Earlier in the week Bush did surprise reporters by appearing before them after meeting with the family of Army infantryman Chris Hill, killed by a bomb in the Iraq town of Fallujah. “We’ve got to stay the course and we will stay the course,” said Bush, who appeared teary-eyed. Hill’s father-in-law, Douglas Cope, had not been eager for the meeting with the president because, he told NEWSWEEK, he was concerned that the encounter would be “political.” But Cope reported that Bush was emotional and that the president told the dead soldier’s family, “I promise this job will be finished over there.” Cope added: “That really was what I wanted to hear. We cannot leave this like Vietnam.”
It’s the war that never seems to go away. Perhaps we should feel comforted that Bush had time for nature tours and wasn’t hunched over a map in the White House basement like Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, picking bombing targets at 2 a.m. But, having bet his presidency on Iraq, Bush knows that if the war spins out of control, he may end up like Johnson, a political casualty of war. Bush wants to be seen as a “war president” who is decisive and acts. But now comes the real test: can he persuade the American people to make the sort of sacrifices and long-term commitments that go with being the world’s sole superpower in what increasingly looks like a clash of civilizations?
Hard questions–and public opinion–reflect the complexities and ambiguities facing the president and his team. According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, a majority (57 percent) of Americans still believe that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do. But close to half (46 percent) say they are not confident that the United States will ever bring the country stability and democracy. And four in 10 Americans are very concerned that Iraq will become another Vietnam.
Sen. Robert Byrd is now calling for a “road map out of Iraq” and mournfully alludes to the “echoes of Vietnam.” Another liberal warhorse has weighed in, too. “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy. “Iraq has developed into a quagmire.” Measured objectively, the comparison to Vietnam is something of a stretch. That war dragged on for more than a decade and cost 50,000 lives. There were times during the Vietnam War when America was losing 500 men a week. A year in, the death total in Iraq stands at 458 soldiers killed in action. In some ways, a more accurate analogy might be to Lebanon, where Israel plunged into a power vacuum of feuding religious factions during the 1980s and was trapped in a hellhole of bombings and kidnappings. Last week Islamic extremists in Iraq began hijacking foreign civilians, including three Japanese, and appeared to capture and hold hostage several American contractors. Bush could face a full-fledged hostage crisis–and confront the sort of dilemma Jimmy Carter did in Iran in 1980.
And yet to most Americans, Vietnam is the recurring nightmare. To anyone over the age of about 50, last week felt a little like the end of February 1968, when the Tet offensive was raging through the cities of South Vietnam and Americans were starting to wonder if the war would ever end. A year after Iraqi civilians (with the help of U.S. Marines) toppled Saddam’s statue, America suffered through its worst week of combat since the supposed end of the war, with more than 40 soldiers dead and hundreds more wounded. During Tet, a Viet Cong suicide squad penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon before being gunned down. Nothing quite that dramatic happened in Baghdad. Yet Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, had to cancel an appointment on the edge of the so-called Green Zone, where the Americans are headquartered, when security forces found an unexploded bomb possibly waiting for his arrival.
Though Senator Byrd got a little carried away with his prediction that Iraq would turn into a debacle of epic proportions (he recited “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the Senate floor), and Senator Kennedy is, well, Senator Kennedy, there are, indeed, uncomfortable echoes of Vietnam in Iraq. So far they are heard mostly by the chattering classes. One significant difference between now and then–no draft–has kept down dissent in the heartland. Even so, it is possible to lay Iraq and Vietnam side by side and see disturbing parallels, as well as critical differences–both of which shed light on what must be done going forward.
For all the tremendous reforms by the military since Vietnam, the battlefield challenges are eerily similar. The generals are still torn between winning hearts and minds with soccer games and reconstruction projects–and going in hammer- and-tongs to obliterate the enemy. The experience of the Marines is illustrative. For most of the occupation in Iraq, the Marines regarded the U.S. Army as too heavy-handed. With its emphasis on heavy armor, the Army liked to stand back and bombard the enemy from afar with artillery and tanks. The Marines, by contrast, preferred to go in “light”–to make friends while patrolling the streets, even taking off the dark glasses that many Arabs find offensive.
The leathernecks are now finding, however, that the desert can be as deadly and confusing as the jungle. Because the Marines sent most of their tanks home, they found themselves badly missing their armor when Fallujah blew up last week (and even had to suffer the indignity of asking the Army to loan a few tanks). When Marines came under fire from a mosque, they had to call in an airstrike. A 500-pound bomb dropped from a jet, even a satellite-guided smart bomb, is a blunter instrument than a tank shell. Arab-language TV claimed that the bomb killed more than a score of civilians at prayer (a claim rejected by a Marine spokesman).
Then there is the question of adding “boots on the ground” in a distant nation where the situation is murky at best and the lure of throwing more force at the problem is hard to resist–another debate that also consumed Washington in the 1960s. “The bigger the better” is an old American reflex, but today’s military is divided over whether more troops would really help–or just provide more targets for Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. Americans seem to accept that more troops may be required to pacify Iraq, but the appetite for a long stay is very limited. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, 63 percent support increasing U.S. personnel in Iraq in response to the recent attacks on Coalition forces; 31 percent are opposed. But by 50 to 34 percent, they oppose extending the June 30 deadline for turning over power to the Iraqis, and the poll suggests that most Americans would support large troop deployments in Iraq only for another year or two.
And who, exactly, are our troops–the ones there and the ones who may find themselves in theater before it’s all over–fighting? Just as in Vietnam, it is not clear that America understands the enemy. The Viet Cong may have been communists, but they were nationalists first–and prepared to fight however long it took to free their country. The Iraqis are Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, age-old enemies, but there are disturbing signs that the Sunnis and Shiites were willing to bury their differences, at least for the moment, in the common cause of burying Americans.
Vietnam had its Best and the Brightest, brilliant but sadly wrongheaded (and hubristic) government officials who tried to convince themselves that they were on the right track long after wiser heads had detected a march of folly. Iraq may have its own cast for a best-selling tragedy.
The Iraq war was supposed to banish forever the ghosts of Vietnam and America’s long, slow slide into paper tigerdom. By demonstrating resolve and “shock and awe,” America would show the Arab world that it had not gone soft, frightened off by terrorist bombs or the fear of sending home a few body bags. At least that was the hope of President Bush and most notably the gung-ho hawks in his war cabinet, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who also hoped that America could go in with a bang–and get out quickly). But now America finds itself entangled in a conflict that does look suspiciously like an open-ended war for vague or shifting strategic aims on behalf of an ungrateful, if not incomprehensible people.
Not a quagmire, not yet. But the atmospherics have a distinctly familiar feel. At a recent Washington dinner party attended by some famous names from the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite, the conversation went something like this:
Former Senior Administration Official: I had real doubts about going in there…
Echoes Around the Table: Me too, me too, but…
Chorus: But we have to stay the course. We can’t cut and run.
Lone Voice (who has imbibed one more, or perhaps one less, glass of wine than the others): Why not?
Chorus: American credibility!
The exact same conversation could have been heard in a dozen Georgetown salons on almost any given weekend night from about 1966 to the winter of 1968, when the establishment decided that it was time to get out, one way or the other.
In their own ways, both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. With Southeast Asia, Western leaders worried that the spread of communism would affect our security; with Iraq, the White House worried that the spread of the means of terrorism (from ideology to weapons) would get Americans killed, either at home or abroad. Still, neither posed an imminent threat to us, though the administration can rightly argue that the stakes for ordinary Americans are actually higher in Iraq than they were in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong never attacked an American city. Saddam may not have had direct ties to Al Qaeda, but the jihadists are eager to fill his shoes. If Iraq is allowed to become a failed state, it is likely to create a breeding ground for terrorists who will attack the United States, if they possibly can.
Bush does appear from time to time with the families of dead or wounded soldiers, and he always calls for steadiness and sacrifice. Yet Bush’s top advisers sometimes look like Robert McNamara, LBJ’s Defense secretary, as well as the various Vietnam-era generals who were always seeing light at the end of the tunnel. There is one more disquieting similarity between then and now: the beginnings, at least, of a credibility gap.
All last week administration officials danced about to downplay the insurrection in terms reminiscent of what reporters called the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the out-of-touch official briefings in Saigon. Early on White House spokesman Scott McClellan explained the Shiite uprising in the south as “one individual who is seeking to derail democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people.” He was referring to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Islamic extremist graduate student with ties to the mullahs of Iran. Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army may number only 5,000 to 6,000 men, but then, as columnist George Will has noted, the Russian Revolution was started by a few thousand determined radicals in a country of 150 million. By Wednesday McClellan was arguing with reporters who demanded to know about a two-front war (Sunnis to the north, Shiites to the south, and unsettling signs of alliance between them). “A relatively small number of extremists elements… are trying to take advantage of the situation,” the White House spokesman insisted. By Friday the terminology was “a minority of extremist elements.”
Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, there were testy exchanges between Secretary Rumsfeld and his interrogators on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rumsfeld dismissed the insurrection as a “flare-up.” Sen. John McCain was still simmering when he later spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter: “For Rumsfeld to say ’there are good days and bad days’ when they are taking control of cities… well, it’s a little more than a flare-up, a lot more than a bad day.” McCain said that Bush needs to make a nationwide speech laying out the difficulties involved and the sacrifices required–more troops, more time, more will.
Will the president rise to the challenge? Out in Crawford, as he prayed with his mother and father, wife and daughters over Easter weekend, Bush was undoubtedly seeking to renew his resolve. He is in the same difficult spot faced by earlier presidents who have sent troops into harm’s way and could not find a way to bring them back. In America’s long and violent history, its people have been ready to fight–small wars, big wars, “police actions,” world wars, even, a century and a half ago, a gargantuan Civil War. But when the fighting is done, Americans like to come home and try to forget about it. It is not really in the American character to be effective imperialists. With few exceptions, Americans have been too decent and freedom-loving, as well as too nativist, impatient and inward-looking, to want to colonize or “pacify” any country for long.
Persuading Americans to commit abroad has been a challenge for any president. After World War II, as the cold war loomed, most Americans just “wanted to go to the movies and drink Coke,” the statesman Averell Harriman said. President Harry Truman had to persuade them to spend billions to rebuild Europe and send their sons to far-off places to guard against communism. Truman achieved this in part by hyping the communist threat (or as his Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, “by making things clearer than the truth”).
Bush has declared an ambitious foreign policy, vowing that he will not hesitate to “pre-empt” terrorist threats. He has demonstrated a willingness to promote liberty, even by going to war. But he has been less than forthright about explaining the cost and sacrifice required by such undertakings (not unlike LBJ, who tried to have both “guns and butter” during Vietnam). Bush’s opponent this November, John Kerry, has been no more willing to step up. He talks about the need for honesty and more troops, but then seems to suggest that the United Nations can bear the burden, a somewhat wishful suggestion and, in any case, too late.
Pacifying Iraq–as well as stopping further terrorist attacks on the United States–will require an enormous act of national will and the abandonment, or at least diminution, of some taken-for-granted freedoms. The Vietnam-era draft is gone, but as anyone in the Reserve or National Guard can attest, protecting America from the wrath of Islamic extremism requires sacrifice and stoicism. Are other Americans willing to shoulder their share?
In Vietnam, Johnson had most of the country with him for most of his presidency. Inspired by JFK’s “bear any burden” rhetoric, Americans were willing to lose tens of thousands of their sons before they finally listened to Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman and national father figure who turned against the war in the winter of 1968, at the height of Tet.
Bush is a long way from such a moment. He has the virtue of taking better care of himself than LBJ, who soaked his miseries in Cutty Sark, and he has the beginnings of an argument that could sustain Americans through some bad “flare-ups” ahead. That is the need for national resolve to face a threat far greater than insurrection in Iraq–the threat of more “spectacular” terror attacks against the United States.
The failure, or lack, of national resolve is the real story behind the 9/11 commission hearings that have captivated many TV viewers over the past two weeks. In her long-awaited public testimony, national-security adviser Rice stirred up the talk-show hosts by admitting that on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks, the top-secret PDB–Presidential Daily Briefing, his morning menu of hot intelligence tips–was titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Her inquisitors pounced: here was the smoking gun! Bush had been warned yet failed to act. (On Saturday, the White House declassified the PDB, which showed intelligence that Al Qaeda planned attacks on Washington and New York.)
The problem with this analysis is that it was probably too late to stop 9/11. Even if Bush had jumped on his desk and shouted “Do something!” it’s unlikely much would have been done. As Rice pointed out, the PDB made no mention of when and where the strike might come. The bureaucracy was too sclerotic and risk-averse to really go after shadowy terrorists. Rice observed, correctly, that until there were thousands of dead Americans after 9/11, the country lacked the will to stop terrorist attacks. Neither the narrowly elected Bush nor his scandal-plagued predecessor, Bill Clinton, had the clout to rally the county and force the bureaucracy to do what needed to be done: assassinate Osama bin Laden and his associates and unleash the intelligence services to spy inside the United States.
So far, there is only one group of Americans who have had to bear the true burden: the servicemen and -women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. There is, to be sure, some restlessness in the ranks. Military Families Speak Out reported receiving so many calls and e-mails from people wishing to join their antiwar cause that they lost count. And yet there are families like the Rippetoes of Gaithersburg, Md. Capt. Russell Rippetoe, 27, was an Army Ranger killed a year ago when a bomb-laden car exploded at a checkpoint he was guarding in northwest Iraq. A pregnant woman had run from the car just moments before, asking for help. Rippetoe had moved toward her. Both he and the woman were killed; Rippetoe was the first Iraq combat casualty buried at Arlington cemetery.
Rippetoe’s father, Joe, had been an Army Ranger who served two tours in Vietnam. “If my son were here today, and I wasn’t disabled, we’d both put our uniforms on and say, ‘Where to?’ " said Rippetoe, 67. His wife, Rita, said of her son’s death, “If I look at it through the eye of a mother, I am devastated.” But, she added, the United States must stay the course in Iraq. “I don’t think you can go into a place and start something so significant and just walk out… As family members of soldiers serving in wartime, we have to have faith. It’s not blind faith, but it’s a deep faith.”
It is such faith that sustains Americans and drives them forward. We do best when we defend freedom without trampling it, defeat tyranny without becoming tyrannical, and understand what is worth the blood of our children and what is not. That is the true lesson of Vietnam.
