"No More Vietnams" can mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again.
The war in Iraq may be ending in much the same way the war in Vietnam appeared to be ending in 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. We had finally won in Vietnam, but then lost the peace two years later. The outcome of the 2008 presidential election could determine whether Iraq becomes "another Vietnam" should there be a significant renewal of insurgent activity.
The Left would have us believe we are stuck in Iraq in an endless and unwinnable quagmire like they said we had in Vietnam. That comparison, however, does not hold up. While much about the two wars is similar, a key difference is Lyndon Johnson's muddled strategy in Vietnam compared with George W. Bush's winning strategy in Iraq.
In 1965, Johnson should have decided to win the war quickly, or to pull U.S. forces out and go home. Instead, he chose a middle road that resulted in a series of "measured responses" and troop escalations that led to a debacle. One measured response Johnson employed was restrictive rules of engagement. Barry Goldwater identified a few in his autobiography:
American pilots were not permitted to attack North Vietnamese MIGs sitting on the runway. It could only be attacked when it was flying and showed "hostile intent." . . . SAM missile sites and supporting radar could not be struck while under construction, only after they became operational and actually fired at U.S. aircraft.
And on and on they went. Not surprisingly, North Vietnamese aggressiveness increased in direct proportion to our restraint, resulting in many needless U.S. casualties. It is an ironic fact that the threat of swift and effective military action is one of the best ways to insure peace. A quick and decisive war, moreover, will result in far fewer casualties for both sides than one that drags on for years.
If Johnson was serious about winning, he should have made that clear early on. Goldwater believed LBJ should have publicly stated what he intended to do if the North Vietnamese continued to wage war against the South. That probably would have meant the threat of destroying their factories, ports, dikes, and infrastructure. Such an attack would have to have been launched when we were still a credible adversary, and not years later when our resolve was clearly fading.
When any president goes to war, he has a limited amount of time to win it before the people grow weary and want out. By March 1968, that time had come for LBJ.
Contrary to the media's portrayal of an endless unwinnable war in Vietnam, however, we virtually annihilated the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive. In a matter of weeks, Ho Chí Minh effectively lost the "people's war" by solidifying the South against him. That year, it also became apparent that a negotiated settlement was perhaps the best outcome we could hope for in Vietnam. To reach that end, however, several difficult years of building up South Vietnamese forces would lay ahead. Richard Nixon's Vietnamization policy was designed to achieve just that, and proved to be successful.
Only after determined South Vietnamese resistance against the 1972 offensive, and twelve consecutive days of devastating B-52 air strikes on North Vietnam, did Hanoi move toward a genuine peace agreement. As part of the deal, we agreed to be the enforcer of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. But when North Vietnamese violations occurred, anti-war liberals in Congress prevented us from fulfilling our commitments to the treaty.
Congress cut funding and slowly starved South Vietnam of the supplies it needed to defend itself. The Soviets, meanwhile, continued to pump arms into the North. Public apathy, a scandalized president and a liberal Congress gave up all for which we had struggled. The U.S. effectively abandoned Southeast Asia, and the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge moved in — with horrific results. And in doing so, we betrayed our trusted allies and our own good name.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, our cause was just. A valid debate continues on whether we should have fought either one of them. But it must be acknowledged that once we are committed to war the only acceptable way out is victory. Bush may have been unprepared for the insurgency that followed our initial success, but we always knew he would ultimately do whatever was necessary it win. For more than five years he has been able to maintain Congressional funding and public support and to achieve success.
Unlike Johnson in Vietnam, George W. Bush clearly warned Saddam Hussein of the consequences of not abiding by UN resolutions. Saddam ignored them, and was crushed within days of the start of the war. Our early aggressiveness in the war was a principal reason casualties in Iraq were so much lower than they were in Vietnam.
The effectiveness of Iraqi soldiers and police was agonizingly low in the early days, but eventually improved. The "Anbar Awakening" and the counterinsurgency surge strategy were major turning points in the war. Today, Iraqis are taking over security of their country.
The media's cries of "another Vietnam" started even before Baghdad fell, and increased as the insurgency took hold. Their "objective reporting" served mostly to encourage the terrorists in Iraq and to discourage the American people. Their misrepresentations ended only when the success of the surge became unmistakable to even a causal observer.
We would have lost Iraq by now if not for Bush's stubborn insistence that losing was not an option. When the media and most of the political establishment were united against him, he found a way to win.
A decade after his presidency, Nixon wrote:
"No More Vietnams" can mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again.
To avoid future Vietnams, we must swiftly win on the battlefield and then maintain the peace afterward. Keeping the peace especially applies now to Iraq and the 2008 elections. One of the first decisions the new president will make is to determine under what circumstances we will withdraw for Iraq. Any perception that jihadist forces drove the U.S. out of Iraq in defeat will have a huge destabilizing effect in Iraq and in the region.
Should insurgent activity return to Iraq in a major way, we can be reasonably assured that John McCain will do what is necessary to overcome it. With McCain, we can be confident the U.S. will leave Iraq honorably.
On the other hand, Barack Obama's many contrary and incoherent statements about Iraq reassure no one about our ultimate success there, and essentially invite our enemies to return. His failure to even admit the surge has worked raises doubts about his fitness to be president. With Obama, we can only wonder how long a recurrence of insurgency would continue before he would abandon the Iraqis and condemn them to "another Vietnam."
jlukens@thenma.org
http://www.jefflukens.com
Read more articles by Jeff Lukens
You rightfuly mention the Soviets. I submit that the USA won the Viet Nam war on December 25, 1991 when the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin. If our victory over Islamic radical terrorists ends this way, so be it. If we truly lose this fight, woe be it to the women, gays, and John Edwards types.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | August 14, 2008
To pretend that we ever won anything in Vietnam other than body counts is revisionist history. We should have learned the lesson that the French ultimately learned at Dien Bien Phu: a foreign power has no business attempting to impose a form of government on another sovereign nation. People have the right to self-rule, even if the form of government they choose doesn't look the way we would like to see it.
If we had truly learned from the Vietnam experience, we would never have entered Iraq in the first place, something that Bush the Senior was smart enough not to do in 1991.
Comment by Dr Kilovolt | August 14, 2008
If it is revisionist to say that the Viet Nam war was between the democratic/republican system of the USA and the communist system of the USSR and China, then I am guilty. The question is: revision of what? I would say that it is a revision of the leftist view, which pretends to be pacifist when it meets their needs. I won’t bother to list the body count for the left.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | August 14, 2008
When the Tet offensive was over Westmoreland wanted to invade North Vietnam and LBJ stopped him. Mr. Luken is correct the Viet Cong was destroyed by the American military. They were never a factor militarily again in the war.
How badly were the North Vietnamese defeated during Tet. The architect of it General Giap offered his resignation to the politburo in Hanoi. The politburo also gave orders to review the exit plans for an escape to China.
This was all in Giap's diary. He had opposed the Tet Offensive initially preferring to maintain the guerilla operations because the number of people in the US that wanted out of Vietnam had increased from 25% on January 1, 1967, to 45% on November 30, 1967. He said that any full scale offensive could and probably would lead to a military disaster. He wrote letters of his worries on this matter to at least two other Generals in the North Vietnamese Army.
By June of 1968 the Vietcong were destroyed as well as the North Vietnamese supply lines, and one division of their finest infantry.
The road to Hanoi was open and LBJ said no. The main reason came from McNamara who countered Westmoreland's entreaties by reminding LBJ that in November of 1967 speaking in front of the National Press Club Westmoreland had stated that the Vietcong and North Vietnam could not launch a major offensive in South Vietnam. Westmoreland was known for his major foot in mouth disease.
LBJ should have fired Westmoreland as Bush did with his Generals when he brought in General Petraeus. However, President Bush gave one simple and standing order to Petraeus, "Win". LBJ threw up his hands and capitulated to North Vietnam's demands.
We had them beat we just had to administer a "coup de grace."
Comment by jfking | August 14, 2008
ONe of the outcomes of our victory in Vietnam was the cessateion of communist insurgencies throughout SE Asia by the NVA and Red China. Countries of the Phillipines, Singapore, Malasya, Thailand, and Indonesia are free countries today due to our pinning the NVA in their homeland. All these insurgencies died out after our win in Vietnam. This is now apparent 30 years after the war's end.
A consequence of our retreat from SVN was that the world became more unsafe. Russia invaded Afghanistan, thereby leading to the breakup of the russo empire. Which was a good event. Islam (warlike political movement that it is) showed its true face to the world. Civil wars broke out in most African countries, and the Irish civil war went into full gear.
Now we have to deal with environmentalists, who are mostly communists who have resorted to peaceful means to defeat the west, because they couldn't do this by military means. They want to silence their critics with jail terms. Sounds like a communist system of government to me.
George W. Bush has kept us safe. Hang the cost, defeat would have been far more costly.
Comment by joeallen | August 19, 2008
joeallen
Well, two (of us) out of 300 million ain't bad. I thought I was the only one. Can we add the Bejing Olympics to the list? Things like that would have been unthinkable in the 60's. Now if we can establish and keep a base in Iraq, we will see peace in the middleeast. Can anybody say Ramstein, Zweibrücken, or Spangdahelm? John McCain says 100 years in Iraq. It's been 63 years for Germany.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | August 19, 2008