Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Christmas Memories

One of my favorite Christmas memories was watching the Bob Hope Christmas Special each year.  The show was of Bob’s Christmas tour for the USO to visit our troops, in Vietnam and elsewhere.  (Actually, the special wasn’t on at Christmas.  That was when he was there.  The TV special was on after Christmas, once he got back.) 

And the best part of the show was at the end, when one of the singers, and the troops, sang “Silent Night”.  Here is Jan Daley singing “Silent Night” from the 1971 tour:

 

Random Thoughts on Afghanistan, “Large Armies Overseas,” and “Unleashing Innovation”

In his speech on Afghanistan last Wednesday evening, President Obama said:

“Peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement.”

Actually, a political settlement cannot come just because one side wants it.  A political settlement needs both sides’ consent (or at least grudging acceptance).  If one side would rather fight than negotiate, then they get to decide.  I get more than a little tired of people who say the solution to a problem is to negotiate with the other side, without understanding that the other side has to be willing to negotiate, too.  If the other side thinks that they can achieve their goals better by fighting, they are going to do that.  And if we say that we are leaving (or are significantly reducing our presence), where is the incentive for the other side to negotiate, as opposed to waiting until we leave – unless, of course, they think we will be so desperate to negotiate, that they can get what they want that way.

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David Ignatius said this in The Washington Post:

“This Vietnam history is a caution against premature optimism about diplomatic solutions to deeply embeded conflicts, such as the one in Afghanistan.  But the fact remains, as is so often stated, that there is no military solution to such conflicts.”

Actually, that is not true.  In fact, Vietnam is an example where there was a military solution.   The military solution was simple:  The North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam in 1975, and they won.  Winning is a military solution.

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In his speech, President Obama also said:

“We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force -- but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.”

I’m sorry, President Obama.  Who are you saying wants to “deploy large armies overseas” “when … force can be targeted”?  Instead of saying you are against things that nobody is in favor of, tell us how you would do things differently than what real people either have done or are proposing to do.  Anybody can sound reasonable when they are comparing themselves with silly positions that aren’t held by other people.  What President Obama needs to do is to explain how his positions are different than positions that other people really do hold.

(Perhaps President Obama is trying to make a subtle reference to Iraq here.  Well, that doesn’t work.  To accomplish what President George W. Bush was trying to do in Iraq (and what lots of Democrats voted for when they got a chance to approve our going into Iraq before we went there) required a large army.  In fact, it probably required a larger army that we initially sent.  You may disagree with what we were doing.  But you can’t say that what we were doing did not require a large army.)

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And finally, near the end of his speech Wednesday evening, President Obama said:

“Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America's greatest resource -- our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries ….”

If President Obama really wants to “unleash innovation”, then he needs to get out of the way.  Government is not going to unleash innovation by what it does.  It will unleash innovation by what it doesn’t do.  By the new laws it doesn’t pass.  By the new regulations it doesn’t impose.  Our schools can’t even fire incompetent teachers (or at least very many of them).  Why do we think government can do anything positive to unleash innovation?  Except that President Obama and many of his supporters really do think that.  Which is depressing.

On Richard Nixon’s 98th Birthday

As Republicans around the country prepare to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday on February 6, let me mark the 98th birthday of our 37th president, Richard Nixon.  We were watching a show about a book on Dwight Eisenhower, and there was a lot of discussion about how history’s view of President/General Eisenhower has changed.  When President Eisenhower left office he was viewed as an uninvolved and ineffectual president.  Since he left office, this view has changed dramatically, and President Eisenhower is now ranked, in those polls historians do, as one of our better presidents. 

With today being Richard Nixon’s birthday, the question arose, will Richard Nixon ever be rehabilitated?  Will history’s view of him ever change?  My answer:  Probably not, for several reasons.

First, Richard Nixon has no natural constituency.  To be rehabilitated, you need a constituency, a group who supports you and who will work to change history’s view of you.  Richard Nixon has no such group.  The Republican Party, which is mostly conservative today, has its hero in Ronald Reagan.  They don’t need Richard Nixon, and many (most-?) of them don’t like many of President Nixon’s domestic policies, especially in economic matters.

The left and the liberals haven’t liked Richard Nixon since Alger Hiss.  Many of President Nixon’s policies were moderate, if not bordering on liberal.  Consider, for example, affirmative action in the construction trades, the Environmental Protection Agency, Title IX, and more.  But the Democrats and the left will look at Richard Nixon not getting us out of Vietnam fast enough (and actually trying to give the South Vietnamese a chance), campaigning on behalf of the “silent majority,” etc., and will, therefore, never see Richard Nixon as anything other than their arch-foe.

Obviously, historians can lead a re-appraisal of a president, but academia today is, and for at least the foreseeable future will be, dominated by the liberal left.  If history is written by the winners, Richard Nixon will not be rehabilitated because he has lost in academia.

President Nixon’s reputation will also continue to be damaged by those tapes, the tapes which ultimately forced his resignation.  Bits and pieces of the tapes are continually being released, and they make him look as bad as any of us would look if our private thoughts and conversations were released for public consumption.  I don’t know if Richard Nixon could have saved his presidency by destroying the tapes when their existence first became public, but he might have helped his future reputation by doing so.

But should President Nixon’s reputation be rehabilitated?  Certainly, I disagree with many of his economic policies.  Wage and price controls were a terrible idea, but maybe each generation or two needs to be reminded of how bad they are so they won’t adopt them again. 

Reaganites do not like President Nixon’s policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.  They like President Reagan’s “we win-you lose” policy for the Cold War.  But the Soviet Union wasn’t ready to be beaten in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.  Détente was what we could do at that time.

Richard Nixon is always given credit for opening relations with China, but did he do anything else?  Yes.  A couple of examples:  For all of the talk by Democrats of civil rights, etc., it was Richard Nixon’s Justice Department that got the schools in the South desegregated.  It wasn’t John F. Kennedy, and it wasn’t Lyndon Johnson.  It was Richard Nixon, with his “southern strategy” and all, who got the job done.

When Israel’s existence was threatened by surprise attacks of Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, it was Richard Nixon who immediately came to Israel’s aid, sending them the arms they needed to save themselves.  Supporters of Ronald Reagan should compare President Nixon’s immediate help of Israel with President Reagan’s late and faltering support of Great Britain when Argentina’s military dictatorship invaded the Falklands in 1982.

Finally, there were the prisoners of war in Vietnam.  President Nixon’s Vietnam policies were not as good as they could have been, and things turned out very badly in Vietnam (to a large extent because the Democratic Congress failed to live up to the promises of support that the United States made to the South Vietnamese people).  But our prisoners came home with honor.  Many of us may not have honored them as we should have once they came home, but President Nixon made sure that they could home with their heads held high – and that they came home.

Happy birthday, President Nixon.

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Note:  I apologize for not including any links.  I want to get this posted today (for obvious reasons), and I do not have the time to add links.

Afghanistan, President Kennedy and “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife”

Last week The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "Behind Afghan War Debate, A Battle of Two Books Rages":

"The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books – both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.

The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vie President Joe Biden is reading it now.

The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.

It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.

The two books – ‘Lessons in Disaster,’ on Mr. Obama’s nightstand, and ‘A Better War’ on the shelves of military gurus – have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama’s presidency."

I read A Better War eight years ago, before it became popular, when it was just a history of a part of the Vietnam War.* I have not read Lessons in Disaster, though I did watch a show on C-SPAN 2 this past weekend on the book. According to The Wall Street Journal, those in the White House are reading Lessons in Disaster while the generals are reading A Better War. This is unfortunate. It really ought to be the other way around. Each side would probably learn more.

But I would actually suggest two other books that would be more useful than either of these. The first, which is for the politicians (the generals have already read it), is the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It is not necessary to read all of it. The two forwards (by Lt. Col. John A. Nagl and by General David H. Petraeus and Lt. General James F. Amos) and the introduction (by Sarah Sewall) to the University of Chicago Press edition would be good enough (as I previously suggested here.)

The other book is Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by Lt. Col. John A. Nagl (ret.).** Col. Nagl compares the British success against the Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s with the U.S. failure in Vietnam, especially from the point of view of the relative abilities of the British Army and the U.S. Army to learn to fight a new type of war as it is being fought. Needless to say, Col. Nagl does not feel that the U.S. Army did a good job of learning how to properly fight an insurgency in Vietnam. (While Mr. Nagl agrees that General Creighton Abrams did a better job than his predecessors in Vietnam, he does not think the U.S. Army under General Abrams did as good a job as Lewis Sorley does in A Better War.)

Col. Nagl’s book shows the importance of not only getting the strategy and doctrine right but also implementing the strategy and the doctrine properly. You need a military that is willing to change its preconceived notions and learn to fight the enemy in front of it, instead of just fighting the war it wants to fight and following its standard doctrine even it isn’t working.

One other point from Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Over the years the keepers of the Kennedy flame have claimed that, if President Kennedy had lived and been re-elected in 1964, he would not have escalated our involvement in Vietnam. Instead of sending more troops in, he would have pulled the troops out. With Kennedy, we would not have had "Vietnam". But that theory has always seemed a little too convenient to me; a little too much based on what liberals want to believe Kennedy would have done. They turned against the war, so they say Kennedy would have, too.

But from reading Col. Nagl’s book, you see a different President Kennedy, you see a President Kennedy who was, from the beginning of his presidency, pushing the Army on counterinsurgency:

"John F. Kennedy took a deep personal interest in counterinsurgency almost immediately on taking office in January 1961: the first question he asked his aides after his inauguration was reportedly ‘What are we doing about guerrilla warfare?’

Kennedy was no stranger to the war in Vietnam, having visited the country as a congressman and as a senator. His understanding of the essentially political nature of insurgency – and of the dramatic changes in military tactics and operations required to defeat it – would present a substantial challenge to the U.S. Army’s preferred method for fighting insurgents. Roger Hilsman remembers an early discussion he had with Kennedy on the subject during which the president stated, ‘The most likely and immediate threat from the communists was neither nuclear war nor large-scale conventional wars, as in Korea, but the more subtle, ambiguous threat of the guerrilla. To meet this threat new military tactics had to be developed, which he hoped the Special Forces would do. But new political tactics also had to be devised, and, most importantly, the two – the military and political – had to be meshed together and blended.’ …

[T]he Special Group (Counterinsurgency), was created in a charter signed by President Kennedy on 18 January 1962. … The Special Group reflected the president’s personal interest in developing American capability for counterinsurgency operations. …

Kennedy worked very hard to get the army behind his counterinsurgency program, concentrating on the subject in his address to the West Point class of 1961 …" (pages 124-25)

I have not read enough other books on this time period to know if what I am about to say is accurate, but based on Mr. Nagl’s book, perhaps a more logical argument might be that President Kennedy would have avoided the disaster that was Vietnam, not by withdrawing our troops at the beginning of his second term, but by continuing to push the military and by eventually forcing them to actually adopt – and implement – a proper counterinsurgency strategy at an early enough time that it might have made a difference. Maybe the legacy of a Kennedy second term would not have been a Vietnam withdrawal but a Vietnam victory.

Which means that, if President Obama wants to emulate President Kennedy, instead of cutting back in Afghanistan, perhaps he needs to start paying closer attention to what is happening in Afghanistan and to make sure that a proper counterinsurgency is both followed and given enough resources to succeed.

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* See here for some earlier thoughts on Iraq, Vietnam, counterinsurgency warfare and A Better War.

** The title of the book comes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia): "To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."

President Obama at the United Nations

Michael Barone had this to say about President Obama’s speech to the United Nations last week:

"Much of the speech seemed to be an exercise in what Sigmund Freud called ‘projection,’ assuming that others think the way you do. Obama spoke as if the mullahs of Iran, the Kim Jong Il clan of North Korea, Vladimir Putin and his gang of oligarchs, and the rulers of China had the same gripes against the Bush administration as Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress. Hey, if we just close Gitmo, they'll realize that we're all in sympathy now."

Which is exactly how Democrats handled those portions of the Vietnam War they were in control of (i.e., from January 20, 1961 or whenever you want to say it started {whichever is later} through January 20, 1969 and from Richard Nixon’s resignation {or slightly before that} through the end).

They always thought that the North Vietnamese thought like we did; that the North Vietnamese would understand the signals we were giving them in only gradually escalating the bombing and then, at appropriate times, stopping the bombing to encourage negotiations. Except that the North Vietnamese didn’t think like we did. We wanted to negotiate a compromise solution; they wanted to win. They did, however, understand what our signals really meant; i.e., that we were more interested in negotiating than in succeeding

I hope we do not have a similar disconnect today with countries like Iran, etc., but I fear it is possible.

A Few More Thoughts on Afghanistan

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Jim Hoagland gave what may be a preview of President Obama’s policy on Afghanistan, which is to be rolled out (to use Mr. Hoagland’s phrase) starting this week. Let me comment on several of the things Mr. Hoagland said. (The excerpts from Mr. Hoagland’s article are indented.)

"According to U.S. and foreign officials, Petraeus – the regional commander for the Afghan and Iraqi theaters – persuaded the president last month that sending 17,000 new soldiers to Afghanistan will enable U.S. and allied commanders to reduce their reliance on the airstrikes and special forces' raids that have inflicted growing civilian casualties and provoked bitter outbursts from President Hamid Karzai."

This is an important point, and I am glad President Obama agreed to it. Airstrikes and special forces’ raids can kill terrorist leaders, but they also wind up killing lots of innocent civilians, too. They often create more enemies than they kill. With more troops on the ground, we can limit our reliance on airstrikes and raids. One other thing: I don’t care about President Hamid Karzai’s complaints as much I do the people of Afghanistan. Fewer of these strikes and raids will help us convince the Afghanis we are there to protect them, not kill them as collateral damage.

"Petraeus would also apply in Afghanistan another feature of the surge strategy that he championed in Iraq's Anbar province. U.S. intelligence estimates that only 5 percent of the Taliban are ‘hard core’ ideologues sympathetic to al-Qaeda, and Petraeus wants a significant outreach by provincial Afghan officials and the U.S. officers who work with them to the ‘recoverable’ Taliban."

Petraeus has an excellent idea here. One caution, though: David Kilcullen, an Australian army reservist and adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq, notes that "[i]f the Taliban sees that we’re negotiating for a stay of execution or to stave off defeat, that’s going to harden their resolve." In Iraq, President Bush made it clear we were not merely trying to stave off defeat. Whether President Obama’s administration – and his party – will convey a similar message of commitment in Afghanistan is unclear.

"The general acknowledges the great differences between the two countries. But his recent success in Iraq seems to drive his approach in Afghanistan. Holbrooke brings a different perspective, having experienced success in the Balkans but also having absorbed as a young diplomat the failure of pacification and counterinsurgency in Vietnam."

Mr. Hoagland both underestimates General Petraeus and is wrong when he talks about the failure of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. During our first three to four years in Vietnam (from 1965 to 1968), we did not try counterinsurgency. We used General William Westmoreland’s big unit/"search and destroy"/body count strategy. It was only when General Creighton Abrams took over in 1968 that we started to employ a proper counterinsurgency strategy. Unfortunately, by the time General Abrams’ "One War" strategy started to have some success, we were already on the way out and the strategy did not have time to succeed.*

If Richard Holbrooke thinks pacification and counterinsurgency "failed" in Vietnam, as opposed to not succeeding because the United States was leaving no matter what, then it is Mr. Holbrooke who has not absorbed the complicated history of our time in Vietnam. General Petraeus did his doctoral dissertation on the lessons of Vietnam. He understands both sides of the Vietnam experience, both where we had success and where we failed.

"All through the Afghan strategic review the ghosts of Vietnam have been tugging at the sleeves of some of the president's advisers, while others have focused on the (still fragile) stabilization of Iraq."

"[T]he ghosts of Vietnam" are truly President Obama’s Achilles heel when it comes to Afghanistan. Too many Democrats see Vietnam whenever they look at the possibility of sending our military overseas. We have gotten smarter since then. It took a while, but we have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and we can, if we want to, avoid the mistakes of Vietnam.

"The 'minimalist' camp, which includes Vice President Biden and the review's coordinator, Bruce Riedel, argued for modest goals -- essentially an Afghanistan that is not a base for international terrorism."

As John McCain’s and Joe Lieberman said in their article in The Washington Post last Thursday (and as I said here), the minimalist approach will not work – because the Afghanis won’t help us if we are not going to help protect them. You beat insurgencies with intelligence. You get intelligence from people. People will give you intelligence if you make a credible commitment to be there to protect them. The problem is too many of the veterans of the anti-Vietnam war left seem unwilling to make such a commitment.

"Holbrooke seems to have been in the middle. …

The arguments have been serious and intense enough for Obama to have delayed a decision beyond his original mid-March deadline …. When the strategy emerges, it is likely to be a synthesis that moves everyone toward a middle ground. That is the other thing about smart operators: They also know when they have to bridge differences and get to work."

If Mr. Hoagland is saying that President Obama is trying to come down in the middle, then we are in trouble. An approach of "some of this, some of that" may work in a Chinese restaurant, but it is not what we need in Afghanistan. President Obama needs to go with what will work on the ground in Afghanistan, not try to "synthesize" some middle ground designed mostly to make people in Washington happy.

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* For more discussion on General Westmoreland’s strategy in Vietnam versus General Abrams’, see here and other posts in the category "Vietnam".

Vietnam and Iraq: For the Last Time*

People have been comparing Iraq to Vietnam since before the United States went into Iraq. At first, the comparisons were mainly made by those who wanted to get out or who did not want to go in the first place.

More recently, those who support what we are doing in Iraq, or who worry about what might happen if we leave too early, have talked what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia after we left and what might happen in Iraq if we left in a similar way. President Bush has even made this point himself.

But let me make another comparison between Vietnam and Iraq. This is going to be a very broad comparison. It has to be broad because, while there are some similarities between Vietnam and Iraq, there are as many, if not more, differences. Also, Vietnam is over. The story in Iraq has not finished yet. We still have a chance to learn things from our experience in Vietnam that might help us in Iraq.

First, a few comments about Vietnam. When the United States first started sending large numbers of combat troops to South Vietnam in late 1964/early 1965, those troops mostly followed what was then our standard military strategy and tactics. We approached Vietnam as if it were a big-unit war. General William Westmoreland said that we would win with firepower. Our policy was search and destroy: We would search out the Communists and destroy them. This is, roughly, the story of We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. We would find the Communists, attack them and kill them. If necessary, we would go where we thought they would be and get them to attack us, so we could kill them. The measuring stick was the number of enemy killed, the body count. If we could kill enough of them, we would win. But it did not work that way. That was not, and is not, how you beat an insurgency.

In June of 1968, General Westmoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams. General Abrams brought a new strategy to the war. Instead of body count, the goal was protecting the people. General Abrams said that everything was part of "one war," and the key marker of success was population security.

Two events, however, overshadowed Abrams’ efforts and his new strategy. First, after the Communist attacks during Tet in 1968, Walter Cronkite told us the war was lost. He was wrong, but a lot of people believed him and shut their minds to what was really happening in Vietnam. Second, in 1969, President Nixon announced that the United States would start to withdraw its troops from Vietnam. The combination of these two things meant that people in the United States did not see how things were starting to change on the ground in South Vietnam as a result of Abrams’ new policy. Significant progress was being made in our counterinsurgency efforts against the Communists, but people in the United States did not realize it.

In other words, it was not until more than three years after we started introducing large numbers of combat troops into Vietnam that the Army implemented a proper counterinsurgency strategy. Even though the new strategy was not much noticed, it did work. In fact, our counterinsurgency efforts were going so well that, by 1972, it was the North Vietnamese who switched their focus away from insurgency tactics.** The North Vietnamese Easter Offensive in 1972 was regular, traditional warfare, with tanks and all, because we had done so well in our counterinsurgency efforts. The South Vietnamese, with our help, beat back the attacks.***

Three years later, the Communists tried again. This time the situation was different. Our airpower and advisers were gone. We had not kept our promise to keep the South Vietnamese supplied. We had cut South Vietnam off, both materially and psychologically. When the North attacked, the South crumbled.

However, what happened in 1975 does not mean Abrams’ "one war"/counterinsurgency doctrine failed. As I mentioned, the real success of Abrams’ ideas can be seen in the fact that the North Vietnamese abandoned insurgency tactics because they were no longer working. The fact the South Vietnamese could not win a conventional war against the North in 1975 only tells us that the North had a better army and allies who would give it more supplies than the South had in 1975.

Even though Abrams’ strategy was working, after 1975 our military reacted to Vietnam just like the rest of America did: They said no more Vietnams, and they promptly forgot everything they learned in Vietnam about counterinsurgency warfare. Abrams had figured it out, but the Army forgot it. The military turned its attention to Europe and beating the Russians.

Which brings us back to Iraq. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army fought the kind of big-unit war it knew how to fight. And it did a great job of beating Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army (just like it did in Kuwait in 1991).

The problem was that we were not prepared for what happened after we won. Apparently, we had not thought through what might happen after the initial fighting was over. In some ways, though, even if we had thought things through, even if we had known what was going to happen, it is unclear whether the military would have had the proper doctrine to deal with it.

The insurgency did not start right away, but even when it did, and even once we admitted there was an insurgency, the Army, or at least large parts of it, did not seem to know what to do about it or how to respond to it.

There were some generals in Iraq, like General Petraeus when he was there the first time, who knew what to do, but others who did not. It was not until late 2006 that the Army had a proper, up-to-date manual to tell our soldiers how to fight an insurgency.**** It almost seems we had to re-learn what we had forgotten after Vietnam about how to fight an insurgency.

What Abrams did in Vietnam would not have been a perfect fit for Iraq. The two wars are different, as are the two countries. But much of what we learned in Vietnam could have been helpful in Iraq. The counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam would have been a great place to start in responding to the insurgency in Iraq. Using that information from the beginning would have gotten us to where we are today a lot quicker.

It is that time delay that brings me back to the Vietnam comparison. All of the problems in Vietnam before Abrams took over in 1968 convinced many Americans that Vietnam was a lost cause or at least that we had to get out.

Abrams changed our approach and our tactics, but, as I said, I am not sure how many people cared or even realized it. Some thought we had already lost. Others were just happy that our soldiers were starting to come home. In any case, our progress went unnoticed (or at least was not sufficiently noticed).

Like in Vietnam, it has taken us too long to figure out and implement the right strategy and tactics to beat the insurgency in Iraq. Some people, like Senator Harry Reid, have told us that we have already lost. Others are just tired of Iraq and want to get out, no matter what.

But there are differences between Vietnam and Iraq, too. First, I think there may be more recognition now than there was in Vietnam that we have changed our approach to fighting the insurgency. While much of the talk has been about the surge, there has also been discussion of General Petraeus’ new tactics.

Second, I think President Bush may be able to sustain support for Petraeus’s counterinsurgency efforts longer than President Nixon did for Abrams’. I am not sure how much President Nixon focused on the tactics and doctrine that Abrams was using. I think President Bush is paying more attention.

Third, the opposition in Iraq is not in the same league as the North Vietnamese.

But where the comparison starts to be a concern is in timing. You can make the claim that we ran out of time in Vietnam. If it was not time that we ran out of, perhaps it was patience. Abrams’ ideas were working in South Vietnam, but we could not stay there long enough to help the South Vietnamese beat the North Vietnamese.

Will we run out of time in Iraq? Certainly, the failures of 2005 and 2006 tested the patience of the American people. A lot of Democrats have already declared defeat. But how do the American people feel about it? Will they give our efforts enough time?

Tied in with this, do we have enough troops to do the job? We probably do not have as many as we should have. We certainly do not have as many as the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual calls for. The military is too small (one reason for Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses in the 1990s was a decrease in the size of the military), and we wasted too many tours of duty/too much time before we got to the right strategy.

I hope that enough of the American people will see that things are improving in Iraq in a military sense. We finally have a general who knows what to do, who knows how to fight the war we have to fight in Iraq. But it has taken a long time for our political leaders and our military leaders to figure it out. Just like Vietnam.

Ultimately, the progress in Vietnam was not enough. But the enemy in Iraq should be easier to beat than the Communists in Vietnam. The question, then, is whether we have enough patience and troops – and will – to build on the progress we have made in Iraq. Or whether the progress will once again be too little and too late.

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* I say "for the last time" because I have written on comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq a number of times and I hope this is the last time.

** I understand there are people who would not agree with this statement or would not believe it. A detailed response is beyond the purpose of this post and would require more time than I have available. In general, I refer you to A Better War by Lewis Sorley.

*** An aside on the Easter Offensive (so-called because it started on Good Friday): The Easter Offensive failed for at least three reasons. First, North Vietnam’s plan was flawed. Instead of concentrating their forces, they split them into three parts, launching uncoordinated attacks in three different sections of the country. If they had concentrated in one of the areas, they might have succeeded. By dividing their effort, they were stopped. Second, the North Vietnamese were using tanks for the first time. Not surprisingly, they did a poor job in coordinating their tanks and their troops. (It is not easy to get it right the first time.) Third, the United Sates was still there. We may not have had ground forces, but we had airpower and we had advisers. Our planes provided incredible amounts of air support. We not only filled in for the artillery the ARVN lost early in the attack. We also provided close air support and B-52s. Our advisers provided enough advice, backbone stiffening and moral support to just barely hold off the Communists. The Easter Offensive was, in some ways, the kind of big-unit, conventional war that the Army wanted to fight in the Westmoreland years.

**** The new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by General David H. Petraeus and Lt. General James F. Amos of the Marine Corps, was published in December 2006.

Comparing Vietnam and Iraq – September 2007

Comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam were originally made by those who opposed our involvement in Iraq. More recently, however, supporters of our involvement in Iraq, including President Bush himself, have been making the comparisons.

While many of the comparisons have been overwrought, not all have been. Certainly, the initial failure of our leaders, both civilian and military, to properly understand the situation on the ground and implement the proper strategy and tactics is a fair comparison. So, too, may be a comparison of the success we are beginning to see in Iraq, with General Petraeus using proper anti-insurgency strategy and tactics, and the success which Creighton Abrams achieved in Vietnam.

Other comparisons, and this was President Bush’s point, have been made to what happened after we left Vietnam and what might happen if we leave Iraq too early or in the wrong way.

I agree with President Bush that the consequences for Iraq and, more importantly, for the Iraqi people of an early and hasty withdrawal of American and Coalition forces would probably be horrendous. But there are other consequences we need to consider, too, just as there were consequences of the way we left South Vietnam other than the killing fields, the re-education camps, and the boat people.

Those telling us to get out of Iraq now claim that the strategic consequences of how we left Vietnam were not that great. They say that no dominoes fell (other than Cambodia and Laos). The Soviet Union lost the Cold War and disintegrated within 17 years. We now trade with Vietnam. Etc. Etc.

I beg to differ.

While Vietnam was a war, it was also a battle, a battle in the Cold War. Losing one battle in a war, as we lost in Vietnam, does not mean you automatically lose the whole war. But it can make the next battles harder to win. It also encourages the other side to become more aggressive. That is what happened because of Vietnam.

For example, in the late 1970s, in an effort to split the Western alliance, the Soviet Union deployed medium range SS-20 missiles which targeted Western Europe. When the United States tried to counter this threat by putting cruise and Pershing missiles in West Germany, and elsewhere in Western Europe, a huge debate took place, both in Europe and in the United States. Many people did not want to respond to the Soviets, but fortunately leaders like Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl prevailed and the cruise and Pershing missiles were deployed. Without the loss in Vietnam, would we even have had to install these missiles and run these risks? Who knows?

We have also lost other "battles" that made future battles harder. In 1983, Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon in response to a deadly attack on our forces there. Bill Clinton did the same thing in Somalia ten years later.

I am not saying that it was wrong for Reagan to leave Lebanon or for Bill Clinton to leave Somalia. It may have been appropriate to leave those places, even though doing so made future battles harder, because staying would have been even harder still. Some battles, some places, are such that it makes more sense to withdraw and regroup, to be ready for the next battle, than to stay and continue to fight.

What the Vietnam comparison says for Iraq is this: Leaving Iraq without winning, leaving in a way that will look like a defeat to the rest of the world (and which can be trumpeted as a defeat by our enemies), will make the next battles in the fight against those enemies harder. The question then is whether staying in Iraq until we can achieve a good result and leave without losing, would be harder than the degree by which the next battles will be more difficult because we lost in Iraq.

In this regard, we must remember that the Islamic totalitarians use Vietnam and Lebanon and Somalia as examples of our inability to fight and beat insurgencies. Just fight long enough and the United States will give up. That is what they say. Having those examples in our past has made the battle in Iraq harder. If we now we leave Iraq in a way that can be seen as yet another loss, how much harder will the next battle be?

It may be that succeeding Iraq will be so hard that we should pull out now, even though it will make the next battle more difficult. I do not think so, but others may disagree. What I ask is that those who want to leave Iraq now understand that withdrawing now will make the next battle harder – and commit to being willing to undertake the extra effort to win next time.

They Don't Think Like Us

An article in the Australian of August 11, 2007, included the following comments of Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center (part of the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya in Israel):

"[Rubin] believes that the radical Islamist movements of the Middle East have reversed all the normal rules of warfare in a way that is disorienting Western policy-makers and Western public opinion. Rubin, who visited Australia this week, told me: ‘Historically there were certain principles of warfare. For example, the weaker power doesn't attack the stronger power. If you're suffering great losses you look for a cease-fire, and then if you're offered a decent compromise you accept it. The radical Islamists reverse all of this. The balance of forces doesn't matter to them because (in their view) they're heroic and their enemies are cowards.

‘Their casualties don't matter to them because their casualties are martyrs.’

Similarly the economy doesn't matter because they have no economic program. Anyway, their vision is religious, not economic. Rubin believes too many Western analysts and commentators project on to the Islamists a version of themselves, in which there are limited goals, potential trade-offs, a search for concessions. Instead, part of the Islamist power is that no matter what happens, they keep on fighting, for goals that no adversary can possibly concede.

‘It makes it very hard to understand this conflict in the West because it's so counter-intuitive,’ Rubin says.

The essence of the strategy is simply to keep imposing costs on the Islamist enemies. War without end."

Rubin makes an important point, one that is often missed in discussions about the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. As Rubin explains, Islamic totalitarians follow rules and have a mindset that are vastly different than ours.

This difference is important because it creates a disconnect between our way of fighting and their way of fighting. When they see casualties as martyrs and have goals that are apocalyptic, our approach does not match up well with theirs. For example, while we try to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, they do not care because for them death is a ticket to heaven. When we think we are compromising, they think we are weak. The problem is made worse because many of our leaders do not even realize there is a difference.

It reminds me of Vietnam. The anti-war protesters and their politician supporters were constantly telling us that all we had to do was negotiate with the North Vietnamese. If we would just sit down and talk, we could agree on a solution.

The fact is the North Vietnamese did not think like we did. They did not have the same goals or the same time frames or follow the same rules. They wanted to win, and they were willing to fight as long as necessary to do so. They would accept whatever casualties were necessary to reach their goal. While we thought a bombing halt would lead to negotiations, they saw it as an opportunity to increase traffic down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Too many of our "best and brightest" assumed the North Vietnamese thought like they did and based their views on what we should do on this terribly mistaken belief.*

Winning the "war without end" against the Islamic totalitarians requires understanding how they think and figuring out what we can do, within our values and under our rules, to beat their fanaticism. Assuming that they think like we do and have the same values as we do is wrong – and dangerous.

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* Some of our military leaders were just as bad. General William Westmoreland, for example, saw Vietnam as a war of attrition that we would win by firepower. (See here and Lewis Sorley, A Better War, 1999, p.1.)

Iraq: A Plan, Not Just a Surge

My first response to President Bush’s call to increase the size of the Army and the Marines Corps is: What took you so long? The answer may be that it had to wait until Don Rumsfeld left. Secretary Rumsfeld was a proponent of a small, light, fast military. While that can work for offensives against regular armies (see the invasion of Iraq), it does not work for the follow-up against counterinsurgents and nontraditional forces (see Iraq after the invasion). Rumsfeld was right to force the Army to learn to fight the next war, but he was wrong if he thought it would never have to also fight the last war. We need to be able to do both, and for the latter, we need a bigger military.

The Army says that 10,000 additional soldiers would cost $1.2 billion a year. I have no problem with that. I would have no problem if it cost more than that. I object to bridges to nowhere and tax breaks for corporations and all of the other pork that Congress doles out, but I do not object to paying and equipping our soldiers. There is nothing I would rather spend my tax dollars on than the men and women in our military.

However, supporting an increase in the size of our military is not the same as supporting a short-term increase in the number of troops in Iraq. While President Bush has not said what he is going to propose for Iraq, there is a lot of speculation he will increase the number of troops in Iraq, perhaps as a temporary surge to support a big offensive against the insurgency.

The problem with this is that I do not think it will work. I doubt the insurgency (or civil war or whatever you want to call it) can be defeated with the kinds of strategies and tactics we are using now. If attacked, the insurgents will just fade away and come back to fight again on another day in another place. The insurgents cannot be defeated in one big battle or one big operation. The key has to be providing security for the people of Iraq, and this is a long-term project that needs different tactics.

For example, William Westmoreland‘s search and destroy tactics did not work in Vietnam, but Creighton Abram’s "one war concept" was working. As General Abrams explained to Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander in Chief, Pacific:

"[T]he one war concept puts equal emphasis on military operations, improvement of RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces] and pacification – all of which are interrelated so that the better we do in one, the more our chance of progress in the others." *

One journalist said, referring to Abrams emphasis on disrupting the enemy’s supplies, "Where Westmoreland was a search-and-destroy and count-the-bodies man, Abrams proved to be an interdict-and-weigh-the-rice man." According to Abrams, the appropriate measure of success was not body count but population security:

"‘The body count does not have much to do with the outcome of the war. Some of the things I do think important are that we preempt or defeat the enemy’s major military operations and eliminate or render ineffective the major portion of his guerrillas and his infrastructure – the political, administrative and para-military structure on which his whole movement depends.’"

What Abrams was talking about was disrupting the enemy’s supplies and cutting the enemy off from the sources of support (usually involuntary support) in the local population by providing safety and security for the local people.

It seems to me we may need some variation of General Abram’s concepts in Iraq today. In the Wall Street Journal article also noted here, a major who served as a company commander in Baghdad said that "[j]unior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure," but "[a] lot of senior officers just don't get it."

The new draft counterinsurgency doctrine mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article sounds a lot like what Creighton Abrams did in Vietnam. But is it being followed? The report in the Wall Street Journal is not encouraging, just as the idea of sending more troops for a short term surge is not encouraging. A short term surge indicates a mindset looking more at big battles and body counts than what we need to be doing, which is "providing security, finding friends, and fixing infrastructure."

I agree with those who say we must not lose in Iraq. I also agree with those who say we should not surge without a purpose. The key to both of these is making sure that we get our strategies and tactics right – and realizing that, even once we get our strategies and tactics right, it is going to take time to complete the job. Short terms surges and big operations are not going to get the job done. It is going to take slow, hard work.

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* For these quotations and more on Abrams’ tactics in Vietnam, see A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, by Lewis Sorley, especially chapters 2 and 3.