BIGGER DIFFERENCES THAN SIMILARITIES:

The lessons of Vietnam: Iraq desperately needs a political solution in the short term to make the war more manageable for the next president (Henry A. Kissinger, May 31, 2007, LA Times)

[A] brief recapitulation of the Indochina tragedy is necessary.

It must begin with dispelling the myth that the Nixon administration settled in 1972 for terms that had been available in 1969 and therefore prolonged the war needlessly. Whether the agreement, officially signed in January 1973, could have preserved an independent South Vietnam and avoided the carnage following the fall of Indochina will never be known. We do know that American disunity prevented such an outcome when Congress prohibited the use of military force to maintain the agreement and cut off aid after all U.S. military forces (except a few hundred advisors) had left South Vietnam. American dissociation triggered a massive North Vietnamese invasion, in blatant violation of existing agreements, to which the nations that had endorsed these agreements turned their backs.

Two questions relevant to Iraq are raised by the Vietnam War: Was unilateral withdrawal an option when Richard Nixon took office? Did the time needed to implement Nixon's design exhaust the capacity of the American people to sustain the outcome, whatever the merit?

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that U.S. withdrawal would start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group then advocated unilateral withdrawal.

Nor was unilateral withdrawal feasible. To redeploy more than half a million troops is a logistical nightmare, even in peacetime conditions. But in Vietnam, more than 600,000 armed communist forces were on the ground. They might well have been joined by large numbers of the South Vietnamese army, feeling betrayed by its allies and working its way into the good graces of the communists. The U.S. forces would have become hostages and the Vietnamese people victims.

A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.

Nixon correctly summed up the choices when he rejected the 1969 terms: "Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that — by our own actions — consciously turns the country over to the communists? Or shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable choice to survive as a free people?" A comparable issue is posed by the pressure for unilateral withdrawal from Iraq.

Of course, there is no North Iraq, its Viet Cong is even weaker, and there's no USSR or PRC. Shiastan & Kurdistan aren't loseable. A disorderly withdrawal would just exacerbate the internecine killing, though that's not necessarily a bad thing either.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2007 11:05 AM