On the eve of the 38th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it is instructive to study the parallels between the Vietnam debacle and the current situation in Iraq.
by David Robson and Richard Krohn
During the present conflict in Iraq many of us who lived through Vietnam have been hearing echoes of that earlier conflict. The echoes are getting louder and are not just coincidence.Two of us stood in the bunker that night, guarding the base perimeter. We had cleaned our rifles, loaded the machine gun and checked the wires to the Claymore mines when a jeep slid to a stop. The Captain of the Guard growled, “You men better stay alert tonight. You know what time of year this is...it’s Tet!” Two years earlier the infamous Tet Offensive had caught the U.S. Army off guard and the Captain wasn’t about to let that happen again on his watch.
January 30th thirty-eight years ago: Tet began with simultaneous attacks in every major city. When the month-long battle ended, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had suffered a sweeping military defeat in Vietnam, but had scored a major political victory in the United States. President Lyndon Johnson had assured anxious Americans the war was going according to plan. Tet exposed his assurances as deceptions.
During the present conflict in Iraq many of us who lived through Vietnam have been hearing echoes of that earlier conflict. The echoes are getting louder and are not just coincidence. Because each nation was distant and no direct threat to the United States, the President’s unfounded alarm triggered six stages of a war based on deception.
1. SELLING THE WAR
The President needs to depict the war as a mandatory response to provocation.
Early in the Vietnam conflict, President Johnson accused North Vietnam of attacking U.S. destroyers, but he withheld information about prior U.S. gunboat raids on the North Vietnamese coast. Congress reacted to the reported Gulf of Tonkin attack by endorsing increased military action.
Before invading Iraq, President Bush insisted that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear bombs that threatened the U.S., but he withheld government intelligence that questioned reports about African uranium and aluminum tubes. Congress reacted by authorizing the President to use military force to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”
2. DISMISSING HISTORY
More intent on selling the war than planning for it, the administration ignores the dynamics of the region’s history and religion.
Vietnam’s long domination by China, France, Japan, and France again, followed by eight years of war, taught the Vietnamese how to outlast the U.S., which they began to see as another occupying force. Iraq’s long domination by the Ottoman and British empires, and Saddam’s recent brutality taught Iraqis the importance of covert resistance, and they began to see the U.S. as another occupying force.
For a century in Vietnam, French rulers had used the Catholic church and schools as part of their governing apparatus, and during the U.S. era Buddhists burned themselves to protest the Catholic-dominated regime. In Iraq, Saddam drew his governing class from the Sunni Muslim sect. With Saddam gone, Shiite death squads killed Sunni leaders, and Sunnis retaliated by bombing Shiite mosques.
3. STAYING THE COURSE
U.S. leaders stick with policy in the face of facts to the contrary.
In Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara believed massive bombing would cause North Vietnam to surrender. In Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted on a lean, agile invasion force. Neither policy admitted the rapidly-shifting facts in the field.
In both wars U.S. commanders believed in the power of superior technology: Vietnam--helicopters, hovercraft and remote troop sensors; Iraq--unmanned aerial vehicles, smart bombs and depleted uranium tank shells. The Viet Cong found low-tech ways to counter U.S. technology, using tree trunks as decoy cannon emplacements; the Iraqi guerrillas triggered roadside bombs with radio-controlled garage door openers.
Guerrillas smuggled supplies across borders the U.S. could not secure: from North Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail; from Syria and Iran into Iraq.
In both wars the U.S. assumed liberation would win the “hearts and minds” of the common people. But destruction of villages and farms in Vietnam, and extensive bombing of Iraqi cities like Bahgdad and Fallujah killed thousands of civilians, alienating millions more.
Pentagon planners ignored the question “What will we do if they don’t surrender?” In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive smashed the image of long-term victory. In Iraq when insurgencies followed Saddam’s capture, Paul Wolfowitz said “It was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting.”
Meanwhile, lacking real military progress, the administration resorted to statistics. In 1965 the U.S. Air Force boasted that during one month it had destroyed 5,349 “structures” in South Vietnam. In 2005, the U.S. stated that “by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306 million rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq’s 25 million people.”
4. DOUBTING AND DEFECTING
When claims of substantial progress prove false, the administration’s solidarity cracks.
U.S. State Department officials resigned in protest: during Vietnam, diplomats William Watts, Roger Morris and Anthony Lake in 1970; during Iraq, John Brown, John Brady Kiesling and Mary Wright in 2003.
During Vietnam, the New York Times published excerpts of the 43-volume Pentagon Papers, leaked by a Pentagon official; during Iraq the Sunday Times in 2005 published the leaked British Downing Street Memo that “Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.”
A key architect of each war acknowledged the lack of progress...and was soon re-assigned to direct the World Bank. During Vietnam, McNamara commented in 1967, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing and injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” Re-assigned the next year. During Iraq, Wolfowitz said on July 22, 2003 “The fact is. . .we often just make mistakes. We do stupid things.” Re-assigned in 2005.
5. DENYING THE TRAP
The administration finds itself in a trap of its own making--unable to escalate or exit--and sells optimistic slogans.
In Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland requested 206,000 more troops in 1968, but President Johnson refused, knowing the U.S. public would not accept more escalation. During Iraq, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki said post-combat Iraq would require “several hundred thousand soldiers,” which Wolfowitz called "wildly off the mark" because it contradicted Pentagon policy.
Meanwhile, each administration claimed success was near. In 1967, shortly before the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland said “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view,” but six long years later Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was making the same sales pitch: "As a consequence of the success of the military aspects of Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese people today, in my view, are fully capable of providing for their own in-country security against the North Vietnamese."
During Iraq Vice President Dick Cheney said “I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency,” and in June 2005, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said, "The best way to get our troops home is to...train Iraqi forces so that they can take over all of the security of their own country."
6. WITHDRAWING
Public discontent makes continued selling of the war impossible.
The U.S. President realizes he must withdraw.
In Vietnam, five years after the Tet Offensive, the last U.S. troops were withdrawn in 1973.
In Iraq, after years of insurgency. . . ?
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David Robson is a Vietnam veteran who teaches science at Towson High School in Maryland. Richard Krohn, Ph.D., is a historian who teaches at St. Paul’s School, near Baltimore, Maryland. Contact them, respectively, at drobson@bcps.org or rkrohn@stpaulsschool.org.
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