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Vietnam, Iraq and the election campaign

More on the book tomorrow ... I'm sure you're all waiting for that!

Trying to keep track of all the details about the Swift Boat Veterans ads and whether John Kerry was in Cambodia during the day on Christmas Eve, or spent the night there (not mutually exclusive possibilities) could boggle larger minds than mine, so I've resisted any posts on the matter 'til now.

Historians don't usually have much to say in these matters, but here's my two cents worth. If the written documents from the time contradict what people are saying now, you should probably believe the written documents.

Unfortunately source criticism, to say nothing of a little innate skepticism about the motives, memory and logic of anyone peddling a political story, does not seem to have stuck in the minds of many journalists.

Some people, trying to be reasonable about the matter have said that by campaigning on his service record Kerry opened himself up to the Swift Boat Veterans attacks. Hmmm ... So, if you make a true statement this means that you've opened yourself up to the lies that other people charge at you.

Is Vietnam relevant in this election campaign? Yes, in two senses. First is the very personal issue of what Bush and Kerry did at the time. Vietnam was the crucial foreign policy issue of the late 1960s for the United States, and the country committed -- at the peak -- half a million troops to the war. Given that these troops were mostly young men, what young men of military service age did in response to the nation's call to arms speaks critically to their seriousness about the issue.

Bush, by his own admission, supported the war, but wasn't prepared to risk his life for what he believed in. Not that he'd let those last two clauses get too close to each other lest a voter reflect too long on them. This would all be OK, men can grow a lot in four decades, and learn a lot about foreign affairs and other countries. The trouble is that Bush apparently didn't do this. Until September 11th 2001--and maybe not even then--Bush didn't take the trouble to learn about the world, think seriously about America's place in it, and how other countries might perceive American actions.

On the other side of the aisle, why does Kerry make so much of his experience in Vietnam, and how does it relate to his subsequent career in politics, and his potential handling of foreign affairs if he was to be elected.

It's abundantly clear that Kerry came back with a skepticism about the way American power could be used to change the minds of foreign people, and skeptical that even when America claimed to be acting with right principles in mind (democracy and human rights) that it could achieve what it set out to do. Not for lack of the right intentions, but because the groups we allied with in foreign countries were not as good as they seemed, and that the best of intentions from young American soldiers cannot settle domestic political disputes in another country. It's not too hard to imagine how Kerry, having seen America's failed intervention in Vietnam's civil war, would end up making his name as a young Senator exposing the abuses that went on as America intervened in central American civil wars.

The second sense in which Vietnam is relevant to today's campaign when our strategy in Iraq is central to the debate, is that Vietnam was the last time tried to fundamentally alter the political culture and institutions of a large, foreign country.

Needless to say it didn't end well all around. First off, there's the tragedy of ignoring the clear signs that Ho Chi Minh (an ally during WWII) was more interested in an independent Vietnam than a communist one; but even after that the U.S. had plenty of opportunities to let the Vietnamese resolve their own dispute, particularly when the South Vietnamese government was clearly not a good partner for advancing democracy. But the South Vietnamese regime played the U.S. well, and got a good deal out of the U.S. taxpayer who merrily paid most of the bills for the ensuing disaster. Read A Bright Shining Lie sometime, and you'll see how America's involvement ended as tragedy, that the people we were trying to help got caught in some nasty crossfire, both literal and otherwise. Go there today, and wonder at the senseless human tragedy that was involved in fighting a war for three decades, and wonder how much wealthier the people there would be without that war.

Let's be clear: Iraq is not Vietnam. But again, the U.S. has been played well by domestic political players (Chalabi and co.) not to mention the possibility that Iran (!) might have been providing some of the disinformation that got us in there in the first place.

And again, there is the conflict between tactical and strategic objectives. On a tactical level the U.S. armed forces can clearly beat the Mahdi army, but the strategic cost of engaging them fully would be huge.

Iraq is unlike Vietnam, however, in one really crucial way. In Vietnam, because we joined up with an existing civil war, we could always withdraw under the convenient pretext that we had done our job, and were leaving it up to the South Vietnamese.

In Iraq we have no such easy out. There was no civil war, there was a state of long-repressed political divisions, and a sizeable group of exiles without a good feeling for what the domestic population really thought.

Where to from here then? If there was an answer that could be put on a piece of letter paper (a bumper sticker would be a little too simple for a problem this size) we probably would have heard it by now. We clearly can't just pull out and bring the troops home, since they are performing some useful role in making sure that a large scale civil war does not break out if we left.

The rather empty lesson of Vietnam is that war is a rather unpredictable and costly way of conducting foreign policy; but once you've launched it you are committed for quite some time.

Consider where we were in March 2003. It was becoming increasingly clear that Hussein had no active nuclear program, and that his ability to deliver any weaponized biological and chemical devices was limited to say the least (For all the fuss about the rockets that he had exceeding their permitted range, it was that they were able to go 100 miles, rather than 90 that was the breach of the sanctions). Yet, with inspectors roaming round the desert Hussein was clearly not in a position to attack anybody. It's clearer now, but it was clear at the time too, that the regime was brittle, and pressure short of a full-out invasion and war could have brought the regime down at far less cost.

For all the billions we have spent in not making Iraq particularly democratic or secure, we could have spent that money actively supporting the democratization process in other middle eastern countries that we have more leverage over. What good are allies if they don't do what you suggest they do every now and then?

We're not going to get anywhere quickly in Iraq expecting that things will go well; if the lesson of Vietnam for John Kerry was that we don't fully understand the domestic politics of other countries (especially where they speak foreign languages etc ...), that domestic groups in those countries will inevitably try to corrupt even the best-intentioned American missions to gain political power, and that hundreds of thousands of young men in their twenties are fallible instruments for promoting democracy, then those reduced expectations are for the best.

Eighteen months into the American involvement in Iraq is far too soon to claim it has been a success or failure either way. We'll surely be debating Iraq strategy in 2008 at some level. Having low expectations about the prospects for success is not just a Midwestern way of then being satisfied with a not-bad outcome, it's a prerequisite for taking all that could possibly go wrong into account and doing the best to avoid them, and ensuring some happier outcome.

Posted by robe0419 at August 25, 2004 04:17 PM | TrackBack