Returning to Cambodia

[thedrifter]

August 23, 2007, 6:00 a.m.

Returning to Cambodia
Killing fields of media fallacies.

By Peter W. Rodman

For a long time, when it talked about Iraq, the Bush administration avoided Vietnam references like the plague. This was perhaps a reasonable judgment that, even if useful debating points could be made, any mention of the “V-word” would be a psychological and political disaster.

The administration has now dropped the taboo, as we see in the president’s speech Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. One reason may be that in today’s Iraq debate, the analogies that work in its favor are too strong to pass up. I agree with that. The analogies relate to the situation on the ground and the likely consequences of congressional action.

Military historians seem to be converging on a consensus that by the end of 1972, the balance of forces in Vietnam had improved considerably, increasing the prospects for South Vietnam’s survival. That balance of forces was reflected in the Paris Agreement of January 1973, and the (Democratic) Congress then proceeded to pull the props out from under that balance of forces over the next 2 ½ years — abandoning all of Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.

Will tomorrow’s narrative be that the strategic situation in Iraq was starting to improve in 2007 but the Congress tied the president’s hands anyway — tipping events toward an American defeat, dooming Iraq to chaos, emboldening Islamist extremists throughout the Middle East, and demoralizing all our friends in the region who are on the front line against this scourge? How can the president refrain from making this point? Why on earth should he?

The president is absolutely right to include the Khmer Rouge genocide in his recitation of the Vietnam endgame. When Congress, in the summer of 1973, legislated an end to U.S. military action in, over, or off the shores of Indochina, the only U.S. military activity then going on was air support of a friendly Cambodian government and army desperately defending their country against a North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge onslaught. “Cambodia is not worth the life of one American flier,” Tip O’Neill declared. By 1975, administration pleas to help Cambodia were answered by New York Times articles suggesting the Khmer Rouge would probably be moderate once they came into power and the Cambodian people had a better life to look forward to once we left.

Trying to debunk the president’s VFW speech, the Times has lately resuscitated the hoary claim that it was U.S. military activity that destabilized Cambodia in the first place. This claim, alas, is not supportable. What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards for use as military bases from which to launch attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. Cambodia’s ruler Prince Sihanouk complained bitterly to us about these North Vietnamese bases in his country and invited us to attack them (which we did from the air in 1969-70). Next came a North Vietnamese attempt to overrun the entire country in March-April 1970, to which U.S. and South Vietnamese forces responded by a limited ground incursion at the end of April.

So the president has his history right. The outcome in Indochina was not foreordained. Congress had the last word, however, between 1973 and 1975.

The strategic consequences of defeat in Indochina were also serious. Leonid Brezhnev crowed that the global “correlation of forces” had shifted in favor of “socialism,” and the Soviets went on a geopolitical offensive in the third world for a decade. Demoralized allied leaders in Europe as well as Asia feared the new Soviet aggressiveness and lamented the paralysis of American will. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he and his colleagues invoked Vietnam as evidence that U.S. warnings did not need to be taken seriously. That’s what it means to lose credibility. Once lost, it has to be re-earned the hard way.

No analogies are ever complete, but — given our global leadership and the number of allies and friends that rely on us for their security — the consequences of an American defeat can be counted on to be terrible. How can anyone seriously think otherwise?

Ellie

[thedrifter]

August 23, 2007, 6:00 a.m.

Maroons Rush In
Criticism of the president’s Vietnam analogy takes Chutzpah.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Tuesday, President Bush argued that the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq would be similar to those that followed our abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. Citing the killing fields of Cambodia and the executions and “reeducation” camps in Vietnam, the president continued:
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."
Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.

The reaction to Bush’s invocation of the Vietnam War’s aftermath was swift and critical. John Kerry called the comparison “ignorant.” Reporters interviewed several historians who were happy to agree with Kerry. Robert Dalleck called the comparison “a distortion”:
What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion...We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.

USA Today asked Stanley Karnow: “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other, as in Iraq. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government. Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?”

Bugs Bunny had a name for people like this: “maroons.” And Alan Dershowitz once wrote a book about them entitled Chutzpah! Of course in criticizing Bush’s reference to Vietnam, they are comparing apples and oranges. If they don’t see this, they are fools. If they do — which is more likely — they are dishonest. Take your pick.

The fact is that opponents of the war have drawn the Vietnam analogy like a gun, seeking from the very beginning to argue that Iraq and Vietnam were analogous. Ted Kennedy famously called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam.”

I have argued on several occasions that the parallels between the two conflicts at the operational and strategic levels of war were nonsensical. But that has never stopped the opponents of the current war from invoking the conventional Vietnam War narrative, which goes something like this: The U.S. was predestined to lose the Vietnam War because the Vietnamese Communists were too determined, the South Vietnamese too corrupt, and Americans were incapable of fighting the kind of war that would have been necessary to prevail. Accordingly, “orthodox” Vietnam historians often act as if Hanoi had pursued a course of action with little regard for what the United States did.

It is clear that those who invoke Vietnam in discussing Iraq accept the orthodox narrative. But revisionists such as Bob Sorely in A Better War and Mark Moyar in Triumph Forsaken have called the conventional narrative into question. They and others have shown that Hanoi, as Clausewitz would have predicted, responded to American actions. Moyar’s thesis is that the U.S. defeat was far from inevitable; the United States had ample opportunities to ensure the survival of South Vietnam but failed to develop the proper strategy to do so. By far the greatest mistake the Americans made was to acquiesce in the November 1963 coup that deposed Diem, a decision that “forfeited the tremendous gains of the preceding nine years and plunged the country into an extended period of instability and weakness.”

Sorley argues along the same lines. Building on his excellent biographies of Army generals Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson, Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress."

The fact is that the outcome of a war is not predetermined. Who wins and who loses are determined in the final instance by the respective actions of the combatants. Victory or defeat depends on decisions actually made and strategies actually implemented. We came close to victory in Vietnam, but then threw it away.

The 1972 Easter Offensive provided the proof that Vietnam could survive, albeit with U.S. air and naval support, at least in the short term. The Easter Offensive was the biggest North Vietnamese offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. Despite inevitable failures on the part of some units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day "Christmas bombing" campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, "you had won the war. It was over."

Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker, cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?

First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a ceasefire that permitted North Vietnamese forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms.

Of course the president’s reference to Vietnam did not have to do with operational art or strategy but with the consequences of defeat: the abandonment of allies to the tender mercies of Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists, resulting in the death of millions in Cambodia and thousands in Vietnam, the “boat people,” and re-education camps. This abandonment of our Vietnamese allies was a massive moral failure on the part of the United States. It is one we should not repeat in Iraq.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Thursday, August 23, 2007
THE TANK

President Bush & Vietnam [Pete Hegseth]


Historical comparisons, like the Vietnam imagery invoked by the president yesterday, are a necessary part of the public case for completing the mission in Iraq. Americans — and especially Vietnam veterans — remember the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam: a crippled American image, shunned American GIs, and genocide.

So, for good reason, nobody wants to relieve Vietnam; and Americans need to be reminded that our “defeat” in Iraq would have the same result, but with even weightier consequences, as radical Islamists with overt global ambitions would be emboldened by victory to widen their campaign.

Counterinsurgency is complex, and not conducive to immediate results. Difficult situations often appear “hopeless.” But history teaches us — from Europe to Korea to Anbar Province — that no situation is totally hopeless. Victory has oft been “snatched from the jaws of defeat,” given new leadership and adaptive strategy.

Our public consciousness, no matter how fractured, does have the capacity to adapt. And a swift dose of uncomfortable history, applied correctly, can be an effective way to influence that adaptation. Unfortunately, despite recent successes in Iraq, the “allure of retreat” is still alive and well in America and therefore it’s important to remind Americans that we’ve extolled the virtues of “retreat” before, and it wasn’t pretty.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Another Vietnam?
President Bush's analogy to Iraq is not inaccurate, just incomplete.

BY MAX BOOT
Friday, August 24, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad--in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan--would result in "another Vietnam." Conversely, supporters of those interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons.

President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic--just as they were in Southeast Asia.

This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren't so grave. After all, isn't Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.?

True, but that's 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps "where tens of thousands perished." Many more fled as "boat people," he continued, "many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea."

That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."




The problem with Mr. Bush's Vietnam analogy is not that it is inaccurate, but that it is incomplete. As he noted, "The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech." If he chooses to return to the subject in future speeches, there are some other parallels he could invoke:

• The danger of prematurely dumping allied leaders. A chorus of voices in Washington, led by Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton, is calling on Iraqis to replace Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. Even Mr. Bush and his ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, have expressed disappointment with Mr. Maliki. They have been careful, however, to refrain from any calls for his ouster. That's wise, because we know from our experience in Vietnam the dangers of switching allied leaders in wartime.

In the early 1960s, American officials were frustrated with Ngo Dinh Diem, and in 1963 the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup against him, in the hope of installing more effective leadership in Saigon. The result was the opposite: a succession of weak leaders who spent most of their time plotting to stay in power. In retrospect it's obvious that, for all his faults, we should have stuck with Diem.

Today we should stick with Mr. Maliki, imperfect as he is. He took office little more than a year ago after his predecessor, Ibraham al Jaffari, was forced out by American pressure for being ineffectual. The fact that we are bemoaning the same shortcomings in both Messrs. Jaffari and Maliki suggests that the problems are not merely personal but institutional. The Iraqi constitution, written at American instigation, gives little power to the prime minister. The understandable desire was to ward off another dictator, but we shouldn't now be complaining that the prime minister isn't able to exercise as much authority as we would like.

The only hope for long-term political progress is to limit the power of the militias--the real powers--which must start by curbing the violence which gives them much of their raison d'être. That is what the forces under Gen. David Petraeus's command are now doing. We'll need considerably more progress on the security front before we can expect any substantial political progress at the national level. In the meantime, we shouldn't hold Mr. Maliki to unrealistic expectations as we did with Diem.

• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. In 1968, after Gen. Creighton Abrams took over as the senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, he began to change the emphasis from the kind of big-unit search-and-destroy tactics that Gen. William Westmoreland had favored, to the sort of population-protection strategy more appropriate for a counterinsurgency. Over the next four years, even as the total number of American combat troops declined, the communists lost ground.

By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

Following in Abrams's footsteps, Gen. Petraeus is belatedly pursuing classic counterinsurgency strategies that are paying off. The danger is that American politicians will prematurely pull the plug in Iraq as they did in Vietnam. If they do so, the consequences will be even worse, since Iraq is much more important strategically than Vietnam ever was.

• The danger of allowing enemy sanctuaries across the border. This a parallel that Mr. Bush might not be so eager to cite, because in many ways he is repeating the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, who allowed communist forces to use safe rear areas in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to stage attacks into South Vietnam. No matter how much success American and South Vietnamese forces had, there were always fresh troops and supplies being smuggled over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Something similar is happening today in Iraq. Dozens of Sunni jihadists are entering Iraq from Syria every month. While not huge in absolute numbers, they are estimated to account for 80% to 90% of suicide attacks. The National Intelligence Estimate released yesterday finds that "Damascus is providing support" to various groups in Iraq "in a bid to increase Syrian influence." Meanwhile, the NIE notes, Iran "has been intensifying" its support for Shiite extremists, leading to a dramatic rise in attacks using explosively formed penetrators that can punch through any armor in the American arsenal.

The Bush administration has cajoled and threatened these states to stop their interference in Iraqi affairs, but their pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears. For all of Mr. Bush's reputed bellicosity, he has backed away from taking the kind of actions that might cause Syria and Iran to mend their ways. He has not, for instance, authorized "hot pursuit" of terrorists by American forces over the Iraqi border. Until the U.S. does more to cut off support for extremists within Iraq, it will be very difficult to get a grip on the security situation.

• The danger of not making plans for refugees. One of the great stains on American honor in Indochina was the horrible fate suffered by so many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who put their trust in us. When the end came we left far too many of them in the lurch, consigning them to prison, death or desperate attempts to escape.

There are many Iraqis who would be left in equally dire straits should the U.S. pull all or even a substantial portion of its forces out of the country. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have worked closely with our forces, whether as translators, security guards, police officers, civil servants or cabinet ministers. Many have already been targeted for death, and need to flee for their lives. Yet so far we have been accepting only a trickle of Iraqi refugees to our shores--a mere 200 in the first six months of this year.




We should take steps now to assure all those Iraqis who cooperate with us that visas and means of evacuation will be available to them if necessary. The U.S. government has been reluctant to do this for fear of admitting the possibility of failure, and perhaps facilitating an even greater "brain drain" from Iraq. But it would actually be easier for many to stay and serve in Iraq if they know that they and their families have a personal "exit strategy."

This does not, of course, exhaust the possible analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. Nor is it meant to suggest the parallels are exact; there are in fact substantial differences. Any historical comparison has to be handled with care and not swallowed whole. But there are important lessons to be learned from our Vietnam experience, and as President Bush noted, they are not necessarily the ones drawn by the doves who have made Vietnam "their" war.

Ellie