Moving Beyond Vietnam

Like all analogies, the now clich© comparison between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam has its merits and limitations.

On two fronts, it seems to work.

First is the potential impact of declining domestic support for the war as casualties mount without end. President Bush’s astonishing 36 percent job approval rating – lower than Nixon’s at the height of Watergate – can be blamed in large part on the course of the war. Assuming that the military strategy carries on, when will we reach the political breaking point?

Second is the impact of the war on U.S. ground forces. My colleague Larry Korb likes to remind us that Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw from Vietnam to save the Army. Iraq has had much the same effect, stretching the Army and Marines to their limits through repeated deployments and by unprecedented use of the Guard and Reserves. So much for President Bush’s promise to our armed forces in the 2000 campaign that “help is on the way.”

But what I’ve never been comfortable with is the comparison of the two wars in terms of the “on the ground” situation, and particularly the insurgency. The differences between the political and military situations in Vietnam and Iraq are enormous.

In this arena, I’ve been partial to the French in Algeria/U.S. in Iraq comparison for some time. But this week in the Guardian, the ever-insightful British commentator Timothy Garton Ash takes on the imperial implications of the war and presents a different analogy:

Iraq is America’s Boer war. Remember that after the British had declared the end of major combat operations in the summer of 1900, the Boers launched a campaign of guerrilla warfare that kept British troops on the run for another two years. The British won only by a ruthlessness of which, I’m glad to say, the democratic, squeamish and still basically anti-colonialist United States appears incapable. In the end, the British had 450,000 British and colonial troops there (compared with some 150,000 US troops in Iraq), and herded roughly a quarter of the Boer population into concentration camps, where many died.

Garton Ash wisely does not carry the analogy much further, nor does he rejoice in the idea of a time when the United States is no longer a hyperpower.

If you are, by any chance, of that persuasion that would instinctively find this [the demise of U.S. power] a cause for rejoicing, pause for a moment to consider two things: first, that major shifts of power between rising and falling great powers have usually been accompanied by major wars; and second, that the next top dog could be a lot worse.

So this is no time for schadenfreude. It’s a time for critical solidarity. A few far-sighted people are beginning to formulate a long-term American strategy of trying to create an international order that would protect the interests of liberal democracies even when American hyperpower has faded; and to encourage rising powers such as India and China to sign up to such an order. That is exactly what today’s weary Titan should be doing, and we should help him do it.

We can only hope the allies are listening.

– Robert O. Boorstin