Home > The Vietnam Analogy
Iraq isn’t Vietnam. The most important difference is
the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the
carnage in Indochina. But there are also real
parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.
It’s true that the current American force in Iraq is
much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the
U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular,
is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by
the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq
is a Vietnam-size conflict.
And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if
anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted
mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian
life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists
of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never
expected to be called up for extended missions
overseas. The training of these volunteers, their
morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer
severely if they are called upon to spend years
fighting a guerrilla war.
Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army.
But President Bush hasn’t called for larger forces. In
fact, he seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have.
A fiscal comparison of George Bush’s and Lyndon
Johnson’s policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a
golden age of personal responsibility. At first,
Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the
war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and
cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a
surplus the next year. A comparable program today - the
budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to
a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year - would
eliminate most of our budget deficit.
By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying
the course, hasn’t been willing to strike anything off
his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the
initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through
yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us
about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he’s still
at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said
nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that
everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing
operations.
This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern.
Vietnam shook the nation’s confidence not just because
we lost, but because our leaders didn’t tell us the
truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of
"Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and
asked his audience of military officers, "Is it
happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are
proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent
W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet
"welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the
tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet
the new Iraqi Army.
Some say that Iraq isn’t Vietnam because we’ve come to
bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But
idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials
never said, "We’re supporting a corrupt regime." They
said they were defending democracy. The rest of the
world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in
America’s idealistic intentions if and when they see a
legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government - as opposed
to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in
charge.
If we aren’t promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we
doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war
have already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they
no longer have high hopes for what we may accomplish,
but they fear the consequences if we leave. The irony
is painful. One of the real motives for the invasion of
Iraq was to give the world a demonstration of American
power. It’s a measure of how badly things have gone
that now we’re told we can’t leave because that would
be a demonstration of American weakness.
Again, the parallel with Vietnam is obvious. Remember
the domino theory?
And there’s one more parallel: Nixonian politics is
back.
What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious
were Nixon’s efforts to suppress dissent, like the
"Tell It to Hanoi" rallies, where critics of the
Vietnam War were accused of undermining the soldiers
and encouraging the enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a
meta-Nixon: he declared that anyone who draws analogies
between Iraq and Vietnam undermines the soldiers and
encourages the enemy.