Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts: We're Fighting Not to Lose
[Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, directed the Pentagon Papers Project. Richard K. Betts is director of Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.]
Iraq is not Vietnam, yet history seems intent on harnessing them together. Three years ago this seemed an unlikely pairing; surely President Bush would not take the United States down the same trail as Lyndon B. Johnson. Yet even though Iraq's story is far from complete, each day raises the odds that the U.S. fate in Iraq could eventually be the same as it was in Vietnam -- defeat.
The differences are clear. The policy consensus over the Vietnam War ran deeper and lasted longer than on the Iraq conflict. While Johnson and his advisers slogged deeper into Vietnam with realistic pessimism, Bush and his colleagues plunged ahead in Iraq with reckless optimism. And in Vietnam, U.S. leaders made most of their mistakes with their eyes wide open, while it is impossible to fathom exactly what the Bush team thought it was doing after the fall of Baghdad.
Twenty-eight years ago, we wrote a book, "The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked," which argued that although U.S. policy in that war was disastrous, the policymaking process performed just as it was designed to. It seems odd that a good system could produce awful results, but the subsequent declassified documents and the public record showed it to be true. U.S. officials generally had accurate assessments of the difficulties in Vietnam, and they looked hard at the alternatives of winning or getting out.
On Iraq the insider documents are not available, but journalistic accounts suggest that Bush's policy process was much less realistic. The president did not take seriously the obstacles to his goals, did not send a military force adequate to accomplish the tasks, failed to plan for occupation and took few steps to solve the underlying political conflicts among Iraqis.
Despite these different paths, Bush now faces Johnson's dilemma, that of a war in which defeat is unthinkable but victory unlikely. And Bush's policy shift last week suggests that he has come to the same conclusion as Johnson: Just do what you can not to lose and pass the problem on to your successor.
In both cases, despite talk of "victory," the overriding imperative became simply to avoid defeat.
How did these tragedies begin? Although hindsight makes many forget, the Vietnam War was backed by a consensus of almost all foreign-policy experts and a majority of U.S. voters. Until late in the game, opponents were on the political fringe. The consensus rested on the domino theory -- if South Vietnam fell to communism, other governments would topple. Most believed that communism was on the march and a worldwide Soviet-Chinese threat on the upswing.
The consensus on Iraq was shallower and shorter-lived. Bush may have been bent on regime change in Baghdad from the start, but in any case a consensus emerged among his advisers that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of securing nuclear weapons capability -- and that deterrence and containment would not suffice. That judgment came to be shared by most of the national security community. Congress also saluted early on. The vote to endorse the war was less impressive than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which passed almost unanimously, but many Democrats signed on to topple Hussein for fear of looking weak.....
After Vietnam, recriminations over failure became a never-healed wound in American politics. Now Iraq is deepening that wound. With some luck, Washington may yet escape Baghdad more cleanly than it did in the swarms of helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975. But even if the United States is that fortunate, the story of the parallel paths to disaster should be chiseled in stone -- if only to avoid yet another tragedy in a distant land, a few decades down the road.
Read entire article at WaPo
Iraq is not Vietnam, yet history seems intent on harnessing them together. Three years ago this seemed an unlikely pairing; surely President Bush would not take the United States down the same trail as Lyndon B. Johnson. Yet even though Iraq's story is far from complete, each day raises the odds that the U.S. fate in Iraq could eventually be the same as it was in Vietnam -- defeat.
The differences are clear. The policy consensus over the Vietnam War ran deeper and lasted longer than on the Iraq conflict. While Johnson and his advisers slogged deeper into Vietnam with realistic pessimism, Bush and his colleagues plunged ahead in Iraq with reckless optimism. And in Vietnam, U.S. leaders made most of their mistakes with their eyes wide open, while it is impossible to fathom exactly what the Bush team thought it was doing after the fall of Baghdad.
Twenty-eight years ago, we wrote a book, "The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked," which argued that although U.S. policy in that war was disastrous, the policymaking process performed just as it was designed to. It seems odd that a good system could produce awful results, but the subsequent declassified documents and the public record showed it to be true. U.S. officials generally had accurate assessments of the difficulties in Vietnam, and they looked hard at the alternatives of winning or getting out.
On Iraq the insider documents are not available, but journalistic accounts suggest that Bush's policy process was much less realistic. The president did not take seriously the obstacles to his goals, did not send a military force adequate to accomplish the tasks, failed to plan for occupation and took few steps to solve the underlying political conflicts among Iraqis.
Despite these different paths, Bush now faces Johnson's dilemma, that of a war in which defeat is unthinkable but victory unlikely. And Bush's policy shift last week suggests that he has come to the same conclusion as Johnson: Just do what you can not to lose and pass the problem on to your successor.
In both cases, despite talk of "victory," the overriding imperative became simply to avoid defeat.
How did these tragedies begin? Although hindsight makes many forget, the Vietnam War was backed by a consensus of almost all foreign-policy experts and a majority of U.S. voters. Until late in the game, opponents were on the political fringe. The consensus rested on the domino theory -- if South Vietnam fell to communism, other governments would topple. Most believed that communism was on the march and a worldwide Soviet-Chinese threat on the upswing.
The consensus on Iraq was shallower and shorter-lived. Bush may have been bent on regime change in Baghdad from the start, but in any case a consensus emerged among his advisers that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of securing nuclear weapons capability -- and that deterrence and containment would not suffice. That judgment came to be shared by most of the national security community. Congress also saluted early on. The vote to endorse the war was less impressive than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which passed almost unanimously, but many Democrats signed on to topple Hussein for fear of looking weak.....
After Vietnam, recriminations over failure became a never-healed wound in American politics. Now Iraq is deepening that wound. With some luck, Washington may yet escape Baghdad more cleanly than it did in the swarms of helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975. But even if the United States is that fortunate, the story of the parallel paths to disaster should be chiseled in stone -- if only to avoid yet another tragedy in a distant land, a few decades down the road.