Vietnam and Iraq, deja vu all over again?

Arriving in Vietnam for the first time, George Bush could not resist referring to the war in Iraq. Among other things, he said “We’ll succeed –unless we quit.”

Apparently President Bush thinks we could have won the war in Vietnam had we ”stayed the course” beyond the eight years and 58,000 American lives we devoted to the effort. He also seems to believe we are winning the war in Iraq. The facts on the ground do not seem to affect his thinking.

Two other American presidents ignored the facts in Vietnam.

It was twenty-eight years ago, in early 1968, that the Tet offensive shocked us into reconsideration of what we were doing. Even though it failed to achieve the great victory wished for by the North Vietnamese, Tet showed the American people that what they had been told about the state of the war was wrong. We weren’t winning.

After Tet, President Johnson stopped the bombing of the north to jump-start a peace process, which never went anywhere. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president, partly based on a “secret plan” to end the war.

Nixon’s plan was “Vietnamization.” He was going to give the South Vietnamese the resources and training necessary to fight the war themselves, and as they stood up, America would stand down, although they did not use that Bush-like phrase.

Just like the Iraq War today, the Vietnam War was marked by great disagreement over what we should do about a war that was obviously not going the way we had hoped. Could we win it? What would happen if we lost it? The periodicals of the time are full of the debate, and it sounds eerily familiar to the debate we are hearing today over Iraq.

Senator Aiken of Vermont said we should simply “declare victory” and go home. Senator Kennedy argued in favor of a negotiated mutual withdrawal of the North Vietnamese and American armies, leaving the South Vietnamese government and the indigenous Communist rebels (the Viet Cong) to fight it out in a civil war.

Others pushed for a negotiated settlement with the north that would not take the south’s wishes into account, followed by a gradual withdrawal of American troops. All of these would be called “cut and run” today by Karl Rove and his clients.

There was also a movement to replace (once again) the South Vietnamese regime with a “more democratic” government. There was a growing awareness of the corruption and incompetence of the existing leaders.

In fact, we did not change much about our approach and we never did negotiate a peace. Five years after Tet, and almost 30,000 more dead Americans later, we declared the Vietnamese Army ready to win the war on its own, and left. Shortly thereafter North Vietnam took over the whole country. And the world knew we had lost the war.

As time passed Americans learned what most of the world had long known: The war was unnecessary. There was nothing serious at stake. The world went on. There was no domino effect. Communism was not seriously strengthened. And now we are about to sign trade agreements with our former enemy.

Explore posts in the same categories: National Issues