THANKS MOOK:

The Wrong Analogy (MARK MOYAR, December 13, 2007, NY Sun)

The book's contributors allege that American and South Vietnamese counterinsurgency initiatives consistently failed to damage the Viet Cong insurgents or deprive them of popular support. Yet overwhelming evidence, much of it from Vietnamese communist sources, shows that the counterinsurgents seriously weakened the Viet Cong in 1962 and 1963 and destroyed them between 1968 and 1971. During the last years of the war, the communists fought a strictly conventional war, using troops imported from North Vietnam.

Of the authors who discuss the efficacy of counterinsurgency in the two wars, only Mr. Elliott pays much attention to Iraq itself. Mr. Elliott disputes the contention of counterinsurgency theorists that America's woes in Iraq resulted from failure to employ proper counterinsurgency techniques and transfer authority quickly to Iraqis. Mr. Elliott rightly points out that this argument disregards the Iraqi leadership problems stemming from de-Baathification, the dissolution of the army, and social fragmentation, which were worse than anything encountered in Vietnam.

Leadership within the Iraqi government remains a disturbing problem. Events in both Iraq and Vietnam, though, show that leadership can improve unexpectedly, and sometimes quickly and dramatically. In Vietnam, the quality of South Vietnam's local leaders soared in 1962 as a new generation of officers came of age. After dipping back down in the mid-1960s because of political turmoil, the caliber of South Vietnamese leaders rebounded in the late 1960s. In Iraq's Anbar province, widely deemed hopeless a year ago, the war has turned around recently because strong Iraqi leaders have joined the American side. The book's authors, and countless others, point to the ultimate defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 as proof of South Vietnamese ineptitude. In actuality, the South Vietnamese lost not because they lacked skill or popular support but because they lacked the supplies to keep fighting a conventional war. During the Easter Offensive of 1972, after all American ground forces had departed from Vietnam, South Vietnamese forces defeated a massive conventional onslaught by 14 North Vietnamese divisions, and they likely would have done the same in 1975 had Congress not slashed American military assistance, leaving the South Vietnamese without fuel for their aircraft or ammunition for their artillery, and without the American air support Richard Nixon had promised in 1973.

The aspects of the Vietnam-Iraq analogy absent from this book, and indeed from most public discourse, are as important as those present. The book does not mention that in both Vietnam and Iraq, America fought murderous fanatics while supporting indigenous people of more humane and moderate character. In both wars, the irresolution of the American government and the anti-war pronouncements of American citizens and congressmen emboldened the enemy. Ho Chi Minh began sending North Vietnamese Army divisions into South Vietnam in November 1964 because Lyndon Johnson's inaction and American public rhetoric convinced him that America would not fight for Vietnam. With Iraq, congressional denunciations of the war and threats to cut off funding have certainly encouraged the insurgents. Presidential vacillation would encourage them exponentially.

In both Vietnam and Iraq, America hurt itself by trying to transplant liberal government to a country that, because of cultural differences and the presence of civil warfare, did not possess the right soil for liberalism. America's reckless imposition of liberalization on South Vietnam in late 1963 and 1964 enabled the Vietnamese communists to infiltrate the cities, spawned popular protests that caused the Saigon government to lose face, and compelled the government's leaders to do the bidding of self-serving factions. In Iraq, precipitate liberalization created a divided and weak government, undermined social cohesion, and permitted the growth of hostile insurgent and vigilante organizations.

Congressional Democrats tried to slash funding for both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. Both times they did it less out of disgust with the war itself than out of disgust with the president. Both times they paid scant attention to the human misery that would likely result from American withdrawal. We know what happened in Vietnam: Congress succeeded in cutting the funding, the South Vietnamese consequently lost the war, and the North Vietnamese executed tens of thousands of people and caused hundreds of thousands of others to perish in re-education camps or escape boats.

Iraq actually started turning around prior to the surge, when the violence by the Shi'a, directed at the Sunni, convinced the latter they couldn't win.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2007 12:18 PM