Iraq and Vietnam

Iraq and Vietnam
By Melvin Laird
Foreign Affairs | November 11, 2005
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20158

Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on the assumptionthat he had a plan to end
the Vietnam War. He didn't have any such plan, and my job as his first
secretary of defense was to remedy that -- quickly. The only stated plan was
wording I had suggested for the 1968 Republican platform, saying it was time
to de-Americanize the war. Today, nearly 37 years after Nixon took office as
president and I left Congress to join his cabinet, getting out of a war is
still dicier than getting into one, as President George W. Bush can attest.

There were two things in my office that firstday that gave my mission
clarity. The first was a multivolume set of binders in my closet safe that
contained a top-secret history of the creeping U.S. entry into the war that
had occurred on the watch of my predecessor, Robert McNamara. The report
didn't remain a secret for long: it was soon leaked to The New York Times,
which nicknamed it "the Pentagon Papers." I always referred to the study as
"the McNamara Papers," to give credit where credit belonged. I didn't read
the full report when I moved into the office. I had already spent seven
years on the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee
listening to McNamara justify the escalation of the war. How we got into
Vietnam was no longer my concern. (Although, in retrospect, those papers
offered a textbook example of how not to commit American military might.)

The second item was another secret document, this one shorter and infinitely
more troubling. It was a one-year-old request from General William
Westmoreland to raise the U.S. troop commitment in Vietnam from 500,000 to
700,000. At the time he had made the request, Westmoreland was the commander
of U.S. forces there. As soon as the idea had reached the ears of President
Lyndon Johnson, Westmoreland's days in Saigon were numbered. Johnson bumped
him upstairs to be army chief of staff, so that the Pentagon bureaucracy
could dilute his more-is-better philosophy during the coming presidential
campaign.

The memo had remained in limbo in the defense secretary's desk, neither
approved nor rejected. As my symbolic first act in office, it gave me great
satisfaction to turn down that request formally. It was the beginning of a
four-year withdrawal from Vietnam that, in retrospect, became the textbook
description of how the U.S. military should decamp.

Others who were not there may differ with this description. But they have
been misinformed by more than 30 years of spin about the Vietnam War. The
resulting legacy of that misinformation has left the United States timorous
about war, deeply averse to intervening in even a just cause, and dubious of
its ability to get out of a war once it is in one. All one need whisper is
"another Vietnam," and palms begin to sweat. I have kept silent for those 30
years because I never believed that the old guard should meddle in the
business of new administrations, especially during a time of war. But the
renewed vilification of our role in Vietnam in light of the war in Iraq has
prompted me to speak out.

Some who should know better have made our current intervention in Iraq the
most recent in a string of bogeymen peeking out from under the bed, spawned
by the nightmares of Vietnam that still haunt us. The ranks of the
misinformed include seasoned politicians, reporters, and even veterans who
earned their stripes in Vietnam but who have since used that war as their
bully pulpit to mold an isolationist American foreign policy. This camp of
doomsayers includes Senator Edward Kennedy, who has called Iraq "George
Bush's Vietnam." Those who wallow in such Vietnam angst would have us be
not only reticent to help the rest of the world, but ashamed of our ability
to do so and doubtful of the value of spreading democracy and of the
superiority of freedom itself. They join their voices with those who claim
that the current war is "all about oil," as though the loss of that oil were
not enough of a global security threat to merit any U.S. military
intervention and especially not "another Vietnam."

The Vietnam War that I saw, first from my seat in Congress and then as
secretary of defense, cannot be wrapped in a tidy package and tagged "bad
idea." It was far more complex than that: a mixture of good and evil from
which there are many valuable lessons to be learned. Yet the only lesson
that seems to have endured is the one that begins and ends with "Don't go
there." The war in Iraq is not "another Vietnam." But it could become one if
we continue to use Vietnam as a sound bite while ignoring its true lessons.

I acknowledge and respect the raw emotions of those who fought in Vietnam,
those who lost loved ones, and those who protested, and I also respect the
sacrifice of those who died following orders of people such as myself, half
a world away. Those raw emotions are once again being felt as our young men
and women die in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot speak for the dead or the
angry. My voice is that of a policymaker, one who once decided which causes
were worth fighting for, how long the fight should last, and when it was
time to go home. The president, as our commander-in-chief, has the overall
responsibility for making these life-or-death decisions, in consultation
with Congress. The secretary of defense must be supportive of those
decisions, or else he must leave.

It is time for a reasonable look at both Vietnam and Iraq -- and at what the
former can teach us about the latter. My perspective comes from military
service in the Pacific in World War II (I still carry shrapnel in my body
from a kamikaze attack on my destroyer, the U.S.S.Maddox), nine terms in the
U.S. House of Representatives, and four years as secretary of defense to
Nixon.

Today, we deserve a view of history that is based on facts rather than
emotional distortions and the party line of tired politicians who play on
emotions. Mine is not a rosy view of the Vietnam War. I didn't miss the fact
that it was an ugly, mismanaged, tragic episode in U.S. history, with
devastating loss of life for all sides. But there are those in our nation
who would prefer to pick at that scab rather than let it heal. They wait for
opportunities to trot out the Vietnam demons whenever another armed
intervention is threatened. For them, Vietnam is an insurance policy that
pretends to guarantee peace at home as long as we never again venture
abroad. Certain misconceptions about that conflict, therefore, need to be
exposed and abandoned in order to restore confidence in the United States'
nation-building ability.

STAYING THE COURSE

The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is
that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we
grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut
off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight
on its own. Over the four years of Nixon's first term, I had cautiously
engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces while building up
South Vietnam's ability to defend itself. My colleague and friend Henry
Kissinger, meanwhile, had negotiated a viable agreement between North and
South Vietnam, which was signed in January 1973. It allowed for the United
States to withdraw completely its few remaining troops and for the United
States and the Soviet Union to continue funding their respective allies in
the war at a specified level. Each superpower was permitted to pay for
replacement arms and equipment. Documents released from North Vietnamese
historical files in recent years have proved that the Soviets violated the
treaty from the moment the ink was dry, continuing to send more than $1
billion a year to Hanoi. The United States barely stuck to the allowed
amount of military aid for two years, and that was a mere fraction of the
Soviet contribution.

Yet during those two years, South Vietnam held its own courageously and
respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued between
the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut off U.S.
funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never returned. Without
U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297
million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably
fighting the war without our troops since 1973.

I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources,
South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do
the same now. From the Tet offensive in 1968 up to the fall of Saigon in
1975, South Vietnam never lost a major battle. The Tet offensive itself was
a victory for South Vietnam and devastated the North Vietnamese army, which
lost 289,000 men in 1968 alone. Yet the overriding media portrayal of the
Tet offensive and the war thereafter was that of defeat for the United
States and the Saigon government. Just so, the overriding media portrayal of
the Iraq war is one of failure and futility.

Vietnam gave the United States the reputation for not supporting its allies.
The shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the first place, but that
we betrayed our ally in the end. It was Congress that turned its back on the
promises of the Paris accord. The president, the secretary of state, and the
secretary of defense must share the blame. In the end, they did not stand up
for the commitments our nation had made to South Vietnam. Any president or
cabinet officer who is turned down by Congress when he asks for funding for
a matter of national security or defense simply has not tried hard enough.
There is no excuse for that failure. In my four years at the Pentagon, when
public support for the Vietnam War was at its nadir, Congress never turned
down any requests for the war effort or Defense Department programs. These
were tense moments, but I got the votes and the appropriations. A defense
secretary's relationship with Congress is second only to his relationship
with the men and women in uniform. Both must be able to trust him, and both
must know that he respects them. If not, Congress will not fund, and the
soldiers, sailors, and air personnel will not follow.

Donald Rumsfeld has been my friend for more than 40 years. Gerald Ford and I
went to Evanston to support him in his first congressional race, and I urged
President Bush to appoint him secretary of defense. But his overconfident
and self-assured style on every issue, while initially endearing him to the
media, did not play well with Congress during his first term. My friends in
Congress tell me Rumsfeld has modified his style of late, wisely becoming
more collegial. Several secretaries during my service on the Appropriations
Committee, running all the way from the tenure of Charlie Wilson to that of
Clark Clifford, made the mistake of thinking they must appear much smarter
than the elected officials to whom they reported. It doesn't always work.

If Rumsfeld wants something from those who are elected to make decisions for
the American people, then he must continue to show more deference to
Congress. To do otherwise will endanger public support and the funding
stream for the Iraq war and its future requirements. A sour relationship on
Capitol Hill could doom the whole effort. The importance of this solidarity
between Congress and the administration did not escape Saddam Hussein, nor
has it escaped the insurgents. In the days leading up to the U.S. invasion
of Iraq, television stations there showed 1975 footage of U.S. embassy
support personnel escaping to helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy
in Saigon. It was Saddam's message to his people that the United States does
not keep its commitments and that we are only as good as the word of our
current president. We failed to deliver the logistical support to our allies
in South Vietnam during the post-Watergate period because of a breakdown of
leadership in Washington. The failure of one administration to keep the
promises of another had a devastating effect on the North-South
negotiations.

There are no guarantees of continuity in a partisan democracy. We are making
commitments as to the future of Iraq on an almost daily basis. These
commitments must be understood now so they can be honored later. Every
skirmish on the home front that betrays a lack of solidarity on Iraq gives
the insurgents more hope and ultimately endangers the men and women we have
sent to Iraq to fight in this war for us. We are now committed to a
favorable outcome in Iraq, but it must be understood that this will require
long-term assistance or our efforts will be in vain.

VIETNAMIZATION AS THE MODEL

Along with our abandonment of our allies, another great tragedy of Vietnam
was the Americanization of the war. This threatens to be the tragedy of Iraq
also. John F. Kennedy committed a few hundred military advisers to Saigon.
Johnson saw Southeast Asia as the place to stop the spread of communism, and
he spared no expense or personnel. By the time Nixon and I inherited the war
in 1969, there were more than half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam
and 1.2 million more U.S. soldiers, sailors, and air personnel supporting
the war from aircraft carriers and military bases in surrounding nations and
at sea. The war needed to be turned back to the people who cared about it,
the Vietnamese. They needed U.S. money and training but not more American
blood. I called our program "Vietnamization," and in spite of the naysayers,
I have not ceased to believe that it worked.

Nixon was reelected in 1972 based in large part on our progress toward
ending U.S. direct involvement in the war, ending the draft, and
establishing the all-volunteer military service. His opponent that
year,George McGovern, made the war the primary issue of the campaign,
claiming that Democrats -- the party in power that had escalated the war to
an intolerable level -- would be the best folks to get us out. McGovern lost
because the American people didn't agree with him.

We need to put our resources and unwavering public support behind a program
of "Iraqization" so that we can get out of Iraq and leave the Iraqis in a
position to protect themselves. The Iraq war should have been focused on
Iraqization even before the first shot was fired. The focus is there now,
and Americans should not lose heart.

We came belatedly to Vietnamization; nonetheless, there are certain
principles we followed in Vietnam that would be helpful in Iraq. The most
important is that the administration must adhere to a standard of competence
for the Iraqi security forces, and when that standard is met, U.S. troops
should be withdrawn in corresponding numbers. That is the way it worked in
Vietnam, from the first withdrawal of 50,000 troops in 1969 to the last
prisoner of war off the plane in January of 1973. Likewise, in Iraq, the
United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its
confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few
thousand U.S. troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back
home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe
it to the Iraqi people. The readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100
percent, nor must the new democracy be perfect before we begin our
withdrawal. The immediate need is to show our confidence that Iraqis can
take care of Iraq on their own terms. Our presence is what feeds the
insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the
ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.

I gave President Nixon the same advice about Vietnam from our first day in
office. As secretary of defense, I took the initiative in the spring of 1969
to change our mission statement for Vietnam from one of applying maximum
pressure against the enemy to one of giving maximum assistance to South
Vietnam to fight its own battles. Then, the opponents of our withdrawal were
the South Vietnamese government, which we had turned into a dependent, and
some in our own military who harbored delusions of total victory in
Southeast Asia using American might. Even if such a victory had been
possible, it was wrong to Americanize the war from the beginning, and by
that point the patience of the American people had run out.

Even with the tide of public opinion running against the war, withdrawal was
not an easy sell inside the Nixon administration. Our first round of
withdrawals was announced after a conference between Nixon and South
Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu on Midway Island in June 1969. I had
already softened the blow for Thieu by visiting him in Saigon in March, at
which point I told him the spigot was being turned off. He wanted more U.S.
soldiers, as did almost everyone in the U.S. chain of command, from the
chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down. For each round of troop
withdrawals from Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs suggested a miserly number based
on what they thought they still needed to win the war. I bumped those
numbers up, always in counsel with General Creighton Abrams, then the
commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Even Nixon, who had promised to end the
war, accepted each troop-withdrawal request from me grudgingly. It took
four years to bring home half a million troops. At times, it seemed my only
ally was General Abrams. He understood what the others did not: that the
American people's patience for the war had worn thin.

Bush is not laboring under similar handicaps in his military. His commanders
share his goal of letting Iraq take care of itself as soon as its fledgling
democracy is ready. And for the moment, there is still patience at home for
a commonsensical, phased drawdown. In fact, the voices expressing the most
patience about a sensible withdrawal and the most support for the progress
of Iraqi soldiers are coming from within the U.S. military. These people are
also the most eager to see the mission succeed and the most willing to see
it through to the end. It is they who are at high risk and who are the ones
being asked to serve not one but multiple combat tours. They are dedicated
and committed to a mission that ranges from the toughest combat to the most
elementary chores of nation building. We should listen to them, and trust
them.

In those four years of Vietnamization, I never once publicly promised a
troop number for withdrawal that I couldn't deliver. President Bush should
move ahead with the same certainty. I also did not announce what our
quantitative standards for readiness among the South Vietnamese troops were,
just as Bush should not make public his specific standards for determining
when Iraqi troops are ready to go it alone. In a report to Congress in July
2005, the Pentagon hinted that those measurable standards are in place.
However, it would be a mistake for the president to rely solely on the
numbers. Instead, his top commander in the field should have the final say
on how many U.S. troops can come home, commensurate with the readiness of
Iraqi forces. If Bush does not trust his commander's judgment, as I trusted
General Abrams, Bush should replace him with someone he does trust. That
trust must be conveyed to the American people, too, if they are to be
patient with an orderly withdrawal of our troops.

THE PRETEXT FOR WAR

In this business of trust, President Bush got off to a bad start. Nixon had
the same problem. Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based
on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception. The issue was much
more egregious in the case of Vietnam, where the intelligence lapses were
born of our failure to understand what motivated Ho Chi Minh in the 1950s.
Had we understood the depth of his nationalism, we might have been able to
derail his communism early on.

The infamous pretext for leaping headlong into the Vietnam War was the Gulf
of Tonkin incident. My old destroyer, the U.S.S. Maddox, was patrolling the
Gulf of Tonkin 25 miles off the coast of North Vietnam on August 2, 1964,
when it was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. That solitary
attack would have been written off as an aberration, but two days later the
U.S.S. Maddox, joined then by the U.S.S. Turner Joy, reported that it was
under attack again. From all I was able to determine when I read the
dispatches five years later as secretary of defense, there was no second
attack. There was confusion, hysteria, and miscommunication on a dark night.
President Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara hotfooted it over to
Capitol Hill with a declaration that was short of war but that resulted in a
war anyway. I, along with 501 colleagues in the House and Senate, voted for
the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which was Johnson's ticket to escalate our role
in Vietnam. Until then, the United States had been part bystander, part
covert combatant, and part adviser.

In Iraq, the intelligence blunder concerned Saddam's nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction, which in the end may or may not have been Bush's real
motivation for going to war. My view is that it was better to find that
Saddam had not progressed as far as we thought in his WMD development than
to discover belatedly that he had. Whatever the truth about WMD in Iraq, it
cannot be said that the United States slipped gradually, covertly, or
carelessly into Iraq, as we did into Vietnam.

MARKETING THE MISSION

The mistake on the question of WMD in Iraq has led many to complain that the
United States was drawn into the war under false pretenses, that what began
as self-defense has morphed into nation building. Welcome to the reality of
war. It is neither predictable nor tidy. This generation of Americans was
spoiled by the quick-and-clean Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, when the
first President Bush adhered to the mission, freed Kuwait, and brought home
the troops. How would Iraq look today if George H.W. Bush had changed that
mission on the fly and ordered a march to Baghdad and the overthrow of
Saddam? The truth is, wars are fluid things and missions change. This is
more the rule than the exception. It was true in Vietnam, and it is true in
Iraq today.

The early U.S. objective in Southeast Asia was to stop the spread of
communism. With changes in the relationship between the Soviet Union and
China and the 1965 suppression of the communist movement in Indonesia, the
threat of a communist empire diminished. Unwilling to abandon South Vietnam,
the United States changed its mission to self-determination for Vietnam.

The current President Bush was persuaded that we would find WMD in Iraq and
did what he felt he had to do with the information he was given. When we did
not find the smoking gun, it would have been unconscionable to pack up our
tanks and go home. Thus, there is now a new mission, to transform Iraq, and
it is not a bad plan. Bush sees Iraq as the frontline in the war on
terror -- not because terrorists dominate there, but because of the
opportunity to displace militant extremists' Islamist rule throughout the
region. Bush's greatest strength is that terrorists believe he is in this
fight to the end. I have no patience for those who can't see that big
picture and who continue to view Iraq as a failed attempt to find WMD. Now,
because Iraq has been set on a new course, Bush has an opportunity to
reshape the region. "Nation building" is not an epithet or a slogan. After
the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is our duty.

Unfortunately, Bush has done an uneven job of selling his message,
particularly since he was relieved of the pressure of reelection. Nixon lost
his leadership leverage because of Watergate and thus lost ground in the
battle for public support. By contrast, I believe the American people would
still want to follow Bush if they had a clear understanding of what was at
stake. Recent polls showing a waning of support for the war are a sign to
the president that he needs to level with the American people. When troops
are dying, the commander-in-chief cannot be coy, vague, or secretive. We
learned that in Vietnam, too.

Bush is losing the public relationswar by making the same strategic mistakes
we made in Vietnam. General Abrams frequently spoke to me about his
frustration with the war that the U.S. media portrayed at home and how it
contrasted with the war he was seeing up close. His sense of defeat in his
own public relations war, with its 500-plus reporters based in Saigon, comes
through in the hundreds of meetings held in his office in Saigon -- meetings
that were taped for the record. (Transcripts of those tapes are ably
assembled and analyzed by Lewis Sorley in his recent book, Vietnam
Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972.)

In Vietnam, correspondents roamed the country almost at will, and their work
brought home to the United States the first televised war. Until that war,
families back home worried about the welfare of their soldiers but could not
see the danger. Had the mothers and fathers of U.S. soldiers serving in
World War II seen a real-time CNN report of D-day in the style of Saving
Private Ryan, they might not have thought Europe was worth saving. Operation
Desert Storm married 24-hour cable news and war for the first time. The
embedding of journalists with combat units in Iraq 12 years later was a
solid idea, but it has meant that casualties are captured on tape and then
replayed on newscasts thousands of times. The deaths of ten civilians in a
suicide bombing are replayed and analyzed and thus become the psychological
equivalent of 10,000 deaths. The danger to one U.S. soldier captured on tape
becomes a threat to everyone's son or father or daughter or mother.

I have made too many phone calls to grieving families to ever downplay the
loss of even one life. But I have also been in combat, and it looks
different from the inside, from the viewpoint of those who volunteered and
trained to fight for just causes. For a soldier, ducking a sniper's bullet
in downtown Baghdad is all in a day's work, no matter how alarming it looks
on television. The soldier will shrug it off and walk the same streets the
next day if he believes in his mission. The key for Bush is to communicate
that same sense of mission to the people back home. His west Texas cowboy
approach -- shoot first and answer questions later, or do the job first and
let the results speak for themselves -- is not working. With his propensity
to wrap up a package and present it as a fait accompli, Bush declared,
"Mission accomplished!" at the end of the major combat phase of the Iraq
war. That was a well-earned high-five for the military, but it soon became
obvious that the mission had only just begun.

The president must articulate a simple message and mission. Just as the
spread of communism was very real in the 1960s, so the spread of radical
fundamentalist Islam is very real today. It was a creeping fear until
September 11, 2001, when it showed itself capable of threatening us. Iraq
was a logical place to fight back, with its secular government and modern
infrastructure and a populace that was ready to overthrow its dictator. Our
troops are not fighting there only to preserve the right of Iraqis to vote.
They are fighting to preserve modern culture, Western democracy, the global
economy, and all else that is threatened by the spread of barbarism in the
name of religion. That is the message and the mission. It is not politically
correct, nor is it comforting. But it is the truth, and sometimes the truth
needs good marketing.

Condoleezza Rice is one person in the administration who understands and has
consistently and clearly stated this message. When she was national security
adviser, the media seemed determined to sideline her repeated theme, perhaps
because she was perceived as a mere water bearer for the president. As
secretary of state, she is in a better position to speak independently. The
administration should do its best to keep the microphone in her hands.

BUILDING A LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT

As was the case in Vietnam, the task in Iraq involves building a new society
from the ground up. Two Vietnam experts, Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew
Terrill, recently produced an exhaustive comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq
wars for the Army War College. They note that in both wars, the United
States sought to establish a legitimate indigenous government. In Iraq, the
goal is a democratic government, whereas in Vietnam the United States would
have settled for any regime that advanced our Cold War agenda.

Those who call the new Iraqi government Washington's "puppet" don't know
what a real puppet government is. The Iraqis are as eager to be on their own
as we are to have them succeed. In Vietnam, an American, Ambassador Philip
Habib, wrote the constitution in 1967. Elections were choreographed by the
United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than
dictators in the garb of statesmen.

Little wonder that the passionate nationalists in the North came off as the
group with something to offer. I do not personally believe the Saigon
government was fated to fall apart someday through lack of integrity, and
apparently the Soviet Union didn't think so either or it would not have
pursued the war. But it is true that the U.S. administrations at the time
severely underestimated the need for a legitimate government in South
Vietnam and instead assumed that a shadow government and military force
could win the day. In Iraq, a legitimate government, not window-dressing,
must be the primary goal. The factious process of writing the Iraqi
constitution has been painful to watch, and the varying factions must be
kept on track. But the process is healthy and, more important,homegrown.

In hindsight, we can look at the Vietnam War as a success story -- albeit a
costly one -- in nation building, even though the democracy we sought
halfheartedly to build failed. Three decades ago, Asia really was threatened
by the spread of communism. The Korean War was a fresh memory. In Malaysia,
Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even India, communist movements
were gaining a foothold. They failed in large part because the United States
drew a line at Vietnam that distracted and sucked resources away from its
Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. Similarly, the effect of our stand in
Iraq is already being felt around the Middle East Opposition parties are
demanding to be heard. Veiled women are insisting on a voice. Syrian troops
have left Lebanon. Egypt has held an election. Iran is being pressured by
the United States and Europe alike on its development of nuclear weapons.
The voices for change are building in Saudi Arabia. The movement even has a
name: Kifaya -- "Enough!" The parasites who have made themselves fat by
promoting ignorance, fear, and repression in the region are squirming. These
are baby steps, but that is where running begins.

INSURGENTS AS ENEMIES

Insurgents were and are the enemy in both wars, and insurgencies fail
without outside funding. In Vietnam, the insurgents were heavily funded and
well equipped by the Soviet Union. They followed a powerful and charismatic
leader, Ho Chi Minh, who nurtured their passionate nationalist goals. In
Iraq, the insurgency is fragmented, with no identifiable central leadership
and no unifying theology, strategy, or vision other than to get the United
States out of the region. If that goal were accomplished now, they would
turn on each other, as they already have done in numerous skirmishes.
Although they do rely on outside funding, their benefactors are fickle and
without deep pockets.

There is no way of counting the precise number of insurgents in the Iraq
war, but it appears to be in the thousands, which in comparative terms is
paltry. Communist forces in Vietnam numbered well over 1 million in 1973.
North Vietnam, over the course of the war, lost 1.1 million soldiers and 2
million civilians, and yet they were willing to fight on and we were not.
Why? Record and Terrill say the key to understanding any war in which a
weaker side prevails over a stronger one is the concept of the "asymmetry of
stakes." Victory meant everything to North Vietnam and nothing to the
average American. We had few economic interests in Vietnam. Our national
security interest -- preventing the domino scenario, in which the entire
world would fall under the sway of communism if we lost Southeast Asia --
didn't have enough currency to carry the day.

It is a very different story in Iraq, where the Bush administration hopes to
implant democracy side by side with Islam. The stakes could not be higher
for the continued existence of our own democracy and, yes, for the
significant matter of oil. We are not the only nation dependent on Persian
Gulf oil. We share that dependency with every industrialized nation on the
planet. Picture those oil reserves in the hands of religious extremists
whose idea of utopia is to knock the world economy and culture back more
than a millennium to the dawn of Islam.

Bush's belief that he can replace repression with democracy is not some
neoconservative fantasy. Our support of democracy dates from the founding of
our nation. Democracies are simply better for the planet. Witness the
courage of the Iraqi people who shocked the world and defied all the
pessimists by showing up to vote in January 2005, even with guns pointed at
their heads. The enemies of freedom in Iraq know what a powerful message
that was to the rest of the Arab world, otherwise they would not have
responded by escalating the violence.

Although Vietnam may have been a success story when it came to defeating an
insurgency, the domestic insurgency -- conducted by the Vietcong -- was
unfortunately only one front in the war, the larger front being the
conventional military forces of North Vietnam. The Vietcong were largely
suppressed by a combination of persuasion and force. A similar combination
of deadly force against the Iraqi insurgency's leaders and incentives to
co-opt their followers may work in Iraq, where the insurgency is the only
enemy.

Vietnam, however, should be a cautionary tale when fighting guerrilla style,
whether it be in the streets or in the jungle. Back then, frightened and
untrained U.S. troops were ill equipped to govern their baser instincts and
fears. Countless innocent civilians were killed in the indiscriminate hunt
for Vietcong among the South Vietnamese peasantry. Some of the worst
historical memories of the Vietnam War stem from those atrocities. Our
volunteer troops in Iraq are better trained and supervised, yet the
potential remains for a slaughter of innocents. Reports have already
surfaced of skittish American soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians in acts that
can only be attributed to poor training and discipline.

To stop abuses and mistakes by the rank and file, whether in the prisons or
on the streets, heads must roll at much higher levels than they have thus
far. I well remember the unexpected public support for Lieutenant William
Calley, accused in the massacre of civilians in the village of My Lai. The
massacre did not occur on my watch, but Calley's trial did, and Americans
flooded the White House with letters of protest when it appeared that Calley
would be the scapegoat while his superiors walked free. The best way to keep
foot soldiers honest is to make sure their commanders know that they
themselves will be held responsible for any breach of honor.

For me, the alleged prison scandals reported to have occurred in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay have been a disturbing reminder of the
mistreatment of our own POWs by North Vietnam. The conditions in our current
prison camps are nowhere near as horrific as they were at the "Hanoi
Hilton," but that is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. The minute we
begin to deport prisoners to other nations where they can legally be
tortured, when we hold people without charges or trial, when we move
prisoners around to avoid the prying inspections of the Red Cross, when
prisoners die inexplicably on our watch, we are on a slippery slope toward
the inhumanity that we deplore. In Vietnam, I made sure we always took the
high ground with regard to the treatment of enemy prisoners. I opened our
prison camps wide to international inspectors, so that we could demand the
same from Hanoi. In Iraq, there are no American POWs being held in camps by
the insurgents. There are only murder victims whose decapitated bodies are
left for us to find. But that does not give us license to be brutal in
return.

LIMITED WARFARE

Our commanders in Iraq have another advantage over those in Vietnam:
President Bush seems unlikely to be whipsawed by public opinion, but will
take the war to wherever the enemy rears its head. In Vietnam, we waged a
ground war in the South and did not permit our troops to cross into North
Vietnam. The air war over the North and in Laos and Cambodia was waged in
fits and starts, in secret and in the open, covered by lies and subterfuge,
manipulated more by opinion polls than by military exigencies. In the early
years, the services squabbled with one another. Even the State Department
was allowed to veto air strikes. President Johnson stayed up late calling
the plays while generals were sidelined.

In all, 2.8 million Americans served in and around Vietnam during the war,
yet less than ten percent of them were in-line infantry units, the men we
think of as our Vietnam veterans. Men were drafted and given a few weeks of
training before being attached to a unit of strangers. With few exceptions,
our all-volunteer military in Iraq is motivated, well trained, well
equipped, and in cohesive units. This is not to say that any of these troops
want to be there. They don't. Yet they are far more motivated to fight this
war than were the average conscripts in Vietnam.

They are also part of a much smarter military, thanks in large part to the
lessons of Vietnam. In 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense
Reorganization Act, with input from some veterans of my team at the
Pentagon, cleaned up many of the command problems that hindered us in
Vietnam and for a decade thereafter. The old system encouraged the Joint
Chiefs of Staff to be anything but joint. They protected their fiefdoms and
withheld cooperation from one another. The Goldwater-Nichols act centralized
authority in the chair of the Joint Chiefs as the primary adviser to the
president and the secretary of defense. The separate services are now
responsible for training their people for war, but the area commanders who
run the wars control all the assets. Today's soldiers, sailors, and air
personnel can also be more secure knowing that the people who make
life-or-death decisions represent a better balance between military
expertise and the will of the people as expressed through their elected
officials.

Such confidence is critical to sustaining an all-volunteer military. As the
secretary of defense who ended the draft in 1972, I see no need to return to
conscription, even now that the prospect of combat has somewhat dampened the
enthusiasm for military service. As long as servicepeople -- current and
future -- know where their president is leading them, the enlistments will
follow.

As it did in Vietnam, in Iraq the enemy has sought to weaken the United
States' will by dragging out the hostilities. In Vietnam, that strategy was
reflected in a bottomless well of men, sophisticated arms, and energy the
enemy threw into the fight. Similarly in Iraq, the insurgents have
pinpointed the weakness of the American public's will and hope to exploit it
on a much smaller scale, with the weapon of choice being the improvised
explosive device, strapped to one person, loaded into a car or hidden at a
curb, and with the resulting carnage then played over and over again on the
satellite feed. But one lesson learned from Vietnam that is not widely
recognized is that fear of casualties is not the prime motivator of the
American people during a war. American soldiers will step up to the plate,
and the American public will tolerate loss of life, if the conflict has
worthy, achievable goals that are clearly espoused by the administration and
if their leadership deals honestly with them.

Such was not the case in Vietnam. When President Nixon ordered the secret
bombing of Cambodia, I protested vigorously. I did not oppose the bombing
itself, as I believed the United States should fight the war as it needed to
be fought -- wherever the enemy was hiding -- or not fight it at all. What I
opposed was the deception. Behind closed doors, my opinion was so well known
that when the secret was exposed, as I knew it would be, I was immediately
and wrongly pinpointed as being the leak. The president approved Kissinger's
order to the FBI to tap my military assistant's home phone, hoping to catch
the two of us in a plot to leak secrets. Americans will not be lied to, and
they will not tolerate secrets nor be sidelined in a war debate. As with the
Vietnam War, if necessary they will take to the streets to be heard.

AT WHAT COST?

The greatest cost of war is human suffering. But every war has its monetary
price tag, too, even if it is rarely felt in real time. As with Vietnam, the
Iraq war is revealing chinks in our fiscal armor. Only after the Vietnam War
ended did its drain on the U.S. economy become apparent. During the war, our
military readiness to fight other conflicts was precarious. Billions of
dollars were drained away from other missions to support the war. It became
a juggling act to support our forces around the world. I reduced our
contingent in Korea by 29,000 men, and I persuaded Japan to begin paying the
bills for its post-World War II defense by our troops. In retrospect, those
two steps were positive results from the financial drain that the Vietnam
War caused. But there were plenty of other places where the belt-tightening
suffocated good programs. The Army Reserve and National Guard units fell
into disrepair. President Johnson chose to draft the unwilling, rather than
use trained reservists and National Guard soldiers and air personnel. As
unpopular as the draft was, it was still an easier sell for Johnson than
deploying whole National Guard and Reserve units out of the communities in
middle America. So the second-string troops stayed home and saw their
budgets cannibalized. Their training was third-rate and their equipment
secondhand. Now, in our post-Vietnam wisdom, we have embraced the "total
force" concept. After two decades of retooling, most National Guard units
and reservists were better prepared to respond when called up for Operation
Desert Storm.

Yet, because of pandering to the butter-not-guns crowd, we still do not
spend enough of our total budget on national defense. The annual U.S. GDP is
in excess of $11.5 trillion. The percentage of GDP going to the Defense
Department amounts to 3.74 percent. In 1953, during the Korean War, it was
14 percent. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, it was nearly 10 percent -- an
amount that sapped domestic programs and ended up demoralizing President
Johnson because he could not maintain his Great Society social programs. Now
our spending priorities have shifted to social programs, with 6.8 percent of
GDP, for example, going to Social Security and Medicare. That is more than
twice what it was during the Vietnam War.

It will not be easy or popular to reverse the downward trend in defense
spending. But the realities of the global threat of terrorism and the
outside possibility of conventional warfare with an enemy such as China or
North Korea demand that we take off the blinders. To increase defense
spending to 4 percent of GDP would be adequate, but it is especially
important to increase the share of the pie spent on the U.S. Army. It now
gets 24 percent of the total Defense Department budget, but given the new
realities of modern warfare, it should receive at least 28 percent. The army
is currently strung along through the budget year with special
appropriations, and that is no way to run a military service.

Reserve and National Guard units are understaffed and have been abused by
deployments that have taken individuals out of their units to serve as de
facto army regulars, many in specialties for which they have not been
trained, a practice that eats at the morale of reservists. Nearly 80 percent
of the airlift capacity for this war and about 48 percent of the troops have
come from Reserve and National Guard units. The high percentages are due, in
part, to the specialized missions of those troops: transporting cargo,
policing, rebuilding infrastructure, translating, conducting government
affairs -- in short, the stuff of building a new nation. We have realized
too late that our regular army forces have not been as well trained as they
should have been for the new reality of an urban insurgent enemy. Nor was
the military hierarchy paying serious attention to the hints that their
mission in the twenty-first century would be nation building.

Secretary Rumsfeld is trying to reshape the army to be more mobile with
fewer soldiers, in "units of action" built on the Special Forces model. But
he is not being honest with himself or with Congress and the American people
about how much money will be needed to make the transformation. Those
specialized units will be more suited for urban guerrilla warfare, but light
and lean is not the only way to maintain our military. Although guerrilla
warfare looks like the wave of the future, we still face the specter of
conventional divisional and corps warfare against other enemies. Both
capabilities are expensive, but the downward trend of defense budgets does
not recognize that. Except for bumps up in the Ronald Reagan years and
during the Gulf War, the defense budget has been on a downward slide when
viewed in constant dollars. We are coasting on the investments in research,
development, and equipment made during earlier years.

SHORING UP OUR ALLIES

Our pattern of fighting our battles alone or with a marginal "coalition of
the willing" contributes to the downward spiral in resources and money.
Ironically, Nixon had the answer back in 1969. At the heart of the Nixon
Doctrine, announced that first year of his presidency, was the belief that
the United States could not go it alone. As he said in his foreign policy
report to Congress on February 18, 1970, the United States will participate
in the defense and development of allies and friends, but "America cannot --
and will not -- conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all
the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the
world. We will help where it makes a real difference and is considered in
our interest" (emphasis in the original).

Three decades later, we have fallen into a pattern of neglecting our treaty
alliances, such as NATO, and endangering the aid we can give our allies by
throwing our resources into fights that our allies refuse to join. Vietnam
was just such a fight, and Iraq is, too. If our treaty alliances were
adequately tended to and shored up -- and here I include the UN -- we would
not have so much trouble persuading others to join us when our cause is
just. Still, as the only superpower, there will be times when we must go it
alone.

President Bush does not have the luxury of waiting for the international
community to validate his policies in Iraq. But we do have the lessons of
Vietnam. In Vietnam, the voices of the "cut-and-run" crowd ultimately
prevailed, and our allies were betrayed after all of our work to set them on
their feet. Those same voices would now have us cut and run from Iraq,
assuring the failure of the fledgling democracy there and damning the rest
of the Islamic world to chaos fomented by extremists. Those who look only at
the rosy side of what defeat did to help South Vietnam get to where it is
today see a growing economy there and a warming of relations with the West.
They forget the immediate costs of the United States' betrayal. Two million
refugees were driven out of the country, 65,000 more were executed, and
250,000 were sent to "reeducation camps." Given the nature of the insurgents
in Iraq and the catastrophic goals of militant Islam, we can expect no
better there.

As one who orchestrated the end of our military role in Vietnam and then saw
what had been a workable plan fall apart, I agree that we cannot allow
"another Vietnam." For if we fail now, a new standard will have been set.
The lessons of Vietnam will be forgotten, and our next global mission will
be saddled with the fear of its becoming "another Iraq."


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