Is Iraq Another Vietnam?

As the U.S. engagement has deepened and worsened, critics are quick to cite Iraq as another Vietnam: the nation mired in a guerilla war with no hope for success. Even Henry Kissinger, no stranger to the problems of that earlier war, found a parallel: "For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United Sates that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made," he said in 2005.

Advocates of our commitment in Iraq are just as quick to debunk the "myth" that it is another Vietnam. President Bush has scoffed at the analogy many times, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in November 2006: "This is a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States." She noted that Iraq is a fight between an elected government and insurgents and that we are fighting now with a volunteer army, not one based on a military draft. The analogy is "not only faulty, but also unhealthy" she added.

The argument about whether Iraq is another Vietnam, based as it is on similarities and differences in outward events - geography, geopolitics, public opinion, and military tactics - can never be settled. It is also an argument that diverts us from looking inward, at the thinking that underlies the actions in both wars. In the nature of the decision-making and judgment of America's leaders, Iraq is another Vietnam. Without seeing that, it will not be the last Vietnam either.

The similarities are brought to light by returning to Barbara Tuchman's 1984 classic, The March to Folly. In analyzing government miscalculations from Troy to the British loss of America to the U.S. failure in Vietnam, she offered conclusions that seem disturbingly valid to Iraq.

In regard to Vietnam specifically, Tuchman found the rationale for going to war filled with misjudgments. As for the Vietnamese desire for democracy, she noted that "The presumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion." As for the effort to install democratic values and institutions that would protect the average citizen, she reminded us that it took the West 25 centuries to reach its present point. ""Nation-building" was the most presumptuous of the illusions," she said. And as for the belief that the loss of Vietnam would mean the loss of all of Southeast Asia, an argument that four presidents used to continually (and as it turned out quite inaccurately) raise the stakes of the conflict, she concluded that "The melding of the several countries of East Asia as if they had no individuality, no history, no differences of circumstances of their own was thinking, either uninformed and shallow or knowingly false..." The "domino theory" in Southeast Asia has parallels in the concern about the spread of "Islamic terrorism" today.

Tuchman also found folly in the thinking about how to prosecute the war. The illusion of omnipotence, that U.S. power could ensure its desired outcome, was a critical misjudgment in Vietnam. "Americans took it for granted that they could impose their will and the might of their resources," she noted. And once the commitment of those resources had been made, "The stake had become America's exercise of power and its manifestation called "credibility."" "Enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis" that prevented reconsideration about whether the commitment was worth the cost. "War is a procedure from which there can be no turning back without acknowledging defeat," she said about Vietnam. "This was the self-laid trap into which American had walked." Once engaged, she noted, America's leaders could find no way to disengage without the loss of face and power, at home as well as abroad. "Support of Humpty-Dumpty was chosen instead, and once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it."

But perhaps the greatest folly was the thinking that created long-term damage to U.S. society itself. Of President Johnson, she noted, "Long accustomed to normal political lying, he forgot that his office made a difference, and that when lies come to light, as under the greater spotlight of the White House they were bound to, it was the presidency and public faith that suffered." A part of that lying was surely the choking off of dissent, Tuchman found. "Johnson wanted his policies to be ratified, not questioned." "Disgrace of a ruler is not a great matter in world history," Tuchman said, "but disgrace of government is traumatic, for government cannot function without respect."

America lost a lot in Vietnam. In addition to 55,000 combat deaths, and many more injuries, we lost part of our belief in who we are. Tuchman quotes Ambassador George Kennan who said of the American spectacle in Vietnam that it was "inflicting grievous damage on the lives of a poor and helpless people... This spectacle produces reactions among millions of people throughout the world profoundly detrimental to the image we would like them to hold of this country." Some of those reactions were right here at home. The current Administration may wish to point out that Iraq is not Vietnam because we have suffered far lighter casualties. But that misses the point. For what we have lost in Iraq goes far beyond numbers. We might easily say of Iraq what Tuchman said of Vietnam: "What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in one word, virtue."

Contrary to what Secretary Rice claims, the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam is worthwhile if it helps us examine the decision making still taking place. Contrary to what Secretary Kissinger maintains, the divisions of opinion in the United States are the working of democracy and representative government, not a danger to it. Indeed, the lack of those divisions before and in the early days of the Iraq war represents a major failure of both the White House and the Congress.

As someone once said in defining madness, it is doing something that does not work over and over again but expecting a different outcome. And so with the Administration's thinking process about Iraq. Or as Tuchman put it in closing her book, quoting from Samuel Coleridge: "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." After two failed wars, fought with the same thinking, it is time to shine the light onto the ship of state itself.