Two Years On, The Echoes Of Vietnam Are Getting Louder

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Two Years On, The Echoes Of Vietnam Are Getting Louder

As the Iraq insurgency grows, so do the similarities with Indochina

Max Hastings
The Guardian
June 24, 2005

A year after the Iraq insurgency began in 2003, sceptics asked: "Is this the new Vietnam?" At the time, many of us who pontificate about these things answered no. Simplistic historical comparisons are almost always mistaken. It seemed premature to pass any melodramatic judgment about Iraq.

Today, another year on, important differences persist. The US commitment in Iraq is much smaller than in Vietnam, and so is the casualty rate. Half a million Americans spent five years pursuing victory in Indochina, and five more disengaging. "Only" 140,000 US soldiers are deployed in Iraq. George Bush is likely to declare victory and start getting out, rather than escalate his war as Lyndon Johnson so disastrously did.

Yet in significant respects Vietnam comparisons have become unavoidable. First, it is hard to believe that Washington's objective - the creation of a viable local government and institutions to run Iraq as a unitary state - is achievable within an acceptable time-frame.

Second, intelligence is proving a critical weakness. Recently, I heard an American commander deplore the extraordinary paucity of information on the ground: "We spend all these billions of dollars on the CIA and your SIS, and we know next to nothing about what the other side is doing. We need less technology and more spies."

Third, and most important, whatever military successes American forces achieve against the insurgents, there is no sign that they are winning the critical battle, for hearts and minds. The experience of ordinary Iraqis with the US military is at best alienating, at worst terrifying. There is no hint of shared purpose, mutual sympathy and respect between the armoured columns rolling along the roads, intermittently belching fire, and the hapless mass of local people, caring only for survival.

Last month, BBC4 screened an uncommonly vivid documentary, A Company of Soldiers, about a unit of the US 8th Cavalry fighting in Iraq. It brought all the old memories of Vietnam flooding back. These shaven-headed young philistines, fearful and even sometimes tearful, wore on their arms the horse's head badge of a formation I knew in Indochina as the 1st Air Cavalry Division.
As the 8th Cavalry's armoured vehicles roared forth on patrol, their occupants seemed infused with the same bewilderment about an unknown enemy that one remembered so well in the boondocks of Indochina. These soldiers' view of Iraq was determined by what they could glimpse through their weapon slits, or at night on their infra-red screens.

"We're trying to save their lives," said an exasperated officer about the Iraqis, "but they're not helping us by getting in our way." Soldiers quizzing local people through interpreters on a house search are young men from Ohio or Wyoming, Georgia or New Jersey. Yet cocooned in helmets and sunglasses, body armour and weapons that conceal almost every inch of flesh, they do not seem human at all. They resemble the robot legionaries of Darth Vader.

The doctrine of "force protection" - making preservation of American lives the first mission priority - has made US forces unconvincing peacekeepers in Somalia and the Balkans, Vietnam and Lebanon. So, too, has insensitivity about the interests of the people they are allegedly fighting to help.

There was a powerful scene in the TV film, in which a bored and jumpy soldier impulsively put a bullet into a dog. Its owner emerged from his house, bent over his pet's corpse for a moment, then walked away, throwing up his hands in impotent misery. Whatever commanded that man's loyalty six months ago, who can doubt which side he is on today.

"This is Indian territory ... If we meet the enemy, we shall overwhelm him with combat power," said the unit's colonel, briefing his officers for an operation. After an emotional episode in which the whole regiment learned live on the radio about the death on patrol of one of its men, the colonel warned: "I don't want to hear anyone say anyone's dead on the net, right?"

The key imperative for every counter-insurgency campaign is to engage sympathetically with the population. "The only time most Iraqis converse with Americans is when a civil affairs officer comes to pay out compensation for killing somebody in the family," a reporter who has spent several months in Iraq observed recently. American forces bring nothing in their wake that Iraqis can perceive as good or helpful, only a cacophony of military noise, spasmodic death and destruction.

In all this, of course, the resemblance to Vietnam is striking. US commanders would say more emollient tactics are impossible in the face of an increasingly violent insurgency. The suicide bombers, rocket firers and snipers oblige US units to operate as they do. If men went forth on foot, bare-headed, they would pay with their lives.

This may be true. Yet the aim of all insurgencies is to provoke the ruling power to inflict such pain on the civilian population that it forfeits support. This is what happened so spectacularly in Vietnam, and what also seems to be happening in Iraq. For each of the 1,600 US soldiers killed since Bush declared "significant combat operations" at an end more than two years ago, some 20 Iraqis are estimated to have died.

The warrior culture and firepower of the US army make it almost irresistible in a conventional war, yet disastrously ill-orientated for the sort of the struggle it faces today. The more domestic pressure Bush faces, the less inclined will be his commanders in the field to risk exposing their men in human contact with Iraqis.

I wrote here a few weeks ago that it seemed premature to write off Iraq, even if the omens are grim. It remains the case that, however disastrously misconceived was the original decision to invade, to quit precipitately promises anarchy. In the US, disillusionment with the war has not - yet, anyway - developed into the sort of national rage that, during Vietnam, destroyed Lyndon Johnson.*

Yet the rival timetables, of rising anti-war feeling at home and lack of progress on the ground are plainly working against the Bush administration. Most experts suggest it will take five years, if not more, before Iraqi security forces can conceivably take over from the coalition. Who can believe that US opinion will tolerate a commitment on the present scale, a continuing drain of American casualties, for that long?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former British senior representative in Iraq, thinks it somewhere between difficult and impossible to remedy US policy failures in the immediate aftermath of the war. He is probably right. Bush is still many months off being ready to quit and leave the country to resolve its own fate. But this is coming to seem the likeliest outcome. The most notable irony of a comparison between Indochina and Iraq is that American defeat in 1975 brought about Vietnamese unification, while American failure in Iraq will almost certainly precipitate that country's fragmentation.

Max Hastings 's book Warriors: Exceptional Tales from the Battlefield is available in hardback.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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* That's coming.
KJG