![]() Two Vietnam-era buzzwords to watch for are "pacification" and "infiltration." In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States believed it could "pacify" resistance by rooting out enemy agents Pentagon planners are already talking about the same process. What's to stop someone from doing the same against us in Baghdad sometime soon? For instance, the Al Dawa faction fighting Saddam in southern Iraq is apparently the same crowd that helped plan the 1983 bombing of the U.S. The enemies of our enemy (Ho Chi Minh, Saddam) will not necessarily be our friends. ![]() Suicide bombings (like the one carried out by two women last week) will almost certainly continue until the Americans clear out, just as attacks by the Viet Cong (clad as civilians) helped drive the United States out of Vietnam. My NEWSWEEK colleague Ron Moreau recalls how LBJ thought that the Vietnamese could be bought off with a big Mekong River dam.Īfter a period of jubilation following the fall of Saddam's regime, Iraqi nationalism will quickly assert itself. Offering huge economic aid won't be any more decisive. The puppet regimes we installed in Saigon all lacked legitimacy, a sorry tale of failed nation-building that the United States might consider before assuming that exiles from the Iraqi National Congress, many of whom have not set foot in the country in more than 15 years, can govern for long. No sickening "body counts" or 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians killed in bombing attacks.īut if the military comparisons to Vietnam are glib, some political lessons remain relevant, especially those about the limits of power. And while the rest of the world may be seeing bloody pictures on TV, the United States is fighting much more humanely this time around. After all, Iraqis are not as good fighters as the Viet Cong were, and the desert terrain and mind-blowing technology favor the United States in ways they didn't in Vietnam. Those who scoff at the Vietnam analogy now have the upper hand: this war looks as if it will last one month, not 10 years. Then in a flash the manic-depressive media mood swung back to triumphalism. On the ground, the outgunned underdogs adopted cruel Viet Cong tactics, including the execution of civilians who didn't resist the Americans. Instead of admitting as much, civilian and military policymakers in Washington pretended there was nothing amiss, opening up an LBJ-style "credibility gap." Pentagon brass, refusing to be quoted by name, complained in the press as they did 35 years ago about the political leadership denying them the military resources they needed. An overconfident secretary of Defense with slicked-back hair and a know-it-all style was embarrassed by a ragtag, low-tech army putting up stiffer-than-expected resistance. ![]() The Bush administration is approaching a decision more fateful than any tactical move on the battlefield: who should run postwar Iraq, and for how long? History can help.įor a moment early last week, it felt like 1967. But the only thing worse than "thinking in time," as Harvard professors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May call this exercise, is thinking outside of it-forgetting that certain lessons of history, carefully applied, can yield useful insights for the present. Iraq is not Vietnam or Lebanon or anyplace else except Iraq, and historical analogies are often land mines for the careless. ![]()
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