Holding the wrong debate

Meanwhile, the revisionists are trying once again to make the case that we could have won the war in Vietnam.

As is usual for those who take this misguided point of view, Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken apparently defines "victory" as military victory. But nobody questions that military victory was achievable there; by any military measurement, we cleaned the clocks of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese- and even our primary opponents, the Viet Cong- who were, by the way (a point missed by an amazing percentage of the American people even today) by definition South Vietnamese rebels. The Tet Offensive, to cite a single prominent example, was a political defeat of the first magnitude for the United States. But as the revisionists so often correctly point out, it was nevertheless, by any rational military standard, a crushing victory. The offensive was decisively thrown back, accomplishing nothing from a purely military point of view other than inflict upon the Communist forces an utterly unacceptable price in casualties.

The point the revisionists cannot, even now, get through their heads is that we were doomed to defeat in Vietnam because military victory was beside the point. We were engaged in a war which we could not have won politically- which appeared to most Vietnamese, not as an ideological struggle between Western philosophies of government, but between Vietnamese nationalists and yet another group of white folks from another foreign country trying to tell them how to run their own affairs.

The incident in Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest, in which a junior NSA staffer renders Gene Rostow without an effective retort by pointing out that no matter how thoroughly we defeated the enemy militarily, "some day we're going to have to go home- and he's still going to be there" still pretty much says it all.

This is the single place, btw, at which those inane comparisons of the Vietnam conflict with the much briefer and infinitely less costly less current conflict in Iraq have some point. George Bush the Elder chose not to take out Saddam Hussein in 1991, among other reasons, because he knew that without Saddam's strong hand, exactly what is happening there now would happen. The 2003 war was necessitated by the ineffectually of twelve years of lesser sanctions, and the continuing threat of unaccounted for WMD's. Despite disingenuous attempts to argue otherwise, there can be no doubt that it was the buildup to the war that effectively accomplished the goal of forcing Saddam to rid himself of these weapons- which nobody questions he had in 1991, and which both the 1991 peace terms and seventeen ineffectual UN Security Council resolutions required him to destroy under United Nations supervision.

He never met these requirements, and his continued possession of the weapons was the only rational interpretation of his continued manipulation of the feckless UN inspectors- whose mandate, once again, was to destroy the weapons, and never to go on a scavenger hunt for them!

Especially in view of revelations by captured officials that Saddam continued to have an active nuclear program and could have produced nuclear weapons within twelve to twenty-four months of obtaining fissionable materials, there can be no rational doubt (popular opinion, bolstered by the partisan media, to the contrary) that armed intervention would have been necessary- if not in 2003, then in any case before Saddam's nuclear goals could have been accomplished (it should be borne in mind, btw, that President Bush's claim about Saddam seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger- the orignal point about which that maliciously tedious "Bush lied!" mantra was first coined- has since been vindicated, despite Joe Wilson's denials). But no matter the threat Saddam himself posed, the political reality remained: no matter how urgent the need for intervention, Iraq without Saddam would inevitably be a chaotic, bloody mess of warring religious and ethnic groups not merely struggling for power, but giving free rein to ancient rivalries and bigotries going back centuries and even millennia.

As in Vietnam, we won the war in Iraq militarily. President Bush was right; the initial mission- the defeat of the Iraqi armed forces, and the removal of Saddam- was accomplished. This is a different and entirely separate war we are fighting now, and it is this war- not the first- which bears some comparison to Vietnam, in that whatever might be said militarily, it is probably unwinnable politically

We messed up big time in our de-Ba'athification program, in disbanding the Iraqi army, and in destroying so much of the infrastructure of Saddam's regime. As corrupted as it was, it was the only possible foundation upon which to build something strong enough to potentially enforce peace. Eventually, either a new strongman will emerge to fill the vacuum left by Saddam, or the country will disintegrate- maybe both.

But unlike Vietnam, our vital interests are at stake in Iraq. If we pull out, Iraq will undergo a bloodbath that would make what is going on there now look tame by comparison, and Islamic fanatics of one sort or another will almost certainly wind up running the show- or, if not running the show, enjoying free rein in a failed state which will be terrorist haven the like of which the world has never seen.

We have to find a way to minimize the damage in Iraq. Our initial goal- neutralizing Saddam- having been accomplished, it's likely almost as foolish to talk about establishing a functioning democracy in Iraq as it was to pretend that that series of corrupt right-wing dictatorships in Saigon during the Vietnam war had anything to do with democracy. We need, in short, to get off the idealistic nation-building kick we've found so seductive ever since World War II, and start allowing our foreign policy to be governed by a realpolitik which, while hardly unconcerned with humanitarian and ideological matters, keeps always foremost in our consideration the likely consequences of our actions in the real world precisely for our foreign policy objectives.

That being the case, this is the worst possible moment for us to entertain once again the romantic fantasy that it is possible to do precisely what we are once again learning is precisely impossible: to achieve political objectives by military means. Sure we could have won militarily in Vietnam; we did win militarily in Iraq. The problem in both cases comes precisely in the irrelevance of military victories which do not change underlying political realities.

HT: RealClearPolitics