- It took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam.
It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq.
-
- The US armed forces launched their first air raid against
post-war Iraq last week, when F-16 fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs
on Tikrit. The new campaign against Iraq's resistance fighters, dubbed
Operation Ivy Cyclone, recalls President Lyndon Johnson's Operation Rolling
Thunder over Vietnam in 1965. That campaign of bombing Vietnam would eventually
see Indochina devastated by 7 million tons of aerial explosives.
-
- These are early days in Iraq, where the conflict between
a growing percentage of the native population and the occupying forces
is escalating far more rapidly than it did in Vietnam. It took two years,
from 1963 to the end of 1964, for American combat deaths to reach 324.
The US has surpassed that figure in only seven months in Iraq, where 398
American soldiers have died already. In the last 12 days, 38 have been
killed. As for the Iraqi dead, the US does not count them with similar
precision. Vietnam offers examples to the US, but it is learning the wrong
lessons.
-
- Parallels with Vietnam are asserting themselves again
and again in Iraq. They start with the justification for committing American
troops to battle. In both cases, politicians lied to persuade Congress
and the public to go along. In 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson officially
upgraded the US military role from advisory to combat, the secretaries
of state and defence accused North Vietnam of attacking the USS Maddox.
-
- Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in a bravura performance
emulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN last February, announced:
"While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer
Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." The only phrase corresponding
to reality was that the Maddox was a destroyer. Otherwise, the routine
patrol was in fact an attack on North Vietnam's shore installations. The
international waters were really North Vietnam's. And the unprovoked attack
was not only provoked, it did not take place at all.
-
- The Johnson administration's deception, like George Bush's
over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, worked. Johnson won passage
of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing him to take "all necessary
measures". Bush passed his war resolution after telling Congress that
Saddam was threatening the US. The Bush administration's dance around facts
to achieve the invasion of Iraq made Johnson's chicanery look amateur.
-
- Tonkin was shown to be a lie when Daniel Ellsberg leaked
the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The lies over Iraq were exposed almost as
soon as the US erected barriers in Baghdad to protect itself from the people
it had liberated. No one found the nuclear programme, the Niger uranium
or the elusive connection to al-Qa'ida. From the beginning in Iraq, as
in Vietnam, the credibility gap lay wide open.
-
- At a recent dinner in Washington, US Marine officers
told me of their opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Two reasons they
gave were: occupation cannot work; and young Marines risking their lives
know that the sons of the war's architects, like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz, will not face combat or risk death in Iraq. These officers were
born about the time US troops left Vietnam. Their voices echo those of
generals Matthew Ridgway and Douglas MacArthur, who warned Kennedy that
the US could not win a land war in Asia. Many commanders were outspoken
critics of the Vietnam war. The most consistent was the Commandant of the
Marine Corps, General David M Shoup.
-
- In 1966, Shoup, who had already warned both Kennedy and
Johnson that the military had no business in Vietnam, told the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that most of the South Vietnamese people were fighting
against "those crooks in Saigon", leaders whom the US had imposed
upon them. In one of his many speeches throughout the country, Shoup said,
"If we had and would keep our dollar-crooked fingers out of the business
of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive
at a solution of their own. [A solution] that they design and want. That
they fight and work for. [Not one] crammed down their throats by Americans."
-
- Robert Buzzanco, in Masters of War: Military Dissent
and Politics in the Vietnam Era, observed that the reward for Shoup's candour
was to be placed, alongside other military and civilian opponents of the
war, under FBI surveillance.
-
- Robert Buzzanco wrote that, while the American officer
corps was sceptical, "they nonetheless ignored their own bleak analysis
with the full complicity of the civilian policy-making establishment."
Many officers saw what happened to Shoup and protected their careers. Most
of all, they did not want the military to take the blame for a war directed
by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Avoiding blame for disaster was preferable
to telling presidents what they did not want to hear.
-
- As in Iraq, getting into Vietnam was easier than getting
out. The US attempted to impose a viable South Vietnamese government and
army capable of defeating the popular resistance of the National Liberation
Front. It never succeeded. The Bush administration tried a similar manoeuvre
with its appointment last July of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council
(IGC). Now Paul Bremer, head of the occupyin g administration, has been
recalled amid reports that they are seeking alternatives to the IGC.
-
- In South Vietnam, a state the US more or less created
after the Geneva Accords of 1954, Washington installed Ngo Dinh Diem as
leader. When it became dissatisfied with Diem's inability to control the
insurgency against his rule, Kennedy allowed some of South Vietnam's generals
to assassinate him and take over. The US presided over one military coup
after another in the elusive search for a government acceptable to South
Vietnam's people.
-
- When American soldiers died in Vietnam, the US reacted
with various programmes to protect them: saturation bombing, camps called
strategic hamlets in which it confined hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese
peasants, and the Phoenix Programme, under which the CIA and Special Forces
assassinated 30,000 suspected Viet Cong cadres. The CIA chief William Colby
called Phoenix the only successful operation of the war. How far is the
US willing to go to preserve the notion that it can impose a government
acceptable to both itself and the Iraqi people? Will it employ the old
techniques, the only ones in its counter-insurgency arsenal, as it suffers
more casualties? Old words come howling out of the past: body count, kill
ratio, search and destroy, destroying the village to save it and the light
at the end of the tunnel.
-
- America lost 58,000 dead in Vietnam. It killed two million
Vietnamese. It was warned against that war, as it was warned against this
one - and often by the military men who did not want their soldiers to
risk their lives except in defence of their own country.
-
- The last exit strategy in Vietnam was Vietnamisation,
training South Vietnamese soldiers to fight South Vietnamese guerrillas.
Now the word is Iraqisation and amounts to the same thing. In Vietnam,
the US created a state apparatus that was corrupt and a local army that
did not want to fight. Both collapsed when America pulled out. In Iraq,
the Bush administration promises a different outcome - despite pursuing
the same goals with the same methods.
-
- The author was ABC News Chief Mideast correspondent,
1983-1993
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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