Supporters of the so-called surge and the larger war in Iraq are starting to trot out really whacky Vitenam analogies. We should confront them with our own.
Cross-posted at Politics and Letters
The Vietnam analogy is dangerous ground for supporters of the so-called surge in Baghdad and the larger war in Iraq, for three obvious reasons. First, sending more and more American troops did not work in Indochina. Why should we believe it will work in the Middle East?
Second, the "Vietnamization" of the military conflict—remember, this was Nixon’s "big idea"—didn’t work any better, because the political inclinations and the ethnic loyalties of the indigenous people were so divided as to make a merely military solution impossible. Believing that such a solution was possible made military defeat, rather than a diplomatic endgame, inevitable, and so made the subsequent slaughter in Indochina possible. In other words, the lesson of the Korean War was lost in the ideological shuffle of the late Cold War.
Let me be as candid as I can be here: We armed the Khmer Rouge by (a) pretending that we could beat the Commies on the battlefield and bombing Cambodia—not to mention North Vietnam—back to the Stone Age, and then (b) admitting we didn’t have the military force on the ground to back the bluff. The armed forces of the US were broken by 1972, and everybody knew it.
We have similarly armed the terrorists and the militias in Iraq by pretending that we can win on the battlefield—wherever it might be—instead of acknowledging that a military solution is inconceivable, there as elsewhere, and admitting, accordingly, that our troops have already been pushed to the point of physical and psychological exhaustion.
The civil war in Vietnam and the larger conflicts in Indochina were going to be settled by the local participants or policed by a multilateral peace-keeping force. The American occupation in the name of partition was not going to end it. The abrupt departure of the US—bereft of allies, supporters, ideas, even a usable military—made the murderous local alternative the global standard.
So why should we believe that a merely military solution in Iraq, whether carried out by them or us, makes any sense, on any level of analysis? Why should we assume that "defeat" and "victory" have merely military connotations?
Why should we think that our magnificent "all-volunteer army" will survive this horror? Why should we act as if our retreat to the perimeter of conflict, and the concurrent muster of a genuinely multi-national peace-keeping force, signify failure?
Third, the dominoes didn’t fall in Southeast Asia after 1975. The dire, indeed hysterical, predictions of communist triumph throughout the region if Vietnam fell into the hands of Ho Chi Minh were about as accurate as the predictions of impending apocalypse when we "lost" China twenty years earlier to Mao.
So what makes us think that the Middle East collapses into—what?—"chaos" when we acknowledge the limits of our military power there?
Let’s make these questions more concrete by asking, why are Peter Rodman and William Shawcross wailing in the New York Times (6/7/07) about "defeat" in Iraq by reference to—you guessed it—the "domino theory" once applied with reckless abandon to Southeast Asia? And why is Philip Stephens singing the same shrill song in the Financial Times (6/8/07)?
Got me. The Rodman/Shawcross show is almost comical in its historical convolution. "America’s ten [sic] years in Indochina had positive effects," they suggest, and cite the former prime minister of Singapore as their authoritative source: "’Had there been no U.S. intervention,’ he argues, the will of non-communist countries to resist communist revolution in the 1960s ‘would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist.’ The domino theory would have proved correct."
Right. I got that: the dominoes did not in fact fall. It didn’t happen in the 1970s or the 1980s, or at any moment thereafter in real historical time, but it would have happened, earlier, in the 1960s, had we not been on the scene as a military force. This double-negative narration is so pathetic that it makes you want to laugh—or cry. We’re supposed to believe these fools about the future of Iraq because they invent an awful scenario from an imaginary past.
Let me put it a different way. Rodman and Shawcross are using blatantly counter-factual arguments about the military debacle in Vietnam to make their case for military "victory" in Iraq. They never use this loaded word, of course, but they do use the word "defeat" eleven times in an op-ed of 850 words, as if there is still a military resolution available to us.
Toward the end of their pathetic performance, they announce that "The new strategy of the coalition and the Iraqis, ably directed by Gen. David Petraeus, offers the best prospect of reversing the direction of events—provided that we show staying power." I guess this means that we must ignore Petraeus himself, as well as the new "war czar," Gen. Douglas Lute, who have insisted that (a) there is no military resolution available to us and that (b) the occupation itself is the source of the insurgency.
The penultimate paragraph is worth quoting in full: "Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance."
Guys, I’m here to reassure you. Our domestic debate on the Vietnam War was the best thing that happened to our country, and to the world, after 1950 (unless you want me to talk about movies and music). It had exactly the right impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, because—once again—it taught us the limits of military power in pointing the world toward a developmental agenda.
Our credibility will be recreated if we (a) withdraw American troops to the perimeter of Iraq; (b) convene a regional conference on the future of Iraq in which Iran’s special interests—and grievances—are explicitly acknowledged and addressed; and (c) ask the UN and/or NATO to assemble a multinational peace-keeping force to modulate post-occupation disorder in Iraq.
Our credibility will be impaired so long as we act as if there is a military resolution available to us in Iraq and the larger Middle East. If relinquishing that charade means accepting "defeat," I’m all for it.