• The danger of prematurely dumping allied leaders.
• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically.
• The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border.
• The danger of not making plans for refugees.
This does not, of course, exhaust the possible analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. Nor is it meant to suggest the parallels are exact; there are in fact substantial differences. Any historical comparison has to be handled with care and not swallowed whole. But there are important lessons to be learned from our Vietnam experience, and as President Bush noted, they are not necessarily the ones drawn by the doves who have made Vietnam "their" war.
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Earlier this week, President Bush gave a speech in which he drew an analogy between Vietnam and Iraq. As Max Boot argues in today's Wall Street Journal, this was unusual. Normally it is opponents of American power--those who believe, or hope, that America cannot win--who cite Vietnam. "Supporters of [American] interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons."
"In a skillful bit of political jujitsu," Boot writes, Bush "cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic--just as they were in Southeast Asia." Here is what the president said:
The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism--and dangerous naiveté. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life."
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
There's a reason for the apparent reversal Boot describes. Usually, the Vietnam analogy comes up before the U.S. intervenes overseas. Opponents of intervention liken it to Vietnam because they think America was wrong to intervene there, and they want to avoid "another Vietnam"--that is, another U.S. military intervention.
Now, however, it is the Iraq opponents who are seeking another Vietnam, i.e., another defeat for America, and President Bush who wants to avoid that outcome. And so the erstwhile opponents of the Vietnam War have to argue that the outcome in Vietnam wasn't really so bad.
This means, among other things, averting one's eyes from the humanitarian costs of American retreat. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh shows how it's done, describing a visit he made to Hanoi in December 1991, when the Soviet Union had less than a month to exist:
Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles ("Russians with dollars," we were called.)
On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon--the where [sic] some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken--I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North's victory over the "U.S. imperialists." In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi's new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars).
Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall--but the opposite way.
This was the "harsh" aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam.
Could that last sentence be any more disingenuous? To Hirsh, the "aftermath" of America's withdrawal from Vietnam didn't begin until 1991, more than 16 years after Saigon fell. About events between 1975 and 1991, he has only this to say:
Yes, a lot of Vietnamese boat people died on the high seas; but many others have returned to visit in the ensuing years.
Never mind Vietnam's and Laos's "re-education" camps; never mind Cambodia's killing fields. It is as if one visited West Germany in 1960, found a prosperous democracy, and reached positive conclusions about the "aftermath" of Nazi rule. It misses the point by a light-year.
Of course Iraq is not Vietnam, and any historical analogy entails differences as well as similarities. But let's look at one more historical analogy to Iraq: Iraq. That is, the last time America abandoned Iraqis, in 1991. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Shiites in southern Iraq staged an uprising. Today's New York Times reports on some of what happened:
A former top aide to Saddam Hussein had two men tied to concrete blocks and thrown from a helicopter into deep water in 1991, according to testimony on the third day of the trial of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, and 14 co-defendants on charges of crimes against humanity. . . .
Another witness, testifying anonymously, said today that he was tortured in prisons in Basra and Baghdad. In the Basra prison, he said, he was ordered to stand on a chair with a rope around his neck while officers asked him to confess. They kicked out the chair from under him and let him hang by the neck until he passed out, then they took him to another room where he regained consciousness.
The witness said he saw a girl who had been serving tea to officers at the prison forced by one of the officers into an adjoining room, and then he heard her screaming. He realized that she had been raped when another officer congratulated the officer who had taken her into the next room, telling him "you have married twice now, good for you."
He also testified that: he saw hanged men in tents in the prison in Basra; soldiers in the prison raped a young boy who used to work as barber in Basra, and prisoners were tortured by being put into a barrel that was heated by a fire underneath it.
In a 2003 Washington Post op-ed, Peter Galbraith described America's culpability:
On Feb. 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi military and people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander returning from Kuwait fired a shell through one of the portraits of Hussein in Basra's main square, igniting the southern uprising. A week later, Kurdish rebels ended Hussein's control over much of the north.
But although Bush had called for the rebellion, his administration was caught unprepared when it happened. The administration knew little about those in the Iraqi opposition because, as a matter of policy, it refused to talk to them. Policymakers tended to see Iraq's main ethnic groups in caricature: The Shiites were feared as pro-Iranian and the Kurds as anti-Turkish. Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion. As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime."
The practical expression of this policy came in the decisions made by the military on the ground. U.S. commanders spurned the rebels' plea for help. The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.
This history is no doubt uncomfortable for the current President Bush, since it was his own father who committed what Galbraith rightly calls "a mistake of historic proportions." Those who seek to abandon Iraq today would risk repeating the catastrophic mistakes not only of Vietnam but also of Iraq after the Gulf War.
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