Iraq as Vietnam -- Done Right
In the new issue of Foreign Affairs, Melvin Laird, Nixon's first-term Secretary of Defense, writes, "It is time for a reasonable look at both Vietnam and Iraq -- and at what the former can teach us about the latter."
It's a fascinating, frank piece. And though the writer certainly has an interest in promoting the course he helped steer as the best one, he makes a case that Vietnam can -- and should -- be a model for America's venture in Iraq, because the four-year withdrawal of half a million American troops from Southeast Asia was, "in retrospect, ... the textbook description of how the U.S. military should decamp." The mistake, according to Laird (and others) was made after.
This view of the end of the Vietnam War, I suspect is by no means predominant among American thinkers, but it has been emerging for some time, bolstered by academic historians like Paul Johnson. "Others who were not there may differ with this description," Laird writes.
It's a fascinating, frank piece. And though the writer certainly has an interest in promoting the course he helped steer as the best one, he makes a case that Vietnam can -- and should -- be a model for America's venture in Iraq, because the four-year withdrawal of half a million American troops from Southeast Asia was, "in retrospect, ... the textbook description of how the U.S. military should decamp." The mistake, according to Laird (and others) was made after.
[W]e withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.
This view of the end of the Vietnam War, I suspect is by no means predominant among American thinkers, but it has been emerging for some time, bolstered by academic historians like Paul Johnson. "Others who were not there may differ with this description," Laird writes.
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."
