'Back to the Future': Iraq and Vietnam

The Daily Inter Lake

Recently it has become fashionable to compare the Iraq War to the Vietnam War, and such a comparison is certainly instructive.

Both are wars which the United States entered as part of a greater global conflict of ideologies. Both are wars which began or escalated as the result of incorrect information supplied to Congress and the American public (WMDs in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam). Both were continued in the name of bolstering a fledgling democracy. Both were fought on our side as limited engagements rather than as all-out wars, and both were fought against enemies who would stop at nothing to win.

You would think it would be fairly easy, therefore, to make an analogy between Vietnam and Iraq and come away with good information about how to proceed as we enter the fourth year of the Iraq conflict.

But nothing is easy in either the world of ideas or the world of nations, and an easy analogy is oftentimes just a misleading one. Comparisons are odious, as the poet said.

Nonetheless, despite their limitations, historical comparisons can be valuable. Any analysis of history is to be lauded as we try to understand our present-day challenges and quandaries. But what I have noticed in the current discussion about Vietnam is that too often our past is seen as a template for failure rather than for success.

By this, I mean that we greedily digest our history - so it seems - only for the purpose of nourishing our fears, rather than to strengthen us to tackle the future.

I suppose this skewed view of history is best summarized in George Santayana's dictum: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I myself have frequently quoted Santayana, including in this column, but now I wonder whether or not Santayana's sentiment is not a kind of recipe for disaster. It contains a hidden assumption that history itself is inherently bad, that what happened in the past must be avoided in the future, and that the alternative is a kind of "doom."

But of course most history is the story of man's progress from barbarism to civilization, from oppression to freedom and from ignorance to knowledge.

So Santayana really should have been more specific, and offered a bifurcated prescription: "Those who cannot learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them; those who cannot learn from the successes of history are unlikely to duplicate them."

Even that prescription is skewed toward failure, however. It is all about people who can not learn. To be more fair, and more accurate, it would need to be worded thus:

"Those who cannot learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them; those who can learn from the mistakes of history have a chance to avoid them. Those who cannot learn from the successes of history are unlikely to duplicate them; those who can learn from the successes of history are mankind's best hope for a better future."

It's not as catchy as Santayana's famous line, but it seems more accurate. History is not a plague to be avoided, after all, but a resource which we may either take advantage of, or not.

In the case of the Vietnam War, most people seem to prefer to forget about it altogether, but among those who study it, there is a tendency to look at it only as an abject failure. Thus, the fact that there are similarities between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War is seen to warrant an automatic conclusion that the Iraq War must itself be an abject failure and the United States must quit the war and come home, no matter what the consequences.

This appears to be the virtual conclusion of the Iraq Study Group, which essentially said, "There's a big problem over there in Iraq, we don't know how to fix it, we better get out." That of course is not a new approach to the war, and is shared by a majority of Americans. It also appears to be an accurate assessment - based on the current leadership in the White House and the will of the American people.

I would like to propose, however, that the Vietnam War was not an abject failure, although it clearly was a military one.

The purpose of the Vietnam War, from the point of view of the American presidents who fought it, was after all to prevent the spread of communism, first in Southeast Asia and ultimately elsewhere. This vision of one country after another falling under the sway of communism was known as the domino theory.

In general this theory is considered to be disproven because communism was unable to supplant all the existing governments in Southeast Asia. Many dominoes, in essence, are still standing to this day, and opponents of the domino theory take that to mean the theory was incorrect from the start.

But consider this: North Vietnam did conquer South Vietnam and turn it into a united communist government. The governments of Cambodia and Laos - the countries closest to Vietnam - did fall into the hands of communists, with particularly disastrous results in the case of Cambodia, where as many as 3 million people died in genocidal relocations.

Moreover, despite our ultimate military defeat in Vietnam, the United States did wage war there for 10 long years. The question which must be answered is whether that presence - that sacrifice of blood and treasure - had any impact in the politics of the world and the region for the good.

Here, we cannot rely on historians to make conclusive judgments, because they can only see the results of what was actually done. It is left to our imagination how things might have been different under other circumstances. Call it the "Back to the Future" version of history, as we ponder the "what ifs" and "what might have beens."

But whatever you call it, please try to keep an open mind when you try to imagine a world where the United States had not taken an interest in the well-being of people forced to live under totalitarian regimes in the post-WWII era. Does it not seem reasonable to conclude that the United States spending billions of dollars to wage war in Vietnam meant that the Soviet Union was also forced to keep its attention focused there instead of financing insurrections elsewhere?

And if Vietnam had turned communist in 1965 instead of 1975, is it not possible that they would have quickly shared their joyous victory with their brothers in Laos and Cambodia? If all three of those countries had become communist states before the end of the 1960s, is it not possible that Thailand and Burma would have followed? If there had been no anti-communist push by the United States, what would have prevented Indonesia from going down that path?

Perhaps when we look at the history of the Vietnam War, we should not look at it only as an example of the difficulty of fighting a guerrilla war against an indigenous people, but as an example of how even a failed war can be a successful political strategy to change the world for the better.

Does anyone honestly think the world would be a better place today if Southeast Asia were a solid bloc of communist countries? If the Soviet Union had not bankrupted itself trying to keep up with the American military, and were still today maintaining its grip on Eastern Europe?

We will never know for sure what the world would look like if the United States had not fought the war in Vietnam along with a few of its allies such as Australia and New Zealand. But it is certainly easy to imagine that an isolationist policy by the United States after World War II would have plunged the world into chaos and chains.

Now, the question arises, thanks in part to the Iraq Study Group, what the world will look like if the United States withdraws from Iraq and lets matters there unfold without us. You don't need to read tea leaves to get a sense of foreboding in this regard.

There will be bloodshed. There will be sectarian violence. There will be regional battles that will likely divide up Iraq between the Turks, the Iranians, the Syrians and the Saudis. The Kurds will continue their war of independence. The Sunnis and Shiites will continue their centuries-long battle for dominance, and the only winners will be the Islamic fascists, as their brand of absolute submission will take hold with Taliban-like rigidity in one country after another in the Middle East.

Gen. Colin Powell accurately said, prior to the invasion, "If you break it, you bought it." This was an insightful acknowledgment by the general that the United States, in waging war against Saddam, would need to assume responsibility for the country in the event that things did not go as well as anticipated.

If we forget this, it is at our own peril. The impending crisis in the Middle East will make the dangers of Southeast Asia seem like a thrill ride at Disney World. Whether you initially approved of going into Iraq or not, you need to recognize that our fear of staying there any longer will only embolden Iran and Syria as they seek to widen their spheres of influence. And a nuclear-powered Iran will be quite bold indeed.

Perhaps, our new slogan should be, "If you break it, run like hell."

Dominoes, anyone?