The tragedy that we call the Vietnam War began with a piece of deceit known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Congress granted the executive branch special powers that were then used to justify an ever escalating amount of violence.
As a result of McNamara’s testimony, on August 7 Congress passed a joint resolution (H.J. RES 1145), known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that facilitated increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Resolution was approved by the House unanimously (416-0), and by the Senate 88-2, with Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska casting the only nay votes. Although there was never a formal declaration of war, the Resolution gave President Johnson approval “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” Both Johnson and President Richard Nixon used the Resolution as a justification for escalated involvement in Indochina.
The tragedy we call ‘9/11’ was real enough, even if the outlines of the plot are still less than crystal clear. Congress responded, on September 14th, with similar language, authorizing the executive to take broad and ill-defined steps to protect the nation.
Bush determined, through the aid of our intelligence agencies, that the 9/11 terrorists were linked to Usama bin-Laden, whom was known to be residing in Afghanistan. Therefore, it was determined that U.S. forces would have to enter Afghanistan in significant numbers to break up bin-Laden’s organization and training camps, and to capture of kill the leaders of his organization.
But, somehow we wound up in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Usama bin-Laden or the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
And it was the decision to invade Iraq that mirrors the decision to invade Indochina forty years earlier.
When we revisit Vietnam and try to determine how and why we lost that war, we hear the same themes time and time again.
We sided with a corrupt minority-Catholic administration against a nationalist majorititarian movement. We didn’t understand the indigenous culture, or the complex history and relations of the region. We wrongly thought that China and Vietnam might be inclined to make common cause and that China might invade the north, as they had in Korea. Therefore, we fought timidly with one hand behind our backs. We never mobilized the number of troops that were needed to pacify the insurgency. We used the wrong tactics and the wrong mix of weapons. Our strong arm tactics lost the sympathies (the hearts and minds) of the people that might have been inclined to support us.
And, of course, we did all of this using a phony casus belli as our reason for being there in the first place.
There are some important differences between our efforts in Vietnam and Iraq, but I want to focus on the similarities.
First of all, the casus belli for war in Iraq was a trumped up set of allegations that were not supported by the available intelligence. The ‘facts were fixed around the policy’.
The military, diplomatic, and cultural experts were largely ignored and the intricacies of Iraqi sectarian, ethnic, and tribal society were papered over. Troop level recommendations were dismissed, and cost estimates were dismissed. Predictions of a Sunni insurgency were pooh-poohed.
We went in with the wrong force structures, the wrong equipment, and with virtually no civil affairs officers or Arabic speakers. Our troops were not trained for the duties they would be tasked with carrying out, nor with an adequate cultural sensitivity training.
Our policy coordinators had virtually no understanding of the place of the Shi’a clergy in Iraqi society, nor of their individual beliefs and the political agenda of their followers.
All of these shortcomings contributed to enormous problems as soon as we captured Baghdad. And, just as our civilian leaders had done in Vietnam, they refused to level with the American people, or Congress, about the degree to which things were not going well, or as planned.
And that leads me to an article in the Washington Post this morning about how Bush plans to turn around his troubled second term in office:
The result was a hybrid of the two approaches as Bush lashed out at war opponents in Congress, then turned to a humbler assessment of events on the ground in Iraq that included admissions about how some of his expectations had been frustrated.
Not surprisingly, Karl Rove recommended that the President take no notice of the defects or troubles of our Iraq policy. ‘Just keep lying and questioning the patriotism of anyone that questions how well things are going’, Karl said.
Also, not surprisingly, Bush found that his poll numbers improved, not by following Rove’s advice, but by providing a limited amount of candor.
But the polls numbers will not last, because the candor is not sincere, but calculated. Just as in Vietnam, telling Americans that, despite unexpected setbacks, there is light at the end of tunnel, will not work. There is civil war at the end of the tunnel.
The amazing thing is that Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were veterans of the Ford/Nixon administrations that oversaw the collapse of South Vietnam, would make all the same mistakes a second time.
When John O’Neill first ‘swift-boated’ John Kerry in 1971, on the Dick Cavett Show, it did nothing to prevent the collapse of Saigon four years later. Rove’s plan to ‘swift-boat’ John Murtha, Howard Dean, and anyone else who raises their voice against this tragic maladministration of our foreign policy, will do nothing to prevent catastrophe on the Euphrates.
