It’s been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years – when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam has been the shadow war we’re still fighting. The Bush administration began its 2003 invasion by planning a non-Vietnam War scenario right down to not having “body counts,” those grim, ridiculed death chants of that long-past era. His administration, as the president put it before the November midterm elections, wasn’t going to be a “body-count team.” But the Vietnam experience has proven nothing short of irresistible in a crisis. Within the last month, after Bush himself bemoaned the lack of a body count in the vicinity, the body count slipped back into the news as a way to measure success in Iraq.
And that was only the beginning. With the recent plummeting of presidential approval ratings and the dismal polling reactions to Bush’s “new way forward” in Iraq, the Vietnam scenario is experiencing something like a renaissance. Sometimes, these days, it seems as if top administration officials are simply spending their time preparing mock-Vietnam material for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The recent “surge” plan, for instance, brought that essential Vietnam vocabulary word, “escalation,” back into currency. (It was on Democratic lips all last week.) Even worse, the president’s plan was the kind of “incremental escalation” that military commanders coming out of Vietnam had sworn would never, ever be used again.
In any case, when Republican Sen. (and surge opponent) Chuck Hagel questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the E-word last week, she denied it was an appropriate moniker. Here’s what she suggested instead. “I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad.” (And, of course, Stewart promptly pounced…)
But that, too, was only the beginning. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, called the president’s plan “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, just appointed senior military commander in Iraq in charge of the Baghdad “surge,” turned out to have written a doctoral thesis, much publicized last week, entitled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era.” (“Don’t commit American troops, Mr. President unless… You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces… [and] you provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly…”)
Part of the plan Petraeus is evidently to put into effect involves an urban version of what Los Angeles Times reporter Julian E. Barnes labels “a spectacular failure” of the Vietnam War, the “strategic hamlet” program in which whole communities were to be sealed off from the “insurgents” of that era. For Baghdad, the military is now redubbing these – with another obvious bow to Stewart’s show – “gated communities.” (“‘You do it neighborhood by neighborhood,’ said the Defense official. ‘Think of L.A. Let’s say we take West Hollywood and gate it off. Or Anaheim. Or central Los Angeles. You control that area first and work out from there.'”)
Fears that Iraq’s collapse into civil war (or a U.S. withdrawal) might knock down other states in the region like so many tenpins, as former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski reminded us in a Washington Post op-ed, “Five Flaws in the President’s Plan,” brought another Vietnam classic back to the fold: “the (falling) domino theory.” With the president’s latest threats against Syria and Iran – “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq…” – yet another oldie but goodie from that era has reappeared: “hot pursuit,” as in pursuing the commies (or Islamo-fascists or Shi’ite renegades or al-Qaeda terrorists) across the Cambodian or Syrian or Iranian border. And speaking of Cambodia, Congress did at one point prohibit the use of funds to pursue war in that country, exercising its constitutionally guaranteed power of the purse, a thought that only in the last weeks has made it back from the critical wilderness into the mainstream as a respectable, debatable position for any politician.
But perhaps it’s no more complicated than this: In a world in which self-determination and nationalism are bedrock values, once you’ve tried to occupy a country, whether under the banner of anti-Communism or anti-Islamo-fascism, whether claiming to be in support of the “Free World” or “freedom” itself, it may no longer matter which counterinsurgency tactics you use or strategies you adopt, or whether you count bodies or not. Once you’ve taken such a path – as long as you don’t make the decision to withdraw – you may always find yourself in that limited land of options that we like to call “Vietnam.”
In fact, Vietnam wasn’t the only war in the vicinity in these last weeks. Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost (which the president claimed to have read in a recent interview) and a remarkable history of the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, is now at work on a new book on World War I. And here’s what he noticed…Tom
“The Big Push”
Mired in the trenches of the Iraq fiasco
by Adam Hochschild
If we needed more evidence that those surrounding President George W. Bush have a tin ear for the lessons of history, it came 10 days ago when National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley referred to increasing the number of American troops in Iraq as “the big push” that would bring victory closer.
“The Big Push” is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge that was supposed to bring another war to victory. For months beforehand, the Big Push was how British cabinet ministers, propagandists, generals, and foot soldiers talked about the 1916 Battle of the Somme. (It is even the title of a later book on the subject.)
The First World War had been in a deadly stalemate for the better part of two years. A string of horrific battles had revealed the huge toll of trench warfare: Defenders could partially protect themselves by building deeper trenches, concrete pillboxes, and reinforced dugouts far underground. But when you went “over the top” of the trench to attack, you were disastrously vulnerable – out in the open, exposed to deadly, sweeping machine-gun fire as you clambered slowly across barbed wire and bypassed water-filled artillery-shell craters.
So what did the Allies do? They attacked. At the time, in numbers of men involved, it was history’s largest battle. The plan was to break open the German defense line, send the cavalry gloriously charging through the gap, and turn the tide of the war. The result was a catastrophe.
The British army lost nearly 20,000 killed and some 40,000 wounded or missing on the first day alone. German machine gunners, after waiting out the long preliminary bombardment in their fortified bunkers underground, returned to the surface in time to mow down the advancing soldiers. After four and a half months of fighting, British and French troops had suffered more than 600,000 casualties. The Big Push had gained them roughly five miles of muddy, shell-pocked wasteland.
Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it’s like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.
Every piece of evidence from these past nearly four bloody years makes clear that many Sunnis and Shi’ites alike are driven to rage by the very presence of American soldiers walking Iraqi streets, barging into Iraqi homes, and arresting or killing people who may or may not be insurgents. Furthermore, the people arrested or killed, however unsavory, are sometimes the only force protecting their communities against attacks from the opposite side in an extremely bitter civil war. Therefore, as sociologist Michael Schwartz explained the matter some six weeks ago, a previous joint U.S.-Iraqi counterinsurgency drive in Baghdad, of exactly the type now being planned, actually increased civilian casualties.
There are huge differences, of course, between the First World War and the current fighting in Iraq. But even beyond the optimistic talk of the Big Push, there is another eerie resemblance between the two conflicts. In both cases, a great power was itching to launch an invasion and seized on a handy excuse to do so. For the Bush administration, of course, the excuse was Sept. 11. From a long string of insider revelations, we know that its top officials were hungry to invade Iraq, looked eagerly for the most far-fetched connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and – even then not finding them – invaded anyway, while continuing to vaguely imply the connections were there.
Something remarkably similar happened in 1914. Austria-Hungary was a shaky empire of restless ethnic minorities ruled by a German-speaking elite in Vienna. Nearly half the population was Slavic, including many Serbs. As a result, the imperial rulers in Vienna felt threatened by the very existence on their border of the independent nation of Serbia, small though it was. They were determined to invade it, possibly partition it, and so stamp out pan-Slavic and Serb nationalism once and for all.
They drew up detailed invasion plans. Then, most conveniently, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the emperor’s nephew and heir to the throne, was assassinated while on a visit to the provincial city of Sarajevo. Like the White House after 9/11, the imperial palace in Vienna promptly began an eager search for a connection to the Serbian government. Frustratingly, however, the archduke had been killed on Austro-Hungarian soil by Gavrilo Princip, an Austro-Hungarian citizen. The assassin, an ethnic Serb, had indeed had help from a shadowy secret organization of Serb nationalists, but no connection to the government of Serbia was ever proved. No matter. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia anyway. Other countries quickly jumped in on both sides, and a conflagration began that remade the world.
Part of that remaking, ironically, was the postwar cobbling together of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into what was first a British protectorate and then, after 1932, independent Iraq.
There is a final resemblance between the present bloodshed there and the First World War. Both conflicts were fought for a curiously shifting set of noble-sounding goals. With Iraq, the Bush administration has tried on for size finding weapons of mass destruction, liberating the Iraqis, combating Islamist terrorism, and installing democracy in the Arab world. In the First World War, the Allies initially talked of coming to the defense of innocent, invaded little Belgium, then of defeating German militarism and defending the British and French way of life. Once Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the conflict, he spoke of “the war to end all wars.”
It didn’t. The humiliation of the losers and the catastrophic loss of life on both sides did nothing to end all wars and much to light the fuses of later ones – especially the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. The longer the war in Iraq goes on, and the more American troops are planted by Big Pushes in a highly combustible part of the world, the more we will continue to stoke a widespread humiliation and anger whose consequences are already guaranteed to haunt us for decades to come.
Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of six books, including Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, a finalist for the National Book Award, and King Leopold’s Ghost. He is writing a book on the First World War.
Copyright 2007 Adam Hochschild
