Ben Macintyre: Obama must face down the ghost of Vietnam
[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular Friday column.]
An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up.
Comparisons between these two conflicts are easy to make, but hard to avoid: a grinding, unpredictable battle in difficult terrain, a weak and corrupted foreign government kept afloat by American guns and money; a versatile enemy, adept at ambush warfare, with sanctuary in a neighbouring country.
American public opinion on Afghanistan is shifting in a way reminiscent of the tide of feeling that brought the Vietnam War to its humiliating close. The death toll is ramping up, with 55 US servicemen killed this month — the war is suddenly being brought home to America, in bodybags.
The first senior official has resigned in protest over a war that may be unwinnable. “I fail to see the value in the continued US casualties or expenditures . . . in what is, truly, a civil war,” declared Matthew Hoh, the decorated former Marine who resigned from the US Foreign Service this week. He might have been speaking in 1969.
The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma of Vietnam is seared on the national memory like no other event in US history.
The debate is suffused with the language of the Vietnam War: “hawks”, “doves” and fear of the “quagmire”. Mr Obama is of the post-Vietnam generation, yet he, too, is haunted by it. Last month he declared: “You never step into the same river twice, and so, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues that I think about all the time.”
Those words perfectly capture the anxiety that is fraying nerves in the White House, a determination to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam, but an inability to see the conflict though any other prism. After the Gulf War, the first President Bush declared triumphantly, and quite wrongly, that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all”.
The hawks are quick to point out that the Vietnam analogy is routinely trotted out whenever America goes to war. Over the past 25 years it has been invoked in response to US military action in Lebanon, El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Iraq (twice).
In terms of scale, Afghanistan is still a far cry from Vietnam, which involved more than half a million US troops and claimed 58,000 American lives. Fewer than 1,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan in eight years. In the earlier conflict, America was facing not only the Vietcong, but the highly trained North Vietnamese Army, supported by the Soviet Union and China.
When President Johnson intensified the war in Vietnam he, too, was impelled by a determination not to repeat the past, but in this case the precedent was appeasement and the lessons of Munich.
Which lessons may be drawn from the Vietnam War depend on which historians are doing the looking and which part of that long and bitter conflict they are looking at...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up.
Comparisons between these two conflicts are easy to make, but hard to avoid: a grinding, unpredictable battle in difficult terrain, a weak and corrupted foreign government kept afloat by American guns and money; a versatile enemy, adept at ambush warfare, with sanctuary in a neighbouring country.
American public opinion on Afghanistan is shifting in a way reminiscent of the tide of feeling that brought the Vietnam War to its humiliating close. The death toll is ramping up, with 55 US servicemen killed this month — the war is suddenly being brought home to America, in bodybags.
The first senior official has resigned in protest over a war that may be unwinnable. “I fail to see the value in the continued US casualties or expenditures . . . in what is, truly, a civil war,” declared Matthew Hoh, the decorated former Marine who resigned from the US Foreign Service this week. He might have been speaking in 1969.
The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma of Vietnam is seared on the national memory like no other event in US history.
The debate is suffused with the language of the Vietnam War: “hawks”, “doves” and fear of the “quagmire”. Mr Obama is of the post-Vietnam generation, yet he, too, is haunted by it. Last month he declared: “You never step into the same river twice, and so, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues that I think about all the time.”
Those words perfectly capture the anxiety that is fraying nerves in the White House, a determination to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam, but an inability to see the conflict though any other prism. After the Gulf War, the first President Bush declared triumphantly, and quite wrongly, that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all”.
The hawks are quick to point out that the Vietnam analogy is routinely trotted out whenever America goes to war. Over the past 25 years it has been invoked in response to US military action in Lebanon, El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Iraq (twice).
In terms of scale, Afghanistan is still a far cry from Vietnam, which involved more than half a million US troops and claimed 58,000 American lives. Fewer than 1,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan in eight years. In the earlier conflict, America was facing not only the Vietcong, but the highly trained North Vietnamese Army, supported by the Soviet Union and China.
When President Johnson intensified the war in Vietnam he, too, was impelled by a determination not to repeat the past, but in this case the precedent was appeasement and the lessons of Munich.
Which lessons may be drawn from the Vietnam War depend on which historians are doing the looking and which part of that long and bitter conflict they are looking at...