Vietnam & Iraq: Another 'Bright Shining Lie'
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by Elizabeth Sullivan*
Published on Thursday, October 19, 2006 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
The ultimate tragedy of Iraq is that it was dreamed up by a generation that lived through an earlier war constructed atop deception and denial.
The Vietnam generation should have known better.
Yet Iraq is the same "bright shining lie" told by the same sort of smart men -- and this time, smart women -- that Neil Sheehan chronicled in his devastating book about the many-tiered American deceptions that made Vietnam such a quagmire.
As with Vietnam, this nation is propping up a corrupt Iraqi government and distorting outcomes by picking its own political winners and losers.
As with Vietnam, U.S. officials faced with military stalemate are grasping at straws via vain attempts to "Iraqify" a national military and police force that lacks legitimacy with most Iraqis. Why else would Iraqis be able to take over only two of the nation's 18 provinces when -- according to ground commander Gen. George Casey -- 80 percent to 90 percent of current violence is concentrated in only five?
It may not be surprising that a White House where few served in Vietnam would fail to see the Vietnam analogies, and instead cast the post-9/11 landscape as the ideological equivalent of the Cold War.
President George W. Bush effectively sat out Vietnam in the champagne branch of the Texas Air National Guard. Vice President Dick Cheney "had other priorities" and five draft deferments.
The guy with the combat credentials, Colin Powell, was sidelined over at State. His Vietnam-derived Powell Doctrine famously spoke of going to war only when the national interest required it, and then with forces more than sufficient to win and an exit strategy to match. But it had no influence on a Pentagon full of ideologues intent on using America's lone superpower status as a lever to achieve even more world power.
Administration figures continue to mislead each other and the American people about how we're doing in Iraq.
Yet at the root of these lies are the political generals and line officers who signed off on plans they knew wouldn't work and continue to keep silent out of a mistaken interpretation of long traditions of military deference to civilian leadership.
"I don't do body counts," Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told CBS News in March 2002, when asked about Taliban and al-Qaida losses in Afghanistan.
In Vietnam, the military's lies came in part via meaningless body counts that greased assurances that all was well. Somehow, in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the idea took hold that if officials didn't tally enemy or civilian dead in Iraq, it wouldn't look like Vietnam.
All that meant was that the military lost an important index of how bad things might be. The irony is, the longer Iraq goes on, the more it looks like Vietnam.
Instead of intruding into an ongoing civil war, we have created that civil war, one that gains vitality every day that U.S. troops remain on the ground as a nationalist irritant.
U.S. forces in Iraq need an exit strategy and allies that will make such an exit possible without enflaming regional war, not the same old talking points.
Asked at a recent Pentagon news conference to respond to one ex-Vietnam hand's criticism of stay-the-course attitudes in the midst of Iraqi civil war, ground commander Casey -- with Rumsfeld at his side -- pretended he didn't see the problem.
"The broad strategy, where we are working to bring the levels of insurgency down as we bring Iraqi security forces up, I believe, is still a valid framework for what we are doing in Iraq," Casey said.
That sort of see-no-evil approach to a failing war belongs in Vietnam. The Bush administration and its congressional supporters remain rooted firmly in a place of denial even as public opinion swings against the war in Iraq.
And that heralds new dangers. Unless the uniformed military finds its voice and demands a real strategy and more rational exit map, this nation may be doomed to repeat another episode from Vietnam: the helter-skelter withdrawal, leaving foes and friends alike to sort it out through bloodshed.
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*Elizabeth Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages. This is one of a series of columns examining post-9/11 security policies.
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