The Reconstruction

From CNN.com:

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — U.S. President George W. Bush said Friday the United States’ unsuccessful war in Vietnam three decades ago offered lessons for the American-led struggle in Iraq.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit,” Bush said shortly after arriving in this one-time war capital.

It’s a little worrisome that the lesson from Vietnam that our President thinks applies best to Iraq is that “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” Honestly, though, it’s far more worrisome that he extracted that lesson from the Vietnam war at all. I wasn’t alive at the time, so I’m not qualified to judge, but I always thought that even to someone who only made a cameo appearance on a National Guard base in Alabama, the war couldn’t have looked like something that we were guaranteed to win (unless we quit).

To me, a more interesting set of lessons from Vietnam to compare to our policies and experience in Iraq would be those offered by Robert McNamara, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense:

1. We misjudged then – and we have since – the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then – and have since – to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which of these lessons apply to Iraq.

I grabbed the list from the Wikipedia entry on Errol Morris’s superlative documentary, “The Fog of War”; it’s the list that inspired the movie, but it is not the one that forms the structure of the film, nor is it the one provided as an addendum by McNamara himself.

This entry was posted Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 4:00 am and is filed under politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.