Ridnik Chrome--
I agree with you, moving for a draft would weaken Bushco's chances for a second term. But what happens if they drag this crap out and make it just rosy enough that they get re-elected, and THEN roll out complete draft plans? And they don't need to gain many seats in Congress to ram it right through. There's already been a release put out asking for volunteers to be draft board members. If it would ever happen, the Dry Drunk's drunk twins need to be the first to be signed up.
My wife's already getting upset about even the remote possibility of the draft coming up. I would hope that there would be a LOT of protests if it ever raised its head.
Why is it that Americans seem to only have two frames of reference for every foreign policy problem? It's either WWII (Munich, Hitler) or Vietnam. Every foreign crisis has to be squeezed into one of those templates, because most Americans are too ignorant to look at it from a different historical perspective (Lebanon, Algeria, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, etc).
It's not Vietnam. It's America's Chechnya.
the hubris of rummy and bremer-boy only add to the awkward groping as they attempt to set up shop in a sinking and broken china shop called iraq. ones imagination holds more credibility than the spin machine of what is really going on with our military, the unrest and despair of being cogs in the corporate will to power. and than you have 'w' talking fake cornpone in the heartlands of iowa and ohio. hmmmmm. only america could fool its own people but the rest of the world isnt that damn dumb. jam-booney.
as always mr. bill tends an oasis of cutting skepticism when thought and reason are deemed unpatriotic. indeed.
Great post, Billmon!
But there is a Third Way for the U.S. that I'm surprised you didn't mention:
"Peace With Honor"
Otherwise known as:
"We Win. You're Screwed."
The neo-conservatives are fighting the last war with the Soviets. Instead they’ve gotten themselves into a holy war where state support is meaningless. As long as there are Muslims alive in Iraq, the US Army will be foreign infidel occupiers. Trent Lott is right. The only way the US can win the Iraq War, the way the US is fighting it now, is to “mow them down”.
The realists in the Bush II Administration understand the situation the US has gotten itself into. That ‘s why all the conflict leaking for the last month.
No reasonable Iraq reconstruction plan has come from the White House, unlike Wes Clark on NewsHour. The reason is the President cannot give up his own ongoing war with Satan.
We weren't kept in the dark about what was happening in Vietnam. The news media was fantastic and they and the continuing protests(remember those students who died in Ohio?) kept the war front page during the whole of that ignominious peiod....and look how it turned out afterwards...."the killing fields"............. isn't that ever so slightly like ww1, ever so slightly like the killing camps in ww2. I know each war has its complexities and we can be ever so sophisticated about these but what never changes is the thirst for power. The Divine Right of....? It's surely here our governments' responsiblity lies. What are we really doing for the Iraqi people? This is a war which patronises them and the sanctimonious posturising of the anti-terrorist stance stinks.
And now there's a new generation of American soldiers invalided home and will we see another wall of names for these heroes? How does it help all this posting to the internet sitting comfortably in front of our pc. Mr Billmon are you a journalist? Do the opinions I see here on your site appear in the broadsheets and the tabloids?
I wonder what would happen if a general election were iminent. After nearly 30 years being a member of a political party I've quit-- I"m ready for change.
I agree completely with Billmon's analysis. By pointing out all the ways Iraq is not Viet Nam they are missing the forest for the trees. Or lack of trees.
Still I think the Israel / West Bank or Russia / Chechnya analogy is better. Local populations standing up to invaders. Except, as mentioned, the Iraqi population has ready access to tons and tons of high quality military equipment that the USA didn't destroy (or even guard).
Oh, and if Sadam really DID have those WMDs what would have happened by now?
Thank the gods for this blog and Steve Gilliard and Juan Cole and Riverbend. And you too Melanie.
And thank you Al Gore for inventing the internet. Can you IMAGINE having only the likes of Cohen and Friedman and these other yutzes to rely on for "informed opinion?" Jeebus! I'd be in the bin fer sure!
Not Vietnam, of course, but there are some similarities.
First, those who designed and are prosecuting the war are ideologically blinkered. The same attitude that got us into the war, i.e., policy first, intelligence second, has brought us to this point. Policymakers and soldiers are just as ignorant about the enemy now as they were in 1965. Talking of the "lessons of 9/11" obscures what's really going on.
Second, like Vietnam, statements from the administration are at odds with facts on the ground. This dissonance also a product of the inability of the neocons to admit any failings.
Third, as in Vietnam, the US applies a military solution to a political problem.
08:27 PM was me, for what it's worth
"It's offset by the fact that the Baathists had years to plan, prepare and lay in the logistical support for a protracted guerrilla war."
Years? At what point before September 2002 did any
part of the Iraqi Ba'ath apparatus expect to ever be fighting a guerrilla war of any kind?
>"Peace With Honor"
>"We Win. You're Screwed."
Ah, David, but it's not that easy. There certainly are many differences between Vietnam and Iraq, but this is the big one:
Vietnam was not a central part of the region supplying America's very lifeblood
Even people who don't think the war had anything to do with oil (and I would like to offer them a nice used bridge) can't ignore that it has ramifications in that area.
The "rolling democracy" idea didn't pass the laugh test, but the possibility of "rolling failed states" is quite within the realm of likelihood. If Iraq, Saudia Arabia and Kuwait face revolutionary civil war, the revolutionaries sure aren't going to let the pipelines fund the current holders of power.
The sad thing is, if we had faced up to the fact that the Western-installed puppet governments days were over and actually HELD the door for their way out, the people who would have taken over would be full of "demon America" all over the TV but once the cameras were packed up they would go back to filling up our oil tankers.
And although I wouldn't wish Iran on the average Saudi, I think they could work thru that stage to the other side with a lot less bloodshed than we are seeing in Iraq and will see in the near future in these other countries.
And, I might add, without the oil shock therapy to the West.
So maybe we should wish in a way it *was* like Vietnam, were we could just pack up the troops and say "Ok, never mind dumb idea go back to what you were doing" except this time only lose a few hundred of our troops.
The genie is out of the bottle. And this moron still has 50+ percent approval?? What are people thinking??
Two thoughts: First, one thing Iraq has in common with Vietnam is that we're fighting an indigenous enemy that blends with and increasingly draws support from the locals as resentment of the occupation grows.
Second, watch for a draft, but not during this term. If Bush is elected to a second term, it will be instituted right away, with deferments for the privileged.
Well Anne, maybe you were not here for the same Vietnam war as I was, and maybe TR I will stick to the the writers adage of "write about what you know" and Vietnam is what I experienced, at least from a state side perspective as a teenager. And since Vietnam really started in the fifties and TV was, well, I know you are going to find this hard to believe, not available to most Americans being only maybe a decade old, the news cycle was not so fast. Think, no faxes, no Fed Ex, no satellite feeds. And those kids killed in Ohio, ruined what should have been the most carefree time of my life, college life. I really do not want my sons, one a Junior and one a Freshman in college, to have to grow up tha fast. I do not want them losing sleep over lottery #'s which will decide whether they are the "lucky" ones to get to go and die in some hell hole or get to come back from said hell hole all screwed up.
We all know how nonsensical the statements are that come from the administration cronies are. To dial Wolfowitz in on his statement; 'They lack the sympathy of the population and they lack any serious source of external support'. From a piece in the USA Today linkedtext ;'Iragi guerillas have an abundant supply of small arms and explosives that could allow them to maintain their pace of attacks indefinitely,Pentagon and U.S. Central Command intelligence analysts have concluded.The guerrillas' shoot-and-scoot tactics use up relatively little ammunition while inflicting serious casualties and even deeper psychological damage.'
It's not Vietnam. If it were, the next step in the insurgency would be company, battalion and regimental level engagements (and that's not going to happen).
It's Northern Ireland.
No CH, when you have 130,000 troops facing hostility in one country, it could not possibly be Northern Ireland.
If it wasn't like "Essential Vietnam 101" (forget the subtleties), would these idiots spend so much time discussing this?
Let's not forget the persecution of the common grunt LINK.
Years? At what point before September 2002 did any part of the Iraqi Ba'ath apparatus expect to ever be fighting a guerrilla war of any kind?
If they weren't planning for it after 1991, I'm fairly sure they were planning for it after 9/11/2001 -- not because they KNEW we would invade, but because any rational actor (and Saddam in his own way, is a VERY rational actor) would have understood that we COULD invade and PROBABLY would invade, eventually.
We know now that Bush made the final decision to go to war no later than January 2002. Personally, I was pretty sure we would do it in the spring of 2002, unless the absolute lack of international support stopped us, which obviously it didn't.
So, unless Saddam and his people were complete idiots (and complete idiots don't survive long at the top of the food chain in a place like Iraq) then at a minimum they had over a year to get ready.
But they probably didn't even need that long -- thanks to the Baathist obsession with weapons, and the huge purchases made during the Iraq-Iran War, Iraq is essentially one big munitions dump. So it was just a matter of dispersing and hiding them, and laying the groundwork for a covert distribution network.
Saddam and the Baath started out as an underground movement, and operated as such for many years -- roughly from the mid-50s through 1968 (with a brief spell in power in 1963) They also built one of the most efficient and ruthless secret intelligence networks outside the Soviet bloc.
Don't you think they would have prepared for a scenario like this?
It's Northern Ireland.
If the Vietnam analogy is flawed, the Northern Ireland analogy is absurd. Is Ulster the size of California? Does it have over 2,000 miles of porous border? Is it surrounded by hostile (Syria, Iran) or fragile (Jordan, Saudia Arabia) states? Is it one of the world's largest arms dumps? Was it ruled for over 30 years by one of the most ruthless totalitarian regimes in the world?
I have absolutely no doubt that right now Centcom would swap this mess for Northern Ireland in a heartbeat.
It's not Vietnam, it's not Lebanon, it's not Korea, it's not Afghanistan, it's not even Cooleemee, North Carolina on a Saturday night.
It's Iraq.
There are some similarities with other wars, other fights, other conflicts, but unless those who have to manage it realize that it has to be faced on its own merits instead of the way we want it to be, it's going to give the American lexicon another name for a disaster.
Melanie is right in her reference to Sun Tzu. If you haven't read The Art of War, go read it and then come back and comment again. If you have, consider it when you look at the situation in Iraq.
One thing I must agree with: the lack of positive humint in Iraq is pathetic. I'll say it until I am blue in the face: intell doesn't come from gadgetry, it comes from people on the ground. Yes, we have a camera that can spot a goat on the desert. Great. The wide-angle capacity of overhead photint doesn't get the "buttons on the shirt" resolution that we think of when we hear "eye in the sky." In other words, the camera has to be looking at the goat at the right time, which means you have to have some idea that the goat will be at a certain spot on the desert. If you don't know there's going to be a goat in a ten mile square area, you may well be looking at a jackal twenty miles down the road. Ooops.
This is Iraq, it's a new reality, and nobody wants to admit that. Which is why Private Bagadonutz and his buddies are getting blown up by suicide bombers and "Rube Goldberg" weapons.
Kissinger (gag) was on CNN today, and addressed the "similarities" with Vietnam. To paraphrase, Iraq is no Vietnam because the enemy couldn't follow us & attack us in this country.
Great.
The right wing amazes me sometimes. They go on and on ad nauseum about what they would do if someone invaded the US, how they would use their guns against the government, etc. if there were a tyrannical junta in DC, etc.
But then, in Iraq, they fail to understand the obvious realities of the situation. They patently do not appreciate what the situation IS.
Iraqis in substantial numbers are pissed off enough to attack the best military in the history of the world 250 times in one week.
250 TIMES IN ONE WEEK! That is 250 triggers being pulled, times however many people know about the triggermen, times the number turning a blind eye to the attacks.
That is a pretty substantial number of people who at the very least are ambivelant about the US being in Iraq.
I have to point out that it was the Monkey who has been quoting the great warrior Sun Tzu for lo these many weeks. ; )
(ahem)
"Kissinger (gag) was on CNN today, and addressed the "similarities" with Vietnam. To paraphrase, Iraq is no Vietnam because the enemy couldn't follow us & attack us in this country."
I read a statement ("enemy attack us at home" kind of thing) similar to Kissinger's one above posted here a day or two ago. Someone help me out here, please. Was there something on the news I missed? When was the last time any Iraqi attacked the US? Or did someone provide proof (not the "yellowcake" kind) that all the "insurgents" and "unlawful combatants" in Iraq are Al Qaeda recruits? Or is it because it's 4am here and I'm not getting it?
Rebuilding analogies are also wrong. Europe/Marshall Plan/Japan after WWII was far, far different in time and distance.
If the last week in Iraq could be paraphased in American Indian to illustrate the success for the resistance, do you know how many scalps or coos were had? An Abrams tank was taken out two days ago, the first since "Mission accomplished", a supply train, a deputy mayor of Bagdad, a high ranking US army person, an almost direct hit on the big guy Wolfie, alot of dead and wounded American soldiers and on and on. Just a week. Alot of weeks left until November 2004.
Another advantage the Iraqis have is that the decades of living under Saddam's repressive regime forced the people to develop their own underground network for communications and transport circumventing his secret police and snitches. Smugglers became experts. It also solidly cemented family ties and friendships which makes the collection of HUMINT very difficult now. And just because many Iraqis are "secular" doesn't mean that they are atheists; faith is still a strong issue. Our ability to win their trust, assuming things went right from the very beginning, was not good even then. Now, it is a dead issue entirely.
I wonder why we keep hoping for rational solutions from irrational people. And we keep attributing rational motives, such as greed, to their absolutely irrational deeds. I feel like I have woken up in the middle of a Stephen King novel -- everything looks so normal on the surface, yet everything is....irrational.
In the 1980s, we armed the Afghans to fight the Soviets. Why? Because, for a very small price, we could tie up a large amount of expensively trained and equipped Soviet troops in a place that didn't really matter to us.
Why do we think the rest of the world won't do the same to us?
The US military frightens the shit out of the rest of the world. For a small price, you can now tie up all deployable US forces in a country that you probably don't care about. All you need to do is donate to your favorite terrorists group. If you were the defense minister of China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, wouldn't you make sure that Iraq stays a chaotic mess for the indefinite future? If you were in there place, what would you do to neutralize those soldiers with their million dollar training and their billion dollar weapon systems?
"It doesn't matter" has one half of the real problem that limits the US in Iraq, the fear that got them there in the first place and that is unfriendly boots on the oil hose. Bush made very clear mention of this a couple of times back in May 2001. If we fail to act, our country will become more reliant on foreign crude oil, putting our national energy security into the hands of foreign nations, some of whom do not share our interests. At the time I thought he was talking about conservation and new technologies, but apparently not.
So the US is literally fighting for its life now, a life based on cheap, plentiful oil, two things that are already history, and for control of that oil, something else that is going west.
But the other problem is that people missperceive the weapons that are being used. They are not bombs, mines, rockets or mortars, they are not suicide missions. None of those, even at double the current rate, would defeat the US militarily and, given the willingness of this administration to flip the bird to the rest of the world, political ostracism wont do it either.
But the Iraqis don't need any of that. They have Eric Shinseki's word for it, that they will win. All they have to do is keep up enough attacks to ensure that there are no reinforcements from anyone else and that the US cannot draw down its current troop levels. I even heard the BBC today suggest that rummy is now talking about "reinforcing" the US troops with more, god knows where he'll get them, but whatever.
The resistance knows that this deployment is now killing the US war machine which is starting to break under its own weight. The draft doesn't make any difference because it takes 3 years to train a modern US soldier, Bush doesn't have that long.
The emotional and physical and mental strain, not to mention the supply chain strain, the organisational disaster waiting in March next year, the internal discipline problems when the tours are stretched and the steady killing and wounding of their colleagues is grinding down the machine and somewhere along the road something will snap in a very nasty way and all hell will break loose.
We have never seen an army like this break, we have no idea how it will go, but the Iraqi resistance has only one objective, to make it happen and they are getting all the support they need from the cabal.
I'm not sure what the benefit of debating whether Iraq is Vietnam or Lebanon or Afghanistan. Sure, there are lessons to be learned from history--but I think the present is always so complicated (and so many things aren't clear without the benefit of hindsight) that looking for historical "fits" often is a substitute for thinking.
Simply put, the current situation should be evaluated carefully on its own merits. Lessons from past conflicts should be brought in where relevant, but should not obscure hard analysis.
Yeah, the Vietnam thing is a classic red herring. Just further confirmation that the pundit class is completely incapable of thinking without cliches as reference points.
Friedman's piece today was absolute packed with neo-liberal fantasies. How about his claim that unlike Vietnam, U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo .... Only, europeans, the Arab press and the anti-war left believe that nonsense. No, this is a radically liberal war and here is the paradox - being waged by a radically conservative president. Presumably, us liberal types should cease and desist and support our president's radically liberal project to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Karl Rove will be thrilled to hear that our president must continue to do the right things in Iraq without regard to (domestic?) politics.
I mean consider "installing democracy". Like most neo/liberals/cons Friedman means that Iraquis should not be allowed to actually vote, for example, until we are sure that they will vote for what we want them to vote for - presumably, for the complete sell off of their assets to global capitalism, the recognition of "greater Israel" etc., Since, this will never actually happen, Friedman reveals himself as a complete fantasist, a true believer. Our enemies are, he tells us, are simply nihilists (ie., "evil doers") who unlike the Europeans, et al, do understand the radically liberal nature of our project and in desperation are killing aid workers despite the beginning of Ramadam. Is nothing sacred?
Whatever distinction there is between the so-called neo-cons and the neo libs (and I think it is a distinction without a difference) they simply refuse to understand causality - the only explanations (using the term loosely) they provide are appeals to evil, nihilism etc., They don't get it - if you bomb people, invade their country, kill more of them, sell of their assets etc., they may not appreciate your radically liberal project - a project that, by the way, is failing miserably world wide - check south america, eastern europe, Africa and so on.
The Vietnam analogy is wrong because the war phase -- state vs state -- is over. It's the conquered vs the occupier. Wear the occupier down through sabotage and guerilla warfare. More like resistance fighters in France during WWII. (However, Germany didn't have to worry about elections...) Unlike Vietnam, this means the US military has no one to fight (not that this keeps them from killing people). Fighting saboteurs and resistance fighters is not a job for an army so it's become a police force -- a total waste of an army, though in this case a good thing because it stops continued military adventurism from an administration that has made itself the greatest threat to world peace.
The Iraqis are doing what any country would do in a similar situation. Eventually -- in five or ten or twenty years -- Iraq will be in the hands of Iraqis. And the neocons will all write books trying to justify this doomed science project.
For a historical analogy, how about We're Hannibal, they're Rome?
Or, we're Pyrrhus, they're Rome?
The Vietnam analogy is wrong because the war phase -- state vs state -- is over. It's now conquered people vs occupier. The former wears down the latter with sabotage and guerilla tactics. Like resistance fighters in occupied France (except Germany didn't have to worry about elections...). An army is not designed to fight saboteurs and resistance fighters so this one has become a "police force" which it's not designed for either.
(Of course if this military were not being used as a police force it would be used to invade the next country on the neocon agenda.)
sorry about double post. this dial up thing is so much fun...
Dr Paul: Densest Military Intellect Ever. The conclusion to which Wolfowitz was driving in the quotation cited by billmon is
"But basically they're on their own in a population that I think can and will be turned." Nice.
I'll second the Algeria analogy.
No, Iraq is not Vietnam.
We had allies in Vietnam. Hell, the Nazis had allies in France. We don't have any allies in Iraq.
I posted this on tacticus, but seems appropriate to bring up here:
Somebody else in the blogsphere said it better and smarter, but the Vietnam quagmire meme is useful because it helps us understand what that actually meant then and what it means now.
As has been noted many times before, we won the Tet offensive. We were within shouting distance of taking the Viet Cong down. Remember this fact: we were never militarily going to lose Vietnam. But the dissonance between facts on the ground and messages going out over the air from the White House created a political problem that was the true quagmire.
It boiled down to a trap the Johnson administration set for itself, namely "how do we build up more forces and finally defeat these guys, when we've told the American people we don't need more forces because we are beating these guys with one hand tied behind our back?"
The quagmire then was political, not military, and it seems that we are nearing a very similar situation now. In this election year, the political goal is to draw down the troops when in fact we may need to heed Victor David Hanson and engage the enemy in decisive battle. More specifically, as Tom Friedman pointed out last Sunday, we may need to re-invade the Sunni Triangle.
To do so would take a level of political courage I do not think this administration has. I'm not trying to be partisan here but if that's the case, then the only way to resolve this will be to change it for a new one.
The final tragedy is that failure here will do today what Vietnam did to us back then--set American foriegn policy back on its heels. Remember what our little foray into Somalia did for us; we were too chickenshit to even consider using our armed forces to stop the Rwandan crisis. My only consolation will be that the radical wing of the right will be so discredited that the grownups will have a chance to retake the GOP and make room again for open-minded moderate internationalists.
Mary Ellen Moore: Kent State really sucked, didn't it?
The same thing is going on right now, you know. Not the draft stuff so much, though you are right to be concerned with that. It's all the hate talk. Remember that from back then? First it was just the talk. Then some rabble-rousers started showing up at the marches. Then it was rabble-rousers with bats, and then it was the National Guard. Each step fed by the hate talk; each step just a small escallation. Each step headed inevitably towards the only place that such talk ever ends. We lost four that day, but the Right lost the Vietnam War when those triggers were pulled.
Same thing now, just not as far yet. The hate talk, the rabble-rousers, and the (goodness!) Dixie Chicks. The slow scale of escallating violence, all fed by the hate talk. And it will lead to the same place if it continues ... and there are no signs that it will not.
Iraq is not Vietnam, but the "Iraq is Vietnam" argument is convenient for Friendman tear to pieces because he couldn't think of anything else to write and he wasn't in Dhaka interviewing 12 year old soccer ball "laborers" on the glories of globalization, nor was he in Baghdad noting the smile on the traffic cop's face as a sign that Iraq has become the land of milk and honey.
Chechnya or Algeria seems about the closest parallel.
Nah. Pull back and see the big picture.
Iraq is like Vietnam because the US government has fundamentally misconceived the motivating force behind the enemy.
It is like Vietnam because there are no victory conditions.
It is like Vietnam because Americans eventually lose patience with unwinnable wars.
It is like Vietnam (and several other conflicts) because the US has put itself in the wrong.
Billmon: "We know now that Bush made the final decision to go to war no later than January 2002."
In fact, per Wolfie's Vanity Fair interview, we know that he at least thought that Bush had made the decision within 4 days of 9/11. But this ignores a point: Cheney pretty much defined who the White House senior staff would be (he selected himself to be vice president!) and what jobs they would have. He "flooded the zone" with Neocons, and he did this for a reason.
The actual decision to invade Iraq was made in March, 2001 by Cheney himself in his energy task force. (1) Janes first reports the upcoming Afghanistan War this same month, a full six months before 9/11. (2) This is reported several times between March and September, though never by U.S. news outlets. (3) UNOCAL lost the contract for the Caspian Sea pipeline through Afghanistan well before the war there. (4) Halliburton builds UNOCAL pipelines. (5) The new president of Afghanistan is a former UNOCAL consultant. (6) UNOCAL gets 36.5% of the Afghanistan pipeline after the war there.
Funny how things just seem to line up. And this is actually just a short list. There are dozens of more items in this sequence, some most outrageous. One lousy (though quite lucrative) pipeline, and we are going to war with Afghanistan as of March, 2001.
Iraq? We're going to kick the Taliban's butts for one UNOCAL pipeline? What would we do to get control (and profits from) Iraqi oil?
The Judicial Watch PDFs from the Cheney task force clearly show a keen interest in Iraqi oil contracts. There are no American companies on the list. This is the same situation as Afghanistan. American oil companies have been locked out of the market. So we will go to war over a pipeline, but not over the Iraqi oil fields? The second largest reserve in the world, with new information suggesting that theirs might actually be the largest?
If Cheney's task force decided to "borrow" the American military for a pipeline, they certainly would not think twice about borrowing it again for the "Devil's Tears" of Iraq.
THANKS BILLMON OR WHOEVER FOR THE TERM NEOLIB.FIRST TIME I'VE SEEN IT.iT'S VERY GOOD FOR FRIEDMAN AND MANY OTHERS.fOR GIVING A NAME TO IRAQ,IT HAS TO BE "IRAQ IS IRAQ" WITH MAYBE ALGERIA CLOSE.FOR THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW,THE MAX. AGE FOR ENLISTMENT IN OUR MILITARY HAS BEEN 34 FOR A LONG TIME.LAST MONTH,THIS WAS CHANGED TO 39!SOON A 15 MONTH ENLISTMENT PLAN WILL BE AVAILABLE!THEY'RE GOING TO NEED TROOPS!
One thing that keeps coming to mind is that all this "it's not Vietnam" is a pretty sneaky way to get an association with Vietnam up and running in the first place, especially when the Corporate Minders are looking over your shoulder.
Think about it: these articles are keeping the Vietnam Association alive, if simply by pretending to refute it. It's like the old "I have no evidence that Mr. Smith is a crook" style of association.
So whyVietnam? Vietnam is the biggest trauma you can use that draws a visceral reaction from Americans. Lebanon and Somalia were already embroiled in civil war (so the CW goes), so it was just a mistake to try to interfere. Vietnam is, however, the best example of the USA making an entire region sink into destruction and chaos.
Interesting Winston. I knew the term, Neoliberal, long before I'd heard of Neoconservative. It was thrown around a great deal with reference to NAFTA. Btw, wikipedia's definition of Neoconservative is the best I've seen so far (see also Neoliberalism). I wonder if Friedman ever uses the word, Neoliberal.
The Cohen piece baffled and infuriated me. His argument seems to be that Vietnam was a mistake that didn't matter, because Communism and the Soviet state were doomed to collapse a generation later. Iraq, on the other hand, is much more important, because... Uh, why?
"As Sept. 11 proved, the world is a lot more dangerous now than it was in the Vietnam era."
Hard to top that statement for myopia. Look, 9/11 was truly awful - but to argue that it shows the world to be a more dangerous place now than during the Cold War should be enough to cause him to lose his pundit's license.
"Finally, where Iraq is really different from Vietnam: There can be no premature, chaotic and shameful withdrawal. In the end, Vietnam didn't matter. Iraq does."
Note that. "premature withdrawal" - what we did in Vietnam, slinking out after a mere eight years of ferocious combat. We sure don't want to give up that easily in Iraq, do we?
The British took 30 years to figure out how to fight against the IRA, who weren't sitting on a massive stockpile of weapons, in a country about an hours flight from their capital, where the population spoke their language and for the most part shared their culture...and 2/3 of the population very specifically wanted to be ruled by the British and did most of the dying (as police and army reserve) on the British side in the subsequent years. One element of the British strategy was a low-level "dirty war" arranged by feeding intelligence on IRA sympathisers and operatives (at least) to assets in the pro-British terrorist groups.
If its not Vietnam, it could be Northern Ireland. Where is the stomach for that in the US?
As has been noted many times before, we won the Tet offensive. We were within shouting distance of taking the Viet Cong down.
The premise doesn't support the conclusion. Yes, America "won" the Tet offensive at the tactical level. But I think the idea that we could have gone on to win the war is one of those myths that people who lose wars need to console themselves with.
Believe me, I know: I grew up listening to endless arguments about what could have happened if this or that Confederate general had done what he was supposed to have done at Gettysburg.
But the Tet "victory" didn't really change the basic facts on the ground: The South Vietnamese regime remained a weak and corrupt collection of ex-sergeants from the French colonial army, The North Vietnamese government remained determined to prosecute the war to the end, the Russians continued to back them, and we still refused (for very sound reasons) to invade North Vietnam.
The war was lost long before Tet -- it was lost before it ever began. All Nixon and Kissinger did was finally acknowledge reality.
The draft made Viet Nam matter. Thats why hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets and campus' across the land to protest- because their necks were on the line-...say what you will, but having been there, the massive uprising of the people of this country is what caused LBJ to back out. Where are the demonstrations now??? Where is the outrage shown against this fraud of a Presidency and its actions??? The campus' are quiet, students busily searching for the next rave.
billmon says:
The premise doesn't support the conclusion. Yes, America "won" the Tet offensive at the tactical level.
And that was my point. We could win tactically all day long, but we had a flawed strategy to operate under. Like, say, going into Vietnam in the first place?
The apologists like to point to the casualty rate, maybe 6-7 per week here, perhaps 50 in Vietnam in an average week. But these half-dozen come at a time when the American public has become super risk-averse and super-sensitive about casualties. We won a major war in Yugoslavia without losing a man, and just 18 deaths drove us out of Somalia. So my sense is that the casualties are very nearly as big an issue now as then.
We had allies in Vietnam. Hell, the Nazis had allies in France. We don't have any allies in Iraq.
Did the Moroccans ever come through with those 2000 monkeys?
And I understand the Lithuanian Army brought a friend.
The other difference between Iraq and previous armed conflicts is the ‘continuum’ theory. There is no sharp easy either-or distinction among the peoples of the Middle East. The affiliation of sympathy of any given individual falls on a sliding scale from those who support martyrdom for the sake of fulfilling the mandate of religious jihad to those who sympathize with the cause and provide support in a way that is not personally threatening to those who sympathize but resist providing any form of active support to those who understand but would prefer another way. The cultural impregnation, if you will, cannot be excised with any sort of precision surgery, certainly not the kind performed by a military force.
If one can detach from the situation, the perspective of the U.S. (either you’re with us or against us) trying to provide constructive rehabilitation in an region of the planet that recognizes no such black and white loyalties is an unmitigated disaster.
I wish the neocons would borrow a page from the neolib prayer book and give some credit to the potential of technology to change our world in ways that protect our cherished freedoms: Give me oil or give me death seems a clownish caricature of the nobility of motivation for building a country based on freedom and democracy. I hope we don’t decommission all of those dams in the west, just when water is about to become an even more important commodity:
http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/20/1066502117600.html
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=%2Fnbt%2Fjournal%2Fv21%2Fn10%2Fabs%2Fnbt867.html
HBO broadcast "A Bright And Shining Lie", the story of John Paul Van in Vietnam, from midnight to 2am this morning.
In one scene, just after the US embassy is retaken from the Viet Cong, General Westmoreland is standing out front talking with news people. I'm not sure who said it, but one remark was something like: this is the enemies last desparate attempt to win this war.
Several days ago I read a long list of quotes on a blog, perhaps Atrios, where the word desparate was used by a long list of Bushies to make the same claim about the enemy in Iraq: such-and-such a terrorist act is the enemies last desparate attempt to win this war.
The language is beginning to sound the same.
They are right, of course. Iraq has no jungle, and the people can't be pejoratively called slants. And there's no draft - yet!
These poor neocons have had SUCH a tough week! Can't we show them a little of what they have coming to them? I know! We'll have them tour Baghdad at night!