History's Rhyme

For the past two years, some defenders of the war in Iraq have ridiculed any comparisons to Vietnam. Their "argument" is usually a derisive cackle along the lines of "if you're going to compare this to Vietnam, then it's not even worth discussing!" I've found that those who take refuge in this sort of tactic---particularly some of the popular "we decide, you listen" conservative blogs---often fear losing the war of facts and ideas, so they prefer not to enter the fray in the first place.

History never repeats exactly; if it did, we'd be smart enough to avoid the types of mistakes that get millions of people killed. As Mark Twain noted, "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it sometimes rhymes." Let's examine some of those rhymes, shall we?

The following are fifteen similarities between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. If someone---perhaps a supporter of this war---can come up with fifteen ways in which the two conflicts differ materially, I look forward to reading your list in the comments section:

1. The justification for massive military escalation in Vietnam was based largely on a false pretense: the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, during which the North Vietnamese allegedly attacked the USS Maddox. A year after Tonkin, President Johnson joked about the incident saying, "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." Similarly, at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner, George Bush presented a slide show in which he jokingly looked under pieces of White House furniture for the WMD's that were never found in Iraq.

2. The Vietnam War was conceived by a supposedly elite group of thinkers and geopolitical strategists known as "the best and the brightest"---successful academic and corporate leaders who took over the most important senior posts in Washington. Another group of close-knit, supposedly elite ideologues known as "neocons" were instrumental in the planning and execution of the war in Iraq.

3. The ideological justification for the Vietnam War was "the domino theory." This postulated that if all of Vietnam went Communist, the rest of Southeast Asia and beyond would fall like dominos. After the war, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford said, "What we thought was the spread of Communist aggression in my opinion now seems very clearly to have been a civil war in Vietnam. The domino theory proved to be erroneous. The United States made an honest mistake." When it became clear that Tonkin was a fabrication and in 1970 Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that had provided authorization for the war, Nixon began using new justifications that prolonged the war for years, including his "power as Commander-in-Chief" and the need for "peace with honor." Similarly, having found no WMD's in Iraq because of an "honest intelligence mistake", the Bush administration came up with new justifications such as the importance of a "free Iraq" to the spread of democracy in the Middle East and beyond.

4. For the first five years of our military involvement in Vietnam, the war was popular with a passive, complacent, post-1950's materialistic American public. Although the public is starting to question our involvement in Iraq as revealed by recent polls, until now complacency has characterized a post-1990's culture infatuated with Paris Hilton, Donald Trump and the value of real estate.

5. There was no "front line" in Vietnam. The enemy attacked anywhere at any time, from the capital to hundreds of miles away in the jungle. There is no front line in Iraq; some troops fight insurgents in the middle of Baghdad while others fight in places like Tikrit, Fallujah, and on the border with Syria.

6. In Vietnam, the enemy's firepower was utterly inferior to ours. While we flew high above the jungle canopy and dropped napalm from modern jets, the war was won and lost in unconventional ground battles. Some of the most effective weapons were booby-traps, which caused the death and permanent injury of thousands of U.S. troops. In Iraq, the most effective insurgent weapon is the low-tech roadside IED, effective both militarily and psychologically and also the cause of crippling permanent injuries similar to those in Vietnam.

7. Year after year, our political leaders cited "Vietnamization" as an open-ended goal. As the deaths started to mount, the American public was repeatedly assured that when South Vietnamese troops had been trained in sufficient numbers and were ready to fight on their own, our troops would come home. Similarly, we're assured that just as soon as those Iraqi troops are able to "fight for their own freedom" our own troops will begin to withdraw. Of course, the "ization" goal---training indigenous forces to fight on their own---is perfect as an open-ended rationale since it is difficult to quantify or evaluate.

8. When Vietnam started going badly, desperation led to expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos. Frustration is also leading some to call for military action in Iran and Syria.

9. To cushion reports of American deaths with the public and to create the impression of progress in Vietnam, the military began to include estimates of enemy deaths, know as the "body count." A few months ago, our military began to aggressively report the enemy body count after each operation in Iraq.

10. The public in South Vietnam, while not overtly sympathetic to the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong, nevertheless did not actively oppose them. In Iraq, the public has tentatively supported us in some areas, and actively sheltered and supported the insurgency in others.

11. During periods of relative calm in Vietnam, our political and military leaders would proclaim that we were "winning" and that the Vietcong were ready to turn in their weapons and become good citizens. In Iraq, we see the same periodic but short-lived victory laps after events like the handover of sovereignty and the elections---until the next group of car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, or roadside IED's.

12. As the casualties increased year after year in Vietnam, defenders of the war protested that pulling out would "dishonor the sacrifice" of those troops who had already died. We're now beginning to hear that withdrawing from Iraq too early would mean those who have died would have done so in vain. Both wars have given rise to a perverse logic by which death is only valid and honorable if it's followed by more death.

13. Up to the moment in April 1975 when the last evacuation helicopter dusted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, that war's shameless pollyannas were still insisting the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were on the verge of defeat and did not represent the will of the "peace-loving" Vietnamese people. In Iraq, we continue to hear repeatedly that we are fighting nothing more than "dead-enders" as per Rumsfeld, and that the insurgency is "in the last throes" as Vice President Cheney claimed only one week ago.

14. During Vietnam, our press became the enemy. That war's apologists argue to this day that if only the press had not been so negative we would have won. They still regard Walter Cronkite as an American Ho Chi Minh for daring to suggest after a visit to Vietnam in 1968 that the war was a "stalemate." Today, for daring to report outrages like the prisoner abuse scandal and for making mistakes that turn out to have been not too far from the truth, the press is as much of a target of our leaders' vitriol as are the insurgents.

15. The tragedy of any war is the toll it takes on innocent civilians. Two remarkably similar pictures capture this perfectly: this one from Vietnam, and this one from Iraq. Apologists for these sorts of tragedies are fond of repeating the mantra that "these things happen during war." Indeed they do. And precisely because they do, war should always be a last resort---because when it's not, the inevitable outrages and tragedies cause the aggressor to lose the moral high ground. We didn't hear much about human rights violations American troops may have committed in Japan or Germany during World War II, did we? All wars are not the same; when in doubt, see Pyrrhus. Or Abu Ghraib.

Are there important differences between Vietnam and Iraq? You bet. And for those who might want to put together that list, I'll start you off with a few. In Saigon, American troops and civilians could almost always go anywhere in the city at any time and feel relatively safe. In Baghdad, we're confined to a fortified encampment in the center of the city, and even that is not immune from attack. And it took five years and a far higher number of casualties for the American public to even begin to sour on the Vietnam War the way it is starting to on Iraq after just two years. Yes, there are indeed some important differences between the two wars.

History is rhyming, but only for those willing to hear it.