IHT : Bush challenged on Iraq-Vietnam analogy

Bush challenged on Iraq-Vietnam analogy

By Thom Shanker | August 22, 2007

WASHINGTON: The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war - but one that cleared a path for Vietnam to become a unified and stable nation, with healthy ties to the United States.

Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President George W. Bush is challenging that history.

In reminding Americans on Wednesday that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of upheaval in Southeast Asia, Bush argued that the lessons of Vietnam provide reason to stay in Iraq, rather than to leave anytime soon. Bush in essence accused his war critics of amnesia over the exodus of Vietnamese "boat people" refugees and for mass killings in Cambodia that upended the lives of millions of people.

Bush is right on the historic record, according to historians and scholars of military and international affairs. But many of those experts also quarreled with his drawing analogies to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.

"It is undoubtedly true that America's failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia," said David Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College.

"But there are a couple of further points that need weighing," he added. "One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam - this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred."

The American withdrawal from Vietnam was hardly abrupt, and lasted much longer than many people remember. The American drawdown actually began in 1968, after the Tet offensive, a military defeat for the communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors but one that also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. Although American commanders asked for several hundred thousand reinforcements after Tet, President Lyndon Johnson turned them down, and President Richard Nixon began a process of "Vietnamization" in which power was gradually handed over to local security forces.

"It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement," said Andrew Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam and now professor of international relations at Boston University.

"The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure," he added. "If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us.' '

To that end, some members of Congress and human rights groups have urged the Bush administration to drop the limits on Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States.

In his speech Wednesday, Bush also sought to inspire renewed support for his Iraq strategy by recalling the years of national sacrifice during World War II, and the commitment required to rebuild two of history's most aggressive and lawless adversaries, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, into two of this nation's most reliable and responsible allies.

But historians note that Germany and Japan were homogenous nation-states with no internal feuding among factions or sects, in stark contrast to Iraq today.

The comparison of Iraq to Germany and Japan "is fanciful," said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that the American and Allied militaries had completely eliminated the governments of Japan and Germany and assembled occupation forces that were proportionately more than three times as large as the current American presence of 160,000 troops in Iraq.

"That's the kind of troop level you need to control the situation," Simon said. "The occupation of Germany and Japan lasted for years - and not a single American soldier was killed by insurgents."

Senior U.S. military officers, speaking privately, also say that the essential elements that brought victory in World War II - a total commitment on the part of the American people, and a staggering economic commitment to rebuild defeated adversaries - do not exist for the war in Iraq today. The wars in Korea and Vietnam also involved considerable national sacrifice, including tax increases and conscription.

While Bush sought to draw historic parallels for Iraq to America's overseas battlegrounds, some military officers say the nation's civilian leaders need to compare their efforts in Washington to those of their predecessors.

"We didn't win World War II until the Marshall Plan," said one field-grade American military officer who has served in Iraq. "This is ultimately a long war for the soul of Islam. And we do not yet have a Marshall Plan for the new Middle East. We need to help the moderate governments of the Middle East. We have to have an incredible effort to eliminate poverty and provide housing and jobs across the Islamic world. The scale of the effort would dwarf the Marshall Plan, and we have not even acknowledged that is what is required."