Chilling Comparison of Vietnam and Iraq

I don't know about anyone else, but I am afraid. All this talk of cut'n run and we cannot pull out, Hubris! If this be (fair & balanced) fear for us all, so be it.

[x NYtimes]
The Lessons of a Quagmire
By MAX BOOT

This month's setbacks in Iraq — the downing of American helicopters, the suicide bombing of an Italian headquarters — have made President Bush's mantra of "progress" ring increasingly hollow. It's true that 80 percent of Iraq remains peaceful and stable, but we seem to be losing in the other 20 percent, mostly among Sunni Muslims who benefited from Saddam Hussein's rule. The escalating violence lends credence to critics who see parallels with Vietnam.

In truth, there is no comparison: In Vietnam, we faced more than 1 million enemy combatants backed to the hilt by North Vietnam and its superpower patrons, China and Russia. In Iraq we confront a few thousand Baathists and jihadis with, at most, limited support from Iran and Syria. But even if this isn't "another Vietnam," we can still learn important lessons from that earlier war about how to deal with the insurgency.

The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht. The military staged big-unit sweeps with fancy code names like Cedar Falls and Junction City, and dropped more bombs than during World War II. Neither had much effect on the enemy, who would hide in the jungles and then emerge to ambush American soldiers. Seeing that his strategy wasn't working, Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander, responded by asking for more and more troops, until we had 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And still it was not enough.

President Bush seems so intent on avoiding this mistake that the Defense Department has unveiled plans to cut the total number of troops in Iraq next year from 132,000 to 105,000. It is hard to see what, in the current dismal strategic picture, convinces the Pentagon that this makes sense. Such a slow-motion withdrawal will only embolden our enemies in Iraq and discourage our friends.

Senator John McCain has suggested that, far from reducing our forces, it's time to send another division. There are certainly tasks where we could use more troops, such as securing Iraq's porous borders and guarding arms depots that have become virtual Wal-Marts for terrorists. But as the experience of Vietnam suggests, more troops will not necessarily solve our central challenge: defeating guerrillas.

Sending more soldiers could even be counterproductive if it results in more civilian casualties, as it did in Vietnam, complicating our effort to win over the population. American forces in Iraq have tried hard to avoid "collateral damage," but they have nevertheless made some costly mistakes. A week ago, an army sentry shot dead the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City in Baghdad.

What proved most effective in Vietnam were not large conventional operations but targeted counterinsurgency programs. Four — known as CAP, Cords, Kit Carson Scouts and Phoenix — were particularly effective.

CAP stood for Combined Action Platoon. Under it, a Marine rifle squad would live and fight alongside a South Vietnamese militia platoon to secure a village from the Vietcong. The combination of the Marines' military skills and the militias' local knowledge proved highly effective. No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the Vietcong.

Cords, or Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was the civilian side of the counterinsurgency, run by two C.I.A. legends: Robert Komer and William Colby. It oversaw aid programs designed to win hearts and minds of South Vietnamese villagers, and its effectiveness lay in closely coordinating its efforts with the military.

The Kit Carson Scouts were former Communists who were enlisted to help United States forces. They primarily served as scouts and interpreters, but they also fought. Most proved fiercely loyal. They had to be: they knew that capture by their former Vietcong comrades meant death.

Phoenix was a joint C.I.A.-South Vietnam effort to identify and eradicate Vietcong cadres in villages. Critics later charged the program with carrying out assassinations, and even William Colby acknowledged there were "excesses." Nevertheless, far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000).

There is little doubt that if the United States had placed more emphasis on such programs, instead of the army's conventional strategy, it would have fared better in Vietnam. This is worth keeping in mind today as Sunni towns like Fallujah and Ramadi increasingly turn into an Arab version of Vietcong "villes." The Army is running some valuable counterinsurgency programs in Iraq, but too often it responds to major setbacks with big-unit sweeps (the ongoing one is called Iron Hammer). In a move reminiscent of some of the excesses of Vietnam, the military has taken to dropping 500-pound bombs and sending out M-1 tanks in a largely futile attempt to wipe out elusive foes.

To secure the Sunni Triangle, the army would do better to focus on classic counterinsurgency strategies. We need closer cooperation between Iraqi and coalition forces, as in CAP. We need better coordination between the military and L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, as in Cords. We need better intelligence to identify and neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in Phoenix. We might even want to recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their erstwhile comrades, as in the Kit Carson Scouts.

The common factor in all these initiatives is solid help from Iraqis. Only locals can pick out the good guys from the bad. Also — and this is a more delicate matter — Iraqis would be able to try some of the strong-arm tactics that our own scrupulously legalistic armed forces shy away from.

Excessive brutality can be counterproductive in fighting an insurgency (as the French discovered in Algeria), but there is also a danger of playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules against ruthless opponents. Our military — which is court-martialing an Army lieutenant colonel who fired his pistol into the air to scare an Iraqi suspect into divulging details of an imminent attack — may simply be too Boy Scoutish for the rougher side of a dirty war. Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny likely feel no such compunctions. More should be done to recruit relatives of those killed by the Baathists who would be eager to pursue a "blood feud" against Saddam Hussein's men.

While Mr. Bush's plans to accelerate the turnover of political authority to Iraqis and the deployment of Iraqi security forces make sense, for now the brunt of the military campaign will still have to be borne by Americans. If American forces fear to spend time on the streets of Fallujah and other Sunni towns, what hope is there for undertrained Iraqi security officers who will be branded collaborators by their own people?

Even if the American forces do everything right, there is no quick or easy end in sight. No halfway competent guerrilla force has ever been defeated as easily as the Iraqi army was in 1991 and 2003.

The Iraqi guerrillas, like the Vietcong, realize that a conventional military victory is beyond their grasp. Their only hope is to continue ratcheting up the cost of the conflict until the desire of the American public to continue the struggle is shattered. This worked in Vietnam. It might — sobering thought — work today. Is the American will to sustain casualties greater than our enemies' ability to inflict them? Upon that question will turn the future of Iraq.


Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

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