The View from Right Field

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.

Who's Willing to Pay More Taxes for This?

There was an article in last Thursday’s Chicago Tribune about sharply higher prices for birth control pills at health centers at colleges and universities around the country. The increase was the result of a change in a federal law that had previously allowed drug makers to provide prescription birth control pills to health centers at a big discount.

One student, whose pills increased in cost from $12 a month to nearly $50, said she had to "do less" because of the increase – "less shopping, less going out to eat."

Everybody willing to pay more taxes – themselves – so students do not have to "do less," please line up now.

Economic Conservative/Social Liberal. Social Conservative/Economic Liberal. Who Do You Trust?

Since Ronald Reagan and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, most Republicans, at least nationally, have been conservative both economically and socially.

There have, however, always been some Republicans who are conservative economically but are somewhat more liberal socially.

The race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is seeing the emergence of a Republican who is conservative socially but liberal economically.

Mike Huckabee has all the right positions socially. He is pro-life, pro-gun rights, and anti-gay marriage. But when it comes to economic issues, his conservatism seems to disappear. For example, he claims to be in favor of free trade, but what he says in his speeches is populist protectionism. While governor of Arkansas, he threatened investigations for price-gouging if gasoline prices went up too much after September 11. (See here and here.)

Economically conservative, socially liberal. Socially conservative, economically liberal. As between the two, I would pick the former. A president can have a bigger impact on things like government spending, taxes, free trade and regulation than he can on gay marriage, abortion and gun control.

When Good News Isn't News

As bad news from Iraq has decreased, so have news reports from Iraq. Apparently, success, as seen in the absence of car bombs and lower numbers of casualties, and the hard, difficult work of maintaining security so people can live normal lives again, just isn’t as interesting or newsworthy as bombs and deaths and apparent failure.

In that spirit, I wanted to give a brief history of the United States’ involvement in World War II:

• December 1941 – Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
• January - June 1942 – Massive losses to German U-Boats in the North Atlantic.
• April 1942 – Bataan surrenders.
• May 1942 – Corregidor surrenders.
• February 1943 – Americans suffer huge losses at Kasserine Pass in North Africa.
• August 1943 – George Patton removed from command after slapping a soldier.
• January 1944 – Allies bottled up on beachhead at Anzio in Italy.
• June 1944 – U.S. fails to reach first-day targets in Normandy invasion; disarray among parachutists and gliders result in loss of countless troops.
• June/early July 1944 – US forces fail to break out of Normandy.
• December 1944 – Massive German counteroffensive in Ardennes pushes US forces back.
• February 1945 – 6,800 troops die and 20,000 are wounded trying to take Iwo Jima.
• April - June 1945 – 5000 American sailors die in Japan’s kamikaze campaign at Okinawa.

Break

What with an upcoming business trip and Thanksgiving, I will not be posting for the next couple of weeks (unless I have something I just have to say). See you near the end of November.

Paul Tibbets and the Bomb

This is a somewhat belated comment on the death of Paul Tibbets, Jr., on November 1. As probably everybody knows, Paul Tibbets piloted the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Tibbets’ death gave people yet another chance to talk about the appropriateness of the United States’ decision to drop the bomb. (Normally, the question comes up on August 6 each year, but this year we get a second chance.)

The discussions were about the same as usual, though perhaps a little more restrained than what sometimes happens in August, perhaps out of respect for the fact Tibbets had just died.

Actually, I have a fairly firm opinion on whether we did the right thing in dropping the bomb on Japan. I think it was the right decision, and I am glad we did it. But then I have a conflict of interest.

In August of 1945 my dad was in the Philippines. If there was going to be an invasion of Japan, he was going to be in it. Now, he was in the artillery, so he might have been in a little better position than those in the infantry. I don’t know. But it still would have been tough. Given what happened at Iwo Jima and all those other places, who knows if he would have made it home.

Like I said, when it comes to Hiroshima, I have a conflict of interest. If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, my dad might not have come home – and I wouldn’t be here.

Greg Maddux – For the 17th Time

It is not surprising that Greg Maddux won his 17th Gold Glove earlier this week. But I do have a complaint on the article at MLB.com about his winning. The article said, correctly, it was the 17th time Maddux had won. But the article went on to say: "Brooks Robinson has the most Gold Gloves for a position player. … 16."

No! Greg Maddux has the most Gold Gloves for a position player because he is a position player. When Greg Maddux is pitching, it’s almost like there is an extra infielder – because he is a fielder.

There are plenty of pitchers who think their only job is to throw the ball. Greg Maddux understands he can get batters out by throwing the ball – and by fielding the ball.

If you want to see the proper way for the pitcher to throw the ball to first base after fielding a ground ball, watch Greg Maddux. He doesn’t underhand it or lob it or make some other silly throw. He just fields the ball and makes a regular throw. It’s simple, it’s safe, and it’s not going to get messed up.

In fact, if you want to make a video to teach kids how to field when they are pitching, all you have to do is get some tapes of Greg Maddux pitching. A couple edits here and there and, presto, you have your tape. And I bet it would win a Gold Glove

In Chicago You May See a Man Dance With His Wife, But You Won't See This

Both Cook County and the City of Chicago say they need more money and are asking for tax increases. After all, if you’re a government and you need money, what else is there to do but raise taxes?

An article by Amity Shlaes on Bloomberg.com tells how it was done in Medellin, Colombia. First, the people of Medellin elected a new, reform mayor. To help people who lived in hillside shacks get down the hills to jobs in the city, the mayor came up with an ingenious idea: Build ski lifts and bring them down in eight-person gondolas.

But where could a place like Medellin find the money to build the ski lifts:

"[Mayor] Fajardo says funding the concrete-and-wire Metrocable wasn't so hard: ‘It's remarkable how much money there is to spend when you don't keep it for yourself and your friends.’"

Why do I think this idea will never be tried in Cook County or Chicago?

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Note: The title to this post is, obviously, taken from the lyrics to "Chicago":

"On State Street that great street I just want to say
They do things that they don't do on Broadway - say
They have the time the time of their life
I saw a man and he danced with his wife
In Chicago, my home town"