The Fog of Peace: Vietnam Myths and the March of Folly in Iraq

It's a little known fact that while most of us are sleeping soundly, the far right gathers to rewrite history. With the Bush administration throwing in the towel on finding weapons of mass destruction, these right wing night owls now claim that the absence of WMD is irrelevant since "there were lots of reasons" to go war. In due time, they may even tell us what those reasons were.

These same night owls, however, have done a masterful job with the Vietnam War, recasting it as a mythic crusade against communism that we noble Americans would have won had we simply let the military do its job. This historical fantasy is anything but harmless, since the same themes are echoed in President Bush's latest "stay the course" argument and right wing comments about Abu Ghraib.

The first part of this mythology is to dispel the notion that Americans committed any wartime atrocities. Just as the Swift Boat veterans disputed Senator Kerry's claim of atrocities in Vietnam, conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh sought to deflect attention from Abu Ghraib by dismissing it as equivalent to a fraternity initiation that extracted "information that actually ended up saving lives."

The reality is quite different, as the trial of Abu Ghraib ringleader Spc. Charles Graner's plainly displayed a picture of torture. In addition, such torture did little to save lives since General Taguba's report found that over sixty percent of the inmates were not even a threat and intelligence and FBI officials concede that such abuses yield little of value.

These actions are also counterproductive on a macro-level since, just as historians concluded that U.S. abuses as part of its Vietnam "search and destroy" strategy played into the hands of the Viet Cong; Abu Ghraib has turned Iraqi's against the U.S. and undermined our moral authority worldwide.

The biggest part of the right wing Vietnam mythology is that the United States could have "won" in Vietnam but for meddling politicians. The beauty of this mythology is that the night owls rarely feel the need to say anything further since it is understood that America always wins its wars. Ann Coulter recently advanced this theory to argue that we should just "let the Marines do their job" in Iraq and now President Bush claims that the mistake in Vietnam was not escalation but withdrawal.

The fact is that the United States deployed 3.4 million soldiers in Southeast Asia; dropped four times as many bombs as during all of World War II on nearly 70 percent of Vietnam's villages; sprayed millions of gallons of chemicals to deforest large sections of the country; at a cost of nearly $500 billion in current dollars and over 360,000 Americans killed or injured only to reach a stalemate in a war that was not vital to our national interests.

The night owls never say how many more soldiers would have been deployed, bombs dropped, dollars spent or soldiers killed to achieve a "victory" in a war both Presidents Johnson and Nixon concluded was unwinnable; nor do they ever address what "winning" means in military or political terms for the weak and corrupt South Vietnamese government.

In fact, Dr. Jeffrey Record of the Army War College concluded that "the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether."

The Vietnam War led to creation of the "Powell Doctrine" which calls for every military campaign to be assessed by several factors including whether its objectives are clearly defined. In essence, the Powell Doctrine is a clear-eyed antidote to the night owl's mythic views. Coulter's "let our boys win" argument, however, only highlights how the doctrine has been ignored, since we are again engaged in a war where "winning" is undefined (as are the reasons we went to war).

In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara appears as an American Oedipus lamenting the arrogance and blindness that led us into Vietnam. The night owls not only refuse to acknowledge what is now plain to the metaphorically blinded McNamara, but are leading us to repeat these mistakes in Iraq.

Thirty-five years after the Paris Peace Accords that led to the U.S. withdrawal, Vietnam again calls us to battle. This time the fight is not about territory but history. If we fail to engage this battle and challenge the night owl's dangerous Vietnam fantasies, we will be complicit in their blindness and the nightmare that is likely to follow.

Note: This column was adapted from Right Wing Fantasies and Iraq, Democratic Underground (January 25, 2005).

Comments

[LarryRiedman]

Clausewitz said he wrote his classic On War "to expose the error of believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war." President Bush"s lack of intellectual preparation for the Iraq war is evident in his misunderstanding of Vietnam.
In Vietnam last year, President Bush said, "America can"t lose a war so long as it maintains its will to win." The statement revealed his belief that defeat in Vietnam was not a consequence of flawed goals, strategy or performance, or of factors beyond our control. The implication for Iraq is that we will succeed if we just persist.
In May 2004, the U.S. Army War College published "Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights," by Professor Jeffrey Record (with W. Andrew Terrell). That 76-page article explains why the Vietnam intervention was foredoomed and became a debacle " and also how since then it has been misinterpreted or misrepresented. A key misrepresentation is that persistence would have led to success. Record and Terrell document that mindless persistence in fact turned Vietnam from a mistake into a debacle.
Professor Record documents that the reality about Vietnam is grossly, fundamentally opposite from the President"s characterization " in Vietnam, America lost a war we strove and sacrificed mightily to win. The determinative factor was not a shortage of or subversion of American resolve, but rather the characters of our South Vietnamese ally and North Vietnamese enemy and our own misjudgments about them.
Yet Bush"s ignorance about Vietnam need not have compromised Iraq policy. Before the Iraq war, President Bush might first have discussed the situation with an accessible, sympathetic, supportive, thoroughly informed source with direct experience in military action against Iraq -- his father. Bush pointedly failed to do so. It"s bad enough to believe that the President"s ignorance led us into Iraq, but even worse to think that the reason was filial vanity. Pride is held to be the sin that opens the way for the other sins. If the President"s pride got us into Iraq, he should expect to burn for that.

[rroy]

How often have we heard the simplistic nonsense of the Simplistic Right that we can win any conflict(they usualy don't start out as wars,but are called things like police actions or restorations of Democracy,etc),if we would just let our military fight the wars to win them?

Yet they never seem to be able to come up with a clear definition of just what the hell we will "win",or how we will or know we have won it!!

Another popular Right Wing ambiguity is terms like "the enemy","surrendering to the enemy","cut and run",appeasement,and on and on.Yet there is either a vague popular use term like terrorism,Al Quaeda ,etc but absolutely no clear definative picture of who or what these things are.

Never has there been any evidence of anybody from any part of Vietnam comming to America and attacking any American.

Never has there been any evidence of an Iraqi,of any religious persuasion comming to America to attack anything or anybody.

So one wonders,just how the hell did these people become ipso faco "enemies of America"?

Do these people,who are or were living on the brink of disaster,and starvation have some hidden and secret cache of C5A Jet transports that will enable them to swarm into America with tanks and sophisaticated weaponry,and overwhelm our country and it's military might?

What paranoid madness!!!!

[Zyzzygowski]

Probably the best book ever written about the Viet Nam War is Stanley Karnow's 'Viet Nam a History.'

Using that book as a template another should have been written about Iraq. According to Karnow's book, there were lies and truths of omission and comission. This does not amount to 20/20 hindsight, it requires that a book be written and read before we enter any conflict. The reality is we knew more about what would happen (see the post gulf war interview with then Sec Def Cheney) then what was talked about publicly. One example of a sin of omission.

Had we, the American people, been more fully informed we may have made a different decision. Had we not allowed ourselves to be manipulated by fear, we may have made a different decision. Had any politician been willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and placed their re-election in jeopardy by forcefully coming out against the Iraqi adventure, maybe a different decision would have been made.

Nope. Viet Nam and Iraq are eerily similar because we did not read the book before making the decision.

[Note: Karnow's book was not published until well after the Viet Nam ended, however when I say 'the book' it means all the information the State Dept, Def Dept, CIA, Historians, and Scholars, etc. can provide to fully appreciate what we are up against.]

[Arcy]

How to win in Viet Nam.
When Clarl Clifford became Secretary of Defense after MacNamera, he asked the generals what do you need? They said we need more of this, this, and this. Then Secretary Clifford said if I get you all that you ask, we are going to win, right? Then the generals said no, we never said that!
Even today, no military or political official has come up with a way to win in Viet Nam with an acceptable cost in either Viet Nameese or American lives.

P.S. I am a Viet Nam vet.

[AceInTheHole]

ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, IS FOR OUR TROOPS TO START COMING HOME!


ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, IS FOR OUR TROOPS TO START COMING HOME!


ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, IS FOR OUR TROOPS TO START COMING HOME!

[TRUE BLUE AMERICAN]

All we want is for you to think like an American. How can we win? What are the repercussions if we pull out? Is the religion of islam a religion of peace? Not, how can we look the weakest?

[don]

One of the causes of WWII was "...would have won had we simply let the military do its job" when the Nazis parleyed this sentiment in post WWI Germany into the power grab that resulted in the slaughter of over 50 million souls. There they go again.

[fortuitous]

Let us not keep repeating to EACH OTHER that we all know oil and oil profiteering and permanent occupation are the Iraq War goals and always have been...let's figure out WHO and HOW to deliver this message elsewhere, w/ out interference from the hoards of history rewriters and obfuscators who want to prevent the truth from being understood. We fight the reality of having been painted shrill conspiracy theorists, and we need a medium and a courageous messenger to clearly teach the truth, and we must all watch his back as he does this.

[RogueCowboy]

Next time a Pro-War Hack is interviewed or writes an article about chaos if we leave someone needs to ask what the IMPACT is if we stay for another decade. Our top GENERAL ON THE GROUND Petraeus has stated that it will take AT LEAST a decade"WIN" and his forecasts have been to optimistic .

How many more US Troops killed? 10,000?
How many more US Troops wounded? 50,000?
How many more ISF killed? 30,0000?
How any more ISF Wounded? 150,000?
How many more Iraqi Civilians killed? 250,000?
How many more Iraqi Civilians wounded? 1.5 Million?
How many more Iraqi's will be displayed from their homes? 100,000/month? 12-24 Million?
Will there be any Iraqi's left to GOVERN or be GOVERNED when we "WIN" and establish a DEMOCRATIC IRAQ?

Oh ya, then ask what the impact will be if we withdraw 100,000 troops by the end of 2008?

[alkamm]

Nixon famously said that he would not the first American president to preside over a defeat. Bush is tracking that thinking. By refusing to accept that their efforts were the worst sort of failures, they managed to make the worst worse.
Nixon is a tough act to follow, but Bush is out their stumbling around about as effectively as Nixon.
Even though Bush probably didn't learn much more from his MBA program than a hands-off approach to management, he should remember how to cut loses in order to preserve the company.

Republicans are supposed to be the party that restores business principles to government, but no business would continue to stay the course and lose so steadily. Bush's other failed ventures in the private sector had to be stopped. It's called stop loss.

Oh wait, there are two or three companies that continue to make money (a la The Producers) by failing in Iraq--Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. They may not be making as much as the energy companies thought was possible, but it's a steady gig with their boy in power. There's method in the madness.

[TRUE BLUE AMERICAN]

Good thing we didn't put the stop loss at 3,000 , 10,000 , 50,000 etc during WW2. If you were talking about the war.

[Citizen823]

Anyone who has any doubts regarding the real reasons we are in Iraq should Google "Crude Designs". This paper documents how the Iraq Oil Law is a blatant giveaway to the big oil companies at the expense of the people whose country we have destroyed.

Its time we all stopped devoting our time to WMD, Saddam's terrorist connections and all the other bullshit that was used to sell this war to the American public and challenged this administration on the real reasons:

Excessive oil company profits locked in for a long time and large permanent military bases situated in the middle of the region.

[FogBelter]

Mr Kelley, The Bush Administration will torture history to the point it conforms with their needs. The Vietnam Conflict (because I always recall it as a Police Action as opposed to an offical War) had more to do with American desire to setup a NeoColonial Government in a mainland Asian country on the Border with China, something that didn't pan out in Korea, than confronting Vietnamese Communism. Of course Communism was used as the excuse, but in reality what the US was fighting in Vietnam was a Nationalist Movement that had stood up to the Japanese in WWII and purged the Colonial French in the 1950's. Most Vietnamese didn't know communism from a hole in the ground, but they did understand being invaded, and that is why they fought like hell.

A combination of arrogance and ignorance on the part of American Leaders got the United States into Vietnam, and so too Iraq ... Bush can mangle history all he likes, but nothing will change the fact that the Kurds, the Sunni, and the Shi'ite have as much desire for self determination as the Vietnamese had, and American NeoCon, NeoColonial notions will have about as much success in Iraq as they did in Vietnam ultimately.

This is not to say our Military didn't do its best in Vietnam, or in Iraq, but the words of Dr. Jeffrey Record of the Army War College that you cited in your post, Mr. Kelley, rings true for Iraq as it does for Vietnam:

"the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether."

[steamboat]

Just nosey, WHERE YOU THERE (Viet Nam)? I WAS ! Drafted by your liberal hero, LBJ, and fought in Viet Nam ('67-68)... Sorry, maybe my PTSD is getting the best of me, but I get tired of listening to all you elitist know-it-alls telling people like me what Viet Nam was all about. Its like yesterday on another post, some guy saying there was no rubber in Viet Nam. Amazing, since I patrolled and fought in the Michelin Rubber Plantation near Hwy. 13 in 1968. Then I got to read another limoseune liberal, Kansas Evans, lecture us about how her professor knew everything about and told her about Viet Nam. ..All you 'arm chair' generals, if you weren't there, shut-up.

[OrangeSam]

Apparently, we can't trust anyone under 55 about Vietnam since they couldn't have been there.

[LarryRiedman]

Like you, Jeffrey Record served in Nam a couple of years, but as a civilian province coordinator. What do you find inaccurate in his May 2004 article that the U.S. Army War College published: "Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities and Insights" (with W. Andrew Terrell)? That 76-page article explains why the Vietnam intervention was foredoomed and became a debacle because we persisted long after our leaders realized that escalation wouldn't bring victory. Can you specify any facts that the U.S. Army War College might have misinterpreted when it published these conclusions?
Once, at the Vietnam Memorial, I went to the place in time when I'd started working against the war. After that point 30,000 more American soldiers died. I regret that we who opposed the war were not more effective to prevent the loss of their lives.

[PeggyBrownstein]

Amen, George W. Bush, you arm chair general, shut up!

[TRUE BLUE AMERICAN]

Mr. Kelley is dead wrong on how to avoid deafeat. The real thing that Vietnam and Iraq have in common is that we fight a war without shutting down supply lines. In Vietnam, Russia and the Chinese were actively assisting with troops and supplies. In Iraq its Iran,Syria along with a few others. We need to tell these countries that if we find evidence of your involvment, we are now at war with them.Without the help of Iran and others, this war would have been over years ago. It is time for a full court press on the countries who are helping the terrorists in Iraq. Lets give them the freedom we love so much. God Bless America

[Snakeback]

Let me put on my Neocon thinking cap:

- It's not important why we went to war, but it is important that we went to war.

- Halliburton, Blackwater, and Raytheon have to make money, myfriend, THAT is important. Weapons systems must get built and used, that is important. You want America's economy to dry up?

- And this time, a vital national interest is at stake: it's called OIL.

- There's a trillion dollars worth of oil deals to be had under those sands in Iraq and the Caspian Sea.

- Conversely, human lives don't show up on the balance sheets because there's no actual value attached to them. It doesn't matter how many American soldiers die, and the lives of foreigners? - hey, we quit counting them last year - or didn't you get the memo?

- As for why they died, that also doesn't matter, but we'll make up something for you lefty whiners.

Hey, I would have made a great neocon, huh?
Just lower my IQ sixty points and cop a bigot-head, and Voila! - INSTANT NEOCON!
Geez, think AIPAC would endorse me?

[Tellmethetruth]

Vietnam: Overview of Seven Biggest Currency Earners in 2005

In a workshop of Nha Be Garment Company Dong Phong Vietnam is estimated to make export revenues of US$32.23 billion in 2005, up 21.6 per cent against 2004, according to the country's General Statistics Office. Nearly 69.2 per cent of the revenues came from seven biggest currency earners, namely crude oil, garment and textile, footwear, seafood, woodwork, electronics appliances, and rice...

Crude oil:Vietnam exported 18.08 million tones of crude oil worth nearly US$7.39 billion in 2005, mainly to China, Singapore, Japan, Britain and the United States, down 7.3 per cent in volume but up 30.3 per cent in value against 2004. Vietnam's crude oil production decreased 7.7 percent to roughly 18.5 million tones in 2005.

Recently, the Ministry of Planning and Investment proposed the Vietnamese Government lower crude oil exports between 2006 and 2010 so as to ensure sufficient supply of the product for domestic industries. Accordingly, the country's crude oil export will decline to 18.5 million tones in 2006 and 15.6 million tones in 2010. To reduce reliance on petroleum imports, Vietnam, a major crude oil exporter in Asia, is pouring some US$2.5 billion into constructing its first oil refinery named Dung Quat with annual processing capacity of 6.5 million tones in the central province of Quang Ngai, which is scheduled to become operational in late 2008 or early 2009, meeting about 40 per cent of the domestic demand for petroleum products. The refinery's construction officially kicked off in November 2005.

http://www.business-in-asia.com/vn_seven_top_revenue.htm

The truth that we went to war in Vietnam for oil because they had the largest undeveloped reserves of oil in Asia seems so difficult for Americans to accept. The only difference between then and now, when we are in another war for oil is the internet. Because of the internet people can finally find out what the truths are.