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Learning from the Past

75

Dateline: Venezuela

On February 18, 2019, speaking in Miami to an audience that included many Americans of Venezuelan descent, President Donald Trump warned the Venezuelan military that they had only a few days to abandon to government of Nicolas Maduro and support opposition leader Juan Guaido. If they failed to do so, Trump warned that they would find “no safe harbor, no easy exit, and no way out . . . you will lose everything.”

The focal point of the political standoff between Maduro and Guaido was the arrival of tons of food and medical supplies for Venezuelans who had been suffering through a deep and ongoing humanitarian crisis for years. The United States promised $20 million in humanitarian aid. One cargo 76plane dispatched from Florida contained enough food to feed 2,000 people for one month. It also brought wheelchairs, crutches, and personal hygiene kits. Another stockpile of aid contained enough food to feed 3,500 people for ten days. These supplies sat on the Venezuelan border, their entry blocked by the military. Maduro had rejected them as part of a Washington-orchestrated coup, asserting that Venezuelans were not beggars. Trump’s deadline came and went. The military remained overwhelmingly loyal to Maduro, and only minimal amounts of aid entered Venezuela.

For much of the post–Cold War era Venezuela had been a stable democratic state with a prosperous economy, due to its vast oil reserves and economic ties to the United States. At its height, Venezuela was one of the world’s twenty richest countries, with a per capita gross national product higher than that of Israel, Spain, and Greece, and only 15 percent below that of Great Britain. By the time of the 2019 crisis, some three million Venezuelans had fled their country. Oil production had fallen to its lowest level in some thirty years. Hyperinflation rose to the level of one million per cent per year. Corruption was rampant. Over half the populations reported losing about 24 pounds due to hunger, and a malaria epidemic gripped the country due to a collapse of the healthcare system.1

Maduro is the handpicked successor to Hugo Chavez. An ardent socialist who saw Cuba as the revolutionary model to follow in Venezuela, Chavez led an unsuccessful military coup in 1992. He was elected president in 1998 and held that position until his death in 2013. Maduro narrowly won the presidency in 2013. He was reelected in 2019 in a highly contested race against Guaido. Trump was the first foreign leader to recognize Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president. Some fifty countries, including many in Latin America, did likewise. Russia and China supported Maduro. Mexico remained neutral. Following Trump’s announcement, Maduro broke diplomatic relations with the United States.

While economic relations between the United States and Venezuela remained strong during the Chavez era, their political relations had deteriorated sharply. Chavez was an outspoken opponent of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Chavez also made overstated claims that the United States was behind a failed 2002 coup attempt against him; that it planned to invade Venezuela; and that he was the target of U.S.-supported assassination efforts. In a 2005 Organization of American States resolution, the Bush administration referred to Chavez as a “negative force” in Latin America and sought to isolate him from neighboring states; the resolution failed.

Relations did not improve during the Obama administration, which criticized his outreach to Iran and support for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist revolutionary group. In 2014, Congress passed the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act, which authorized economic sanctions against Venezuelan officials who had mistreated anti-government protestors. In 2015, Obama signed an executive order defining Venezuela as a national security threat; he ordered 77additional economic sanctions but left U.S. economic, trade, and oil relations untouched. By then Chavez had declared that “there was never a government more terrorist than the U.S. . . . The Yankee Empire will fall.”

Virtually from the outset of his presidency, Trump viewed Venezuela as an ideological adversary. In August 2017, with no warning, he asked top aides if the United States could intervene in Venezuela on the grounds that its deteriorating political and economic situation was a threat to the region. The next day he publicly stated that “We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option, if necessary.” In the fall of 2018, he praised those leaving Venezuela as “great, great people” and said that Venezuela was in the “twilight hour” of socialism. Trump also embraced sanctions designed to deny Venezuela revenue from the sale of oil (something Obama had not done).

As the 2019 crisis developed, veiled references to military action short of sending in U.S. troops were put forward by members of the Trump administration. With the failure of its bid to remove Maduro from power by creating a border crisis, the Trump administration returned to economic power to achieve its goals. Two days after the border crisis passed, Vice President Mike Pence met with Guaido and announced new sanctions directed at Venezuelan state governors who supported Maduro, as well as an additional $55 million in aid to the Venezuelan opposition. In early March, another round of economic sanctions was announced. These were directed at financial institutions jointly owned by Russia and Venezuela, which provided Venezuela with more than $17 billion to get around U.S. sanctions. Also in March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States was withdrawing all remaining diplomatic personnel, stating that they were “a constraint on U.S. Policy.” His statement was widely read as holding out the possibility of military intervention.

As the crisis passed, the likelihood of military action faded. It was reported that Trump was upset that U.S. pressure had failed to remove Maduro, and had become disinterested in Venezuela. That did not, however, put an end to the conflict; the United States and Russia engaged in a spirited exchange of comments over whether Russian troops had left Venezuela because the Venezuelan government did not compensate Russia for its presence. Controversy also arose over the government’s sincerity in entering talks with opposition leaders over holding new elections with many feeling that Maduro was only stalling for time. And trying to end Venezuela’s economic isolation.

In making foreign policy decisions, policymakers must cast their attention in multiple directions. They need to understand the world as it exists, where it is going, and from whence it came. History suggests that remarkably little learning from the past takes place.2 In making threats of military intervention to remove Maduro, the Trump administration showed little sensitivity to how they revived images of American imperialism in the region. Policy makers often get the present wrong.3 In this case, Trump 78misread the likelihood of the military turning on Maduro, disregarding doubts by members of his administration. The future is often viewed through viewpoints rooted in excessive fears or excessive confidence. No plans were announced regarding how aid would reach Venezuelans or how economic recovery, peace, and stability would be created after Maduro was forced out.

This chapter looks at the challenges of learning from the past through a close examination of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Iraq. It also takes up the question of what lessons might be learned from the U.S. experience in Afghanistan.

How Do Policy Makers Learn from the Past?

Policy makers learn by matching the known with the unknown.4 This is not a passive act. They do not sit back and simply accept data as a given, but actively interact with it.5 In deciding how to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, Bill Clinton and his advisors drew upon analogies with at least four different events from the past, each of which suggested a different definition of the problem and the response: Vietnam, the Holocaust, Munich, and the outbreak of World War I.6

In addition to selecting reference points for evaluating information, policy makers must make judgments about whether a piece of information is important (a signal) or unimportant (noise). Discriminating between the two is no easy task. Identifying a piece of data as a signal does not tell the policy maker what to do; it only sets in motion the process of learning. Information received in the Philippines before the attack on Pearl Harbor did not tell policy makers that they were the next target, or identify the steps to take to defend themselves. In the period immediately before Pearl Harbor, fifty-six separate signals, ranging in duration from one day to one month, pointed toward the Japanese attack, but there was also a good deal of evidence to support all of the wrong interpretations. Surprise occurred not because of a lack of signals, but because there was too much noise.7

Policy makers discriminate between signals and noise by making a series of assumptions about what motivates the behavior of others or what constitutes the underlying dynamics of a problem. Consider the intercepted Japanese directive to its U.S. embassy and consulates to burn their codes. In retrospect, this is a clear indication that hostilities were imminent. However, during the first week of December 1941, the United States ordered all of its consulates in the Far East to burn their codes, and no one took this to be the equivalent of a U.S. declaration of war against Japan.

The assumptions that policy makers bring to bear on foreign policy problems are influenced by both long-term experiences and immediate concerns. Long-term experience provides policy makers with a database against which to evaluate an ongoing pattern of behavior. For Franklin 79Roosevelt and other U.S. policy makers, personal experiences and their reading of history led to a conclusion that the presence of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor was a deterrent to a Japanese attack. They failed to appreciate that it also made a fine target. For their part, Japanese leaders drew on their 1904 war-opening attack in the Russo-Japanese War as the model for how to deal with a more powerful enemy.

Once they are in place, perceptual systems are not readily changed. They easily become obsolete and inaccurate. The principle involved here is cognitive consistency.8 Individuals try to keep their beliefs and values consistent by ignoring some information, actively seeking out other data, and reinterpreting still other information to support the individuals’ perception of reality. As a result, instead of being a continuous and rationally structured process, learning is sporadic and constrained. Policy makers do not move steadily from a simplistic understanding of an event to a more complex one as their experience and familiarity with it build. New information and new problems are fitted into already well-established perceptual systems. So, learning rarely produces dramatic changes in priorities or commitments, and changes in behavior tend to be incremental.

A well-documented case of this process at work is John Foster Dulles’s perception of the Soviet Union.9 Dulles was Eisenhower’s secretary of state and had a closed belief system. He saw the Soviet Union as a hostile state and interpreted any data that might indicate a lessening of hostility in such a way that it reinforced his original perceptions. In his view, cooperative Soviet gestures were not a sign of goodwill but the product of Soviet failures, and represented only a lull before the Soviet Union would engage in another round of hostilities.

Events from Which Policy Makers Learn

The sporadic and constrained nature of the learning process means that not all aspects of the past are equally likely to serve as the source of lessons. Two categories of events are especially important lesson sources. The first is the dramatic and highly visible event. Policy makers turn to these events with the conviction that, because they are so dramatic and visible, they must contain more important information than commonplace happenings. The scars they leave in defeat and the praises sung in victory can become deeply entrenched in the collective memory of society. Events of this magnitude are often referred to as generational events, because an entire generation draws on them for lessons. War is the ultimate generational event. A policy maker need not have been involved in the 1938 negotiations at Munich to invoke the analogy and point to the dangers of appeasement.

The corollary to paying a great deal of attention to highly dramatic events is to all but ignore the nonevent. Nothing is learned from the crisis that almost happened. Warnings about the weakness of the shah of Iran 80were heard as early as 1961, when members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned the incoming Kennedy administration that no number of weapons could save him. Mass unrest and corruption, they argued, doomed him to defeat. Senator Hubert Humphrey declared: “This crowd they are dead. They just don’t know it. . . . It is just a matter of time.”10 The more often a warning is given and no attack occurs, the easier it is for policy makers to dismiss the next one. The November 27, 1941, warning to Pearl Harbor that a Japanese attack was possible was not the first one the United States received. An alarming dispatch had been received in October, but no attack had followed.

The second type of highly influential event is one that the policy maker experienced firsthand, especially those that took place early in the policy maker’s career. The lessons drawn from events experienced firsthand tend to be overgeneralized, to the neglect of lessons that might otherwise be drawn from the careful analysis of the experiences of others.11 U.S. thinking about the post–World War II role of the atomic bomb provides an example of the pull of personally experienced events on policy making.12 The initial decisions were made by the men who had defeated Germany and Japan. In formulating ideas about the applications of the bomb, they drew heavily on those experiences. From 1945 to 1950, the Soviet targets identified for destruction by the atomic bomb duplicated the U.S. World War II policy of targeting commercial and industrial centers. They did not view the atomic bomb as a new weapon requiring development of a new strategy. It would be left to politicians to put forward the first strategy tailored to the political and technological realities of the postwar era.

Firsthand experiences that occur early in a policy maker’s career are especially important because perceptual systems are resistant to change. Individuals are most open to competing images of reality when they confront a situation for the first time. Once a label or category is selected, it establishes the basis for future comparisons. These early firsthand experiences are not necessarily related to foreign policy problems. They may be ways of thinking about problems that proved successful in the past, positions taken on issues that produced desired outcomes, or strategies used in winning political office.13 Early firsthand experiences are also of special significance because of the conditions under which policy makers must try to learn from the past. Henry Kissinger spoke to these problems in his memoirs when he stated that “policy makers live off the intellectual capital they have brought with them into office; they have no time to build more capital.”14

Types of Calculations Made

When an event is recognized as a possible source of lessons, policy makers frequently engage in two types of calculations. First, they pay attention to what happened, but seldom to why. The Iron Curtain descended across Europe; Vietnam fell; and hostages were taken following an attack on the 81American embassy in Iran. Focusing on what happened rather than on why it took place creates a type of tunnel vision that obscures the differences between the present situation and earlier ones. What can be concluded from the fact that the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1981 noninvasion of Poland each required three months of preparation time by the Soviet Union? Perhaps not very much.15 Policy makers could not assume that the Soviets would need three months to prepare for the next invasion. None of these was an extremely urgent case demanding rapid mobilization or precluded an invasion starting at a higher stage of readiness.

Second, in examining what happened, policy makers tend to dichotomize the outcomes into successes and failures. They tend to forget that most policy initiatives are designed to achieve multiple objectives, that success and failure are rarely ever complete, and that neither is permanent. Problems are not so much solved as redefined and transformed into new challenges and opportunities.

When a policy is defined as a success, policy makers are especially prone to ignore three considerations in applying it as a lesson: (1) its costs, (2) the possibility that another option would have worked better or produced the same result at lesser cost, and (3) the role of accident, luck, and chance in affecting the outcome of events. When an event is defined as a failure, a different set of biases tends to grip policy makers’ thinking. There is (1) the presumption that an alternative course of action would have worked better and that policy makers should have known this; and (2) an unwillingness to admit that success may have been unattainable or that surprise is inevitable.16 The congressional investigation into Pearl Harbor takes up thirty-nine volumes, and the success of the Japanese attack continues to bring forward a never-ending series of books asserting that U.S. policy makers knew of the attack and permitted it to happen.

Lessons Learned

Three lessons are most often learned by policy makers from their studies of history. First, expect to see more of the same. The shah of Iran was expected to continue in power in 1979 simply because he had ruled for so long. Iran without the shah seemed inconceivable. The grain shortage of 1973 caught U.S. policy makers by surprise because for them “the grain problem” was always too much grain. It did not occur to policy makers that the combination of large-scale Soviet purchases of grain plus global drought would send the price of grain skyrocketing.

Second, expect continuity in the behavior of others. In part this occurs because policy makers are insensitive to the costs of inaction perceived by another state. The United States made this mistake at Pearl Harbor. U.S. estimates of Japanese behavior were based on the cost of attacking the United States. Insufficient attention was given to the costs that the 82Japanese would experience if they did nothing and allowed the status quo to continue. For similar reasons, the hostile acts or words of allies surprise policy makers more than the hostility of an enemy.

Third, avoid policies that fail and repeat policies that bring success. However, two conditions work against the continued success of a policy. First, successful policies get overused, and are applied to problems and situations for which they were not intended. Second, a successful policy often changes the situation in ways that will frustrate its future use. In the 1960s, military aid to the shah may indeed have been responsible for averting the coup predicted by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; however, because it also changed the situation, by the late 1970s continued military aid became part of the shah’s problem instead of the solution.

These three frequently learned lessons cast a long shadow over U.S. foreign policy making in the lead-up to the Iraq War. First, policy makers expected to see more of the same; According to the dominant view, nuclear proliferation was a “strategic chain reaction,” with Iraq under Saddam Hussein being the most recent addition to this chain.17 Second, it was assumed that Saddam Hussein was evil and could not be trusted to change his policies or—at a minimum—contained as a security threat. Moreover, Saddam Hussein was engaged in an ongoing game of deception and obstruction with UN weapons inspectors. Why would he do this unless he was trying to hide something? When no weapons of mass destruction were found, an unexamined possibility emerged as the best explanation.18 Saddam Hussein may have been acting out of a fear that if his bluff was exposed, his enemies within Iraq would be emboldened and his hold on power seriously weakened, or his bluff may have been directed at intimidating neighboring states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. The George W. Bush administration was determined to avoid what it saw as the central mistake made by George H. W. Bush in the Persian Gulf War; the administration would remove Saddam Hussein from power.

U.S.-Cuban relations serves as another example of lessons learned (see the Historical Lesson).

Historical Lesson

U.S.-Cuban Relations

Laying 90 miles off Florida’s south coast, Cuba has long played a prominent role in U.S. foreign policy. After he tried but failed to purchase it from Spain, President Thomas Jefferson commented “we must have both the Floridas and Cuba.” In the years leading up to the Civil War, many southerners looked to annexing Cuba, where slavery was legal, as necessary to offset the growing number of free states. The Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the 1898 Spanish-American War, passed Spanish control over Cuba to the United States. The American military occupation of Cuba began in 1899 and continued for three and a half years before Cuba gained its independence in 1903. Under the terms of the 1901 Platt Amendment, which became part of the Cuban constitution, the United States had the right to intervene in Cuban affairs to maintain order and Cuban independence, and did so in 1906, 1912, and 1917.

Cuba has been a priority in U.S. foreign policy for both national security and economic reasons. U.S. fears that a foreign power might establish a military presence there were realized during the cold war, when the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, leading to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. By the beginning of the twentieth century, some 95 percent of Cuban sugar was sold in American markets, and one-half of all U.S. exports to Central and South America went to Cuba. In the 1940s and 1950s, U.S. firms-controlled 70 percent of all petroleum brought into Cuba and 42 percent of its sugar production. In the late 1950s, American foreign investment in Cuba was valued at almost $1 billion.

Since 1934 the dominant political figure in Cuba had been Colonel Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar. By the late 1950s, Batista’s rule was increasingly challenged. His leading opponent was communist leader Fidel Castro. As opposition became more widespread, the United States concluded that Battista was no longer capable of maintaining political stability in Cuba and began to distance itself from him through such symbolic acts as placing an arms embargo on Cuba and withdrawing its ambassador for consultations.

After Castro assumed power in 1959, Cuban relations with the United States deteriorated to such a degree that the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961. Castro moved quickly to nationalize U.S. businesses, imposing new labor standards and pricing policies. The United States responded by reducing the amount of Cuban sugar that could enter the United States. Castro then nationalized more U.S. property. The U.S. enacted a trade embargo, permitting only food and medicine to reach Cuba. Relations deteriorated further as Castro began to enter into close economic and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The culmination of this rising tension was the decision made in March 1960 by the Eisenhower administration to support the entry of anti-Castro dissidents back into Cuba. Planning eventually shifted to organizing a full-scale invasion of Cuba, anticipated to result in a popular revolt and military desertions. John Kennedy implemented the plan one year later, in April 1961, with a force of 1,400 dissident Cubans. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a failure. No uprising took place, and 1,000 members of the invasion force were arrested and later exchanged for food and medicine.

The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion led presidents to seek other ways of removing Castro from power. At least eight assassination plans were approved—but not necessarily implemented—between 1960 and 1965. In the spring of 1962, a series of political, military, psychological and intelligence operations designed to destabilize Castro’s regime and set the stage for another military intervention were approved by Kennedy under the heading Operation Mongoose.

Operation Mongoose was suspended with the onset of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. Preventing an invasion had been given by the Soviet Union as the rationale for placing missiles in Cuba. As part of the agreement with the Soviet Union that led to the withdrawal of the missiles, the United States agreed not to invade Cuba.

After the Cuban missile crisis, the United States returned to economic sanctions as its primary instrument for placing pressure on Castro, who was now firmly in power. The most significant of these sanctions were bills that prohibited subsidiaries of U.S. firms from doing business with Cuba through other countries and gave presidents the authority to withhold foreign aid and debt relief to countries providing assistance to Cuba. In 1996, the Helms-Burton Act was passed, authorizing lawsuits against foreign companies that purchased property once owned by Americans which had been nationalized by Castro. 2019 marked the 59th year of U.S. trade embargoes against Cuba.

Applying the Lesson

1. Was repeatedly intervening in Cuba in the U.S. national interest? Why or why not?

2. What other policy options existed to remove Castro for power?

3. Which lessons learned from Cuba might policy makers have applied to the Venezuelan case described at the beginning of the chapter?

83 Case Studies

The focus of this chapter now shifts to an examination of Vietnam and the Iraq War as case studies about how to learn from the past. Through the phrases Vietnam syndrome (see  chapter 5 ) and Iraq syndrome, these conflicts have become primary reference points for thinking about the war in Afghanistan and the merits of intervention in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Vietnam provides a look at the range of lessons used by policy makers in making decisions about how to fight the war, and illustrates those that American elites have drawn from U.S. involvement. Lessons can also be drawn from how the Iraq War ended. Joshua Rovner’s study led him to conclude that, contrary to popular perception, the United States did not win the war and lose the peace.19 Instead, it won both the war and the peace that followed, but a combination of domestic politics, diplomatic and strategic considerations, and psychological factors combined to prevent U.S. leaders from recognizing that they had won.

The Vietnam War

America’s involvement in Vietnam spanned six presidents. The cost of the war and its level of destruction were enormous: 55,000 Americans dead; a maximum American troop presence of 541,000 men; a total cost of $150 billion; untold numbers of Vietnamese dead and wounded; 7 million 85tons of bombs dropped; and 20 million craters left behind. Despite these grim statistics, much confusion still exists. A public opinion poll, taken between March 21 and March 25, 1985, revealed that only three of five Americans knew that the United States supported South Vietnam. In a press conference on February 18, 1982, in response to a question about covert operations in Latin America, President Reagan stated:

If I recall correctly, . . . North and South Vietnam had been, previous to colonization, two separate countries [and] provisions were made that these two countries could, by the vote of their people together, decide whether they wanted to be one country or not. . . . Ho Chi Minh refused to participate in such an election. . . . John F. Kennedy authorized the sending of a division of Marines. And that was the first move toward combat troops in Vietnam.20

North and South Vietnam did not exist as separate countries prior to French colonization in the 1880s; it was South Vietnam that rejected the elections; and Kennedy had sent Green Berets to Vietnam in 1961.

Table 4.1  presents a chronology of major events in the history of the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

TABLE 4.1 Chronology of U.S. Involvement in Vietnam
September 1940	France gives Japan right of transit, control over local military facilities, and control over economic resources in return for right to keep nominal sovereignty.
March 1945	Gaullist French forces take over administration of Vietnam from pro-Vichy French troops.
September 1945	Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam to be independent.
February 1950	United States recognizes French-backed Bao Dai government.
March 1954	French forces defeated at Dien Bien Phu.
April 1954	Geneva Peace Talks begin; end in July.
September 1954	SEATO created.
July 1956	No elections held in Vietnam.
October 1961	Taylor-Rostow mission sent to Vietnam; 15,000 advisers sent in as a result.
November 1963	Diem and Kennedy assassinated.
August 1964	Gulf of Tonkin incident.
February 1965	Pleiku barracks attacked; eight U.S. soldiers dead and sixty injured; Operation Rolling Thunder launched in retaliation.
May 1965	General Westmoreland requests 80,000 troops.
July 1965	President Johnson announces an additional 125,000 troops to be sent to Vietnam.
January 1968	Tet Offensive.
March 1968	Bombing halted; Johnson steps out of presidential race.
April 1970	Cambodia invaded.
March 1972	Major North Vietnamese offensive launched.
April 1972	B-52 bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.
May 1972	North Vietnamese harbors mined.
December 1972	Peace talks collapse and then resume after heavy bombing.
January 1973	Peace agreement signed.
March 1975	North Vietnamese offensive begins.
April 1975	South Vietnam surrenders.

Vietnam Chronology The first president to have to deal with Vietnam was Truman. Initially, his views on Indochina resembled those held during World War II by Roosevelt, who was sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh’s efforts to establish independence for the region and unsympathetic to French attempts to reestablish their prewar position of colonial domination. In 1947, Truman resisted French requests for U.S. aid; he also urged France to end the war against Ho Chi Minh, who, while being one of the founders of the French communist party, had proven himself a valuable ally and nationalist in defeating Japan.

Truman’s views were soon to undergo a stark and rapid transformation. By 1952 the United States was providing France with $30 million in aid to defeat Ho Chi Minh, and in 1953, when Truman’s presidency ended, the United States was paying one-third of the French war cost. Ho Chi Minh was also redefined from a nationalist threat to a communist threat to U.S. security interests. Nothing had changed in Indochina to warrant this new evaluation of the situation. Dramatic events, however, were taking place elsewhere as Cold War competition took root. France was reluctant to participate in a European Defense System, something the United States saw as vital if Europe was to contain communist expansionist pressures. In a virtual quid pro quo, the United States agreed to underwrite the French war effort in Indochina, and France announced its intent to participate in plans for the defense of Europe.

The Eisenhower administration began by reaffirming Truman’s financial commitment to France, and then enlarged it. By the end of 1953, U.S. aid rose to $500 million and covered approximately one-half of the cost of the French war effort. For Eisenhower and Secretary of State John 86Foster Dulles, expenditures of this magnitude were necessary to prevent a Chinese intervention that they both felt was otherwise likely to occur. Unfortunately for the French, U.S. aid was not enough to secure victory, and Eisenhower was unwilling to go beyond financing a proxy war.

The end came for the French at Dien Bien Phu. With its forces under siege there, France informed the United States that unless it intervened, Indochina would fall to the communists. With no aid forthcoming, the process of withdrawal began. France’s involvement in Indochina officially came 87to an end with the signing of the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords. According to this agreement, a provisional demarcation line would be established at the 17th Parallel. Vietminh troops (troops loyal to Ho Chi Minh) would regroup north of it, and pro-French Vietnamese forces would regroup south of it. Elections to determine who would rule over the single country of Vietnam were scheduled for 1956. The Geneva Peace Accords provided the French with the necessary face-saving way out of Indochina. Ho Chi Minh’s troops controlled three-quarters of Vietnam and were poised to extend their area of control. All parties to the agreement expected Ho Chi Minh to win the 1956 election easily.

The United States did not sign the Geneva Accords but pledged to “refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb” the settlement. However, only six weeks after its signing, the United States helped set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as part of an effort to halt the spread of communism in the wake of the French defeat. A protocol extended coverage to Laos, Cambodia, and “the free people under the jurisdiction of Vietnam.” The Vietminh saw the protocol as a violation of the Geneva Accords, because it treated the 17th Parallel as a political boundary, not a civil war truce line. Political developments below the 17th Parallel supported the Vietminh interpretation. In 1955 the United States backed Ngo Dinh Diem, who had declared himself president of the Republic of Vietnam. With U.S. support, he argued that, because South Vietnam had not signed the Geneva Accords, it did not have to abide by them and hold elections. The year 1956 came and went with no elections. By the time Eisenhower left office, U.S. military aid had reached one thousand U.S. military advisers stationed in South Vietnam.

The landmark decision on Vietnam during the Kennedy administration came in October 1961 with the Taylor-Rostow Report. Receiving contradictory information and advice on how to proceed, Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission. They reported that South Vietnam could only be saved by the introduction of eight thousand U.S. combat troops. Kennedy rejected this conclusion, but he did send an additional fifteen thousand military advisers. Kennedy’s handling of the Taylor-Rostow Report is significant for two reasons. First, the decision was typical of those he made on Vietnam. He never gave the advocates of escalation all they wanted, but neither did he ever say no. Some increase in the level of the American military commitment was always forthcoming. Second, in acting on the Taylor-Rostow Report, Kennedy helped shift the definition of the Vietnam conflict from a political problem to a military one. Until this point, Vietnam was seen by the Kennedy administration as a guerrilla war in which control of the population was key. Going forward, control of the battlefield would become the priority.

Under President Lyndon Johnson, U.S. involvement in the war escalated steadily. Pressures began building in January 1964, when the Joint 88Chiefs of Staff (JCS) urged Johnson to put aside the United States’ self-imposed restraints so that the war might be won more quickly. The JCS especially pushed for aerial bombing of North Vietnam. In August 1964, bombing began in retaliation for an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, when two North Vietnamese patrol torpedo (PT) boats purportedly fired on the USS C. Turner Joy and the USS Maddox in neutral waters. President Johnson went to Congress for a resolution supporting his use of force against North Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which passed by a unanimous vote in the House and an 88–2 vote in the Senate, gave the president the authority to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The incident itself is clouded in controversy. Later studies suggest that the incident was staged or that it never occurred. According to the authors of these studies, Johnson was merely looking for an excuse to begin bombing.21 The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution became the functional equivalent of a declaration of war.

From that point forward, the war became increasingly Americanized. Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained and massive bombing campaign, was launched against North Vietnam in retaliation for the February 1965 Vietcong attack on Pleiku. In June the military sought two hundred thousand ground forces and projected a need for six hundred thousand troops. By 1967, U.S. goals were also changing. A Pentagon Papers memorandum put forward the following priorities: 70 percent to avoid a humiliating defeat; 20 percent to keep South Vietnam from China; and 10 percent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.22

In January 1968, a final challenge was brought to the Johnson administration. The Tet Offensive was a countrywide assault by communist forces on South Vietnam that penetrated Saigon, all of the provincial capitals, and even the U.S. embassy compound. The U.S. response was massive and expanded bombings of North Vietnam. In the end, the communist forces were defeated. As a final thrust to take control of South Vietnam the Tet Offensive had been premature, but it did demonstrate the bankruptcy of U.S. policy. Massive bombings and hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat troops had not brought the United States closer to victory. In March 1968, Johnson announced both a halt in the bombings against North Vietnam and that he was not a candidate for reelection.

Establishing détente was Richard Nixon’s primary concern (see  chapter 1 ); this policy could be threatened by any weakness or vacillation in U.S. policy on Vietnam. American commitments to Vietnam had to be met if the Soviet Union and China were to respect the United States in the post-Vietnam era. As you learned in  chapter 1 , the strategy selected for accomplishing this was called Vietnamization. Gradually, the United States would reduce its combat presence such that, by 1972, the South Vietnamese army would be able to hold its own when supported by U.S. economic aid and air and naval power.

The inherent weakness of Vietnamization was that it could succeed only if the North Vietnamese did not attack before the South Vietnamese army was ready. Nixon and Kissinger designed a two-pronged approach to lessen this possibility: (1) Cambodia was invaded with the hope of cleaning out North Vietnamese sanctuaries, and (2) the bombing of North Vietnam was increased. Nevertheless, the potential danger became a reality when, in the spring of 1972, North Vietnam attacked across the demilitarized zone (DMZ). At this point, Nixon was forced to re-Americanize the war in order to prevent the defeat of South Vietnam. Bombing of North Vietnam reached unprecedented levels, and North Vietnamese ports were mined.

The Paris Peace Talks were being carried out against the backdrop of this fighting. They had begun in earnest in 1969 but had made little progress. With the escalation of the war, Nixon also offered a new peace plan, which included a promise to withdraw all U.S. forces after an Indochina-wide cease-fire and exchange of prisoners of war. Progress was now forthcoming. Hanoi was finding itself increasingly isolated from the Soviet Union and China, both of which had become more interested in establishing a working relationship with the United States than in defeating it in Vietnam. It was now South Vietnam that began to object to the peace terms and stalled the negotiating process. In early December 1972, the “final talks” broke off without an agreement. On December 18, the United States ordered the all-out bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong to demonstrate U.S. resolve to both North and South Vietnamese leaders. On December 30 talks resumed, and the bombing ended. A peace treaty was signed on January 23, 1973.

Two years later, President Gerald Ford was in office when South Vietnam fell. What had begun as a normal military engagement ended in a rout. On March 12, 1975, the North Vietnamese attacked across the DMZ. On March 25, Hue fell. Five days later, Da Nang fell. The United States evacuated on April 29, and on April 30, South Vietnam surrendered unconditionally.

 

Lessons Used by Policy Makers In examining the lessons used by policy makers in their decision-making on Vietnam, the focus is on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations because it was during this period that the major escalations in the U.S. commitment took place. Two broad types of lessons of the past held by U.S. policy makers can be identified: political lessons, and strategic and tactical ones.

For elected and appointed policy makers, the political lessons of the past had the same bottom line: personal survival in the upper circles of decision-making in Washington required creating an image of toughness. The source of this lesson for elected officials was the “loss” of China to Mao Tse Tung and communism when the U.S. ally Chiang Kai Shek fled to Taiwan in 1949. The Republicans had successfully leveled this charge 90against the Democrats. Kennedy applied the same strategy against Nixon in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower administration of losing Cuba. Politically, Kennedy saw Vietnam as his China. In addition, Johnson stated many times that he did not intend to be the first U.S. president to lose a war.

The national security managers also drew on the fall of China for lessons and added decision-making in the Korean War. In each case, the implications were the same: A reputation for toughness was the most highly prized virtue to possess.23 The bureaucratic casualties in the decision- making process on China were those who—even though they were correct—had become identified with the “soft” side of a policy debate. Though wrong, those who had been hawkish emerged relatively unscathed from McCarthyism. To a lesser extent, Korea produced a similar pattern. Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into Korea but was staunchly anti-communist, did not pay a price for being wrong. Instead, in 1961 he became Kennedy’s secretary of state.

Standing out among the host of strategic and tactical lessons drawn on by Vietnam policy makers was the analogy to Munich and the danger of appeasement. Munich had become a symbol for a generation of policy makers.24 Its impact was so great that even those with no personal contact with the European peace efforts of the late 1930s could draw on it for insight. For example, Lyndon Johnson viewed the central lesson of the twentieth century as that the appetite for aggression is never satisfied. It was Dean Rusk who drew most openly and repeatedly on the Munich analogy. Although he recognized that differences existed between the aggressions of Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, the basic point remained the same: “Aggression by any other name was still aggression and . . . must be checked.”25

Very different lessons could be drawn from the French experience in Indochina, which was on the mind of every participant in the debate on the Taylor-Rostow Report.26 Yet, it had a negligible effect on American thinking, falling far short of being a generational experience on the order of Munich. Only George Ball, who worked for France at the Geneva negotiations, drew actively on its lessons. To him, the war was unwinnable. Ball warned Kennedy that, if he sent the recommended fifteen thousand combat troops to Vietnam, the commitment would escalate to three hundred thousand men.

Ball became concerned with U.S. policy in Vietnam because he feared that it was diverting attention from Europe. His Europeanist orientation to world politics was not unique within the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. McGeorge Bundy was “totally a man of the Atlantic.” He was also very much a product of the 1950s and the Cold War, so when he entered the debate on Vietnam, he was an advocate of the U.S. presence. Kennedy’s first ambassador to Vietnam was also a Europeanist who was ignorant of Asia and Asian communism. The predominance of Europeanists illustrates the interaction of political lessons and strategic and tactical lessons of the past. A president concerned with making sure Vietnam did not become his China had limited options in making appointments, because a cloud of doubt continued to hang over the credentials of most Asian experts. Even 91lacking knowledge about Asian affairs, a president could feel politically safe with Europeanists in key decision-making positions.

The lack of knowledge about Asia comes through in the strategic and tactical lessons that key policy makers drew from Asian events. Kennedy’s favored set of lessons of the past was Magsaysay’s struggle against the Huk guerrillas in the Philippines and the British experience in Malaysia. Both contests were very different from what was being contemplated in Vietnam. For example, according to the U.S. military, the Malaysian analogy was flawed in at least five respects:

1. Malaysian borders were far more controllable.

2. The racial characteristics of the Chinese insurgents in Malaysia made identification and segregation much simpler than the situation in Vietnam.

3. The relative plenty of food in South Vietnam compared to Malaysia made the denial of food to the guerrillas a far less usable weapon.

4. The British were in actual command of military operations in Malaysia.

5. It took the British twelve years to defeat an insurgency far less strong than the one in South Vietnam.27

The professional military also proved unable to draw on Asia for insights into how to fight in Vietnam. General Westmoreland was described as “a conventional man in an unconventional war.” Vietcong challenges brought only a request for more and more men and more and more bombing. The approach of JCS chairman General Maxwell Taylor was not very different. While he spoke of the challenge of brushfire wars, he was not really talking in terms of fighting a guerrilla war. His solution was additional troops; political reforms were not mentioned. Taylor’s analogy was not with Malaysia, but with Korea. He drew favorable comparisons of battlefield conditions and terrain, but overlooked the different nature of the two wars. Korea had been a conventional war, begun with a border crossing by uniformed troops that fought in large concentrations.28 This was not Vietnam in 1964.

Lessons drawn by two other policy makers deserve mention. The first is Walt Rostow, who brought to Vietnam decision-making a firm set of beliefs about the necessity of winning the war and how to do it. In his eyes, communist intervention had taken place in South Vietnam, breaking the first rule of peaceful coexistence. The boundaries of the two camps were immutable, and any effort to alter them had to be resisted. His solution was air power. Rostow had selected bombing targets during World War II and was convinced that massive bombing would bring North Vietnam to its knees.

The second policy maker is Lyndon Johnson, who drew heavily on his experience in Texas politics in formulating his Vietnam strategy. He had opposed the idea of a coup against Diem. That simply was not the way things were done in Texas: “Otto Passman and I, we have our differences, . . . but I don’t plan his overthrow.”29 Beyond that, the United States had 92given its word to Diem, and in Texas, you don’t go back on your word. Johnson also felt that displays of toughness were prerequisites for dealing with the Vietnamese. Here, he drew on analogies to his dealings with Mexicans: “If you don’t watch they’ll walk right into your yard and take it over . . . but if you say to ‘em right at the start, ‘Hold on just a minute,’ they’ll know they are dealing with someone who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along just fine.”30

 

Lessons Learned Vietnam had a tremendous impact on public opinion and elite attitudes. It destroyed the postwar consensus on the ends and means of U.S. foreign policy and left in its place three competing belief systems: Cold War internationalism, post–Cold War internationalism, and neo-isolationism. The existence of these three competing outlooks would greatly complicate future U.S. foreign policy making.

The specific lessons of Vietnam can be identified by examining the results of a survey conducted by Ole Holsti and James Rosenau.31 They identify seven groups holding different opinions about the sources, consequences, and lessons of Vietnam, covering the entire range from consistent critics to consistent supporters. Fully 30 percent of the sample falls at the two extremes, confirming the depth of the impact of Vietnam on American attitudes. Looking first at the sources of failure, Holsti and Rosenau were able to identify twenty-one reasons why the United States lost. The depth of disagreement is great. Not only are the sources of failure ranked differently by the various groups, but no one also explanation appears among all seven groups. Only three explanations are shared by six of these groups: the United States’ lack of clear-cut goals, the presence of Soviet and Chinese aid, and North Vietnamese dedication.

A more coherent picture emerges when we review the consequences of Vietnam. Supporters cited international system-related concerns as the most important consequences, while critics cited Vietnam’s domestic impact. Only one consequence was cited by all seven groups (but not with the same relative importance): the United States will limit its conception of its national interest. Yet the picture becomes cloudy again when turning to the lessons of Vietnam. Of the thirty-four lessons cited, not one appears among all seven groups. Only two appear among six of the groups: (1) executive-legislative cooperation is vital; and (2) Russia is expansionist.

The Iraq War

Before turning to the details of the Iraq War, it is important to understand the six linked phases of military activity described by military planners (see  figure 4.1 ). In the Shape Phase (Phase 0), normal and routine military operations take place. In the Deter Phase (Phase I), military action seeks to deter the enemy by demonstrating resolve and capabilities for action. In the Seize Initiative Phase (Phase II), military force is used to execute 93offensive operations. In the Dominate Phase (Phase III), military forces focus on breaking the enemy’s will for organized resistance by engaging in a full deployment of force. The Stabilize Phase (Phase IV) is required when there is no functioning legitimate government or only a minimally functioning one. In Phase IV, military forces are required to perform limited local governance activities. Finally, in the Enable Civil Authority Phase (Phase V), the objective of the military is to support the civil authorities. Whereas great praise surrounded the initial military operation in Iraq, the lack of connections between the first three phases and Phase IV, as well as the conduct of Phase IV, became the subject of much criticism.32

 FIGURE 4.1  Phase Model of Military Activity

 

Iraq War Chronology The prelude to the Iraq War found the United States engaged in diplomatic efforts at the UN Security Council to gain its approval for military action against Iraq. President George W. Bush addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2002, calling on it to move quickly to enforce the resolution demanding Iraq’s disarmament, while making it clear that the United States was prepared to act on its own. With the prospects for an affirmative vote by the UN Security Council virtually nonexistent, on March 16 President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and leaders from Spain and Portugal in the Azores to announce that the “moment of truth” had arrived for Saddam Hussein. The following day Bush issued an ultimatum requiring Saddam to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours, and on March 19 Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. A shock and awe military campaign began, designed to overwhelm and demoralize Iraqi forces and allow coalition forces to move swiftly to Baghdad. On April 9 Baghdad came under the control of U.S. forces, and on May 1 President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. At this point, the administration began Phase IV. A chronology of major events in the Iraq War is presented in  table 4.2 .

TABLE 4.2 Chronology of Major Events in the Iraq War
January 2002	In his State of the Union address, President Bush identifies Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.”
September 2002	Bush addresses the UN General Assembly and challenges it to confront “the grave and gathering danger” of Iraq or become irrelevant.
December 2002	Bush approves deployment of U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf.
February 2003	The United States, Spain, and Great Britain introduce a resolution in the Security Council authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. Russia, Germany, and France oppose it.
March 17, 2003	Bush gives Saddam Hussein a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq.
March 19, 2003	Operation Iraqi Freedom begins with a “decapitation” air strike against leadership targets in Baghdad.
March 21, 2003	Major fighting begins.
May 1, 2003	Bush declares an end to major combat operations.
December 2003	Saddam Hussein is captured.
April 2004	Photos are aired showing torture and mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib prison.
June 2004	United States transfers power to a new interim Iraqi government.
September 2004	U.S. casualties reach the 1,000 marks.
December 2004	United States announces its plans to expand its military presence in Iraq to 150,000 troops.
January 2005	Iraq holds its first multiparty election in fifty years.
May 2006	Nouri al-Malaki forms Iraq’s first permanent democratically elected government.
December 2006	The Iraq Study Group Report (Baker-Hamilton Report) is released.
January 2007	President Bush announces a surge of U.S. forces into Iraq to stem the violence and create conditions for peace.
March 19, 2008	Fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.
September 2008	The United States transfers responsibility for security in Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi military and police.
November 2008	The Iraq cabinet approves a status of forces agreement that will govern the U.S. presence in Iraq through 2011.
January 2009	Iraq holds local elections that are free from violence.
August 2010	Last U.S. combat brigade leaves Iraq.
December 2011	President Obama declares the Iraq War to be over.

By all accounts, the Bush administration entered Phase IV without a great deal of forethought, expecting it to be completed in about six months. Calls for additional forces were rejected as unnecessary, and postwar planning carried out in the State Department and the CIA received 94little attention in the Pentagon. On May 12, Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq as head of the new Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Bremer’s first two orders proved to be highly controversial. CPA Order 1 attempted to “de-Baathify” Iraqi society. All full Baath Party members were dismissed 95immediately from their government positions and banned from future government employment. CPA Order 2 dissolved the Iraqi army, along with Saddam Hussein’s bodyguard and special paramilitary. The result of these two decisions was to drive many highly trained individuals into the opposition who had not necessarily been supporters of Saddam Hussein, and on whom the United States would have been able to rely to help stabilize the military and political situation.

Establishing political stability proved an elusive goal, as did creating a democratic government. Political milestones were realized, but a functioning government supported by all sectors of the Iraqi population was not created. On May 28, 2004, Iyad Allawi was selected as prime minister of the interim Iraqi government. One month later sovereignty was transferred, and Paul Bremer left Iraq. On October 13, 2005, a national referendum was held on Iraq’s constitution, and in May 2006 Nouri al-Malaki formed Iraq’s first permanent, democratically elected government. President Bush praised al-Malaki’s government as having “strong leaders that represent all of the Iraqi people” and signaling a “decisive break with the past,” but by the end of 2006, U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley was questioning its will and capacity to take the necessary military and political steps to bring sectarian violence under control. Al-Malaki’s ability to do so was central to the success of Bush’s surge plan, announced in January 2007, which sent additional U.S. forces to Iraq.

Bush’s decision was controversial because it contradicted the central thrust of the Iraq Study Group’s report.33 The report recommended a phased exit of U.S. forces from Iraq, as well as talks with Syria and Iran. In June it was announced that the surge was complete, with 28,500 more U.S. forces in the country. This brought the total number of U.S. forces in Iraq to 165,000, the largest to date.

U.S. strategy in Iraq began to move in a new direction in 2007 when General David Petraeus took command of its military operation. Prior to assuming this post, he oversaw the writing of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual.34 The first new manual on counterinsurgency (COIN) operations produced by the army in twenty years, it now became the basis of U.S. operations in Iraq. According to the manual, the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies is political power. The long-term success of COIN requires people to take charge of their own affairs and consent to the government’s rule.

The combination of the surge, the change of strategy to COIN, and the “Anbar Awakening” produced by a Sunni tribal uprising altered the military landscape in Iraq. From 2004 until mid-2007, Iraq averaged more than fifteen hundred civilian deaths per month, and the U.S. military experienced almost one hundred dead and seven hundred wounded. By the end of 2007, U.S. fatalities fell to an average of twenty-three per month; from June 2008 to June 2011 this number decreased by just over one half.35

By 2013, two years after Obama declared the Iraq War over, a much different scenario was in place. A series of political protests accompanied the insurgency-led violence in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. forces. A common focal point was failures of the Iraqi government to end corruption and provide public services. Significant protests in the name of democracy took place in Iraqi Kurdistan. Sunni Arabs protested what they saw to be their marginalization in Iraq’s new economic and political order. The net result of this deteriorating situation was that most of the military gains prior to 2011 were gone. Led by al-Qaeda–linked insurgents, suicide attacks were once again common, and in 2013 some 7,800 civilians and 1,000 Iraq security troops died in attacks.

By 2014, references to an Iraq insurgency were increasingly replaced by those identifying the conflict as a civil war. Both politically and militarily, the tipping point came in 2014 with the announcement by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) of the creation of a worldwide caliphate claiming religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims. In June 2014, ISIS took control of Fallujah and some 70 percent of Anbar Province. In response, Obama sent additional forces to Iraq. Later that year he announced a renewal of significant U.S. military operations in Iraq. It would be 2016 before Fallujah was retaken by Iraqi forces.

Analogies with Past Conflicts This section examines three lessons from the past (the Cold War and the Vietnam and Korean Wars) that American policy makers drew upon in making strategic decisions about the Iraq War.

The Cold War  The George W. Bush administration cast the Global War against Terrorism as a long war with Iraq as its central front, inviting comparisons with the Cold War. One factor that stands out in many analyses of how the Cold War played out, especially in the Third World, is the challenge that nationalism presented to U.S. foreign policy as it sought to counter the influence of the Soviet Union and communism.36 Both the Soviet Union and the United States were most effective when they cast their arguments in terms of local conditions and nationalist sentiment, and least effective when trying to couch a local conflict in global terms. The United States also encountered difficulties because it tended to ignore the differences among local enemy forces, grouping them all together under the heading of communists or communist sympathizers and allying with leadership forces often seen by local political forces as part of the problem. This same set of problems was a central challenge that the U.S. faced in Iraq.

A rather ominous reading of the past is presented by Andrew Bacevich.37 He sees the Cold War and the Iraq War as firmly linked. In his view, they are World War III and part of World War IV, respectively. Periodically during the Cold War, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, in particular, had been major concerns of U.S. policy makers, but were almost always overshadowed by other conflicts. This changed just as the Cold War was ending, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. Bacevich sees President Jimmy Carter as virtually declaring the 97start of World War IV and Ronald Reagan as fully committing the United States to the region. The first phase of World War IV concluded in 1990. Iran and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan were the main U.S. enemies at this time. A second phase began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and ran through the 1990s. World War IV entered its third phase with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. 

The Vietnam War  There are no shortage of comparisons between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War,38 nor is there any shortage of controversy over such comparisons. President George W. Bush invoked the Vietnam comparison in 2007, stating that “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens.” Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) countered, saying, “The president is drawing the wrong lessons from history.”39 Among the most often-noted differences are those involving the nature of the military conflict. In Vietnam, the United States entered into an ongoing national war of liberation which the enemy operated as a unified political-military force, engaging in both conventional military battles and insurgency operations. Violence rarely spread into major South Vietnamese cities. The United States also carried the war on the ground and in the air to North Vietnam and neighboring states that it accused of aiding the enemy. More recently, it has been suggested that the need to learn the political lessons of the Vietnam War still exists. Four lessons have been suggested by John Kerry, John McCain, and Bob Kerry: (1) do not confuse a war with the warriors; (2) be honest with Congress and the American people; (3) exercise humility in assuming knowledge about foreign cultures; and (4) with sufficient effort and will, seemingly unbridgeable differences can be reconciled.40

The Iraq War began with an American invasion. Conventional battles soon ended, and the conflict became almost entirely a combination of terrorist and insurgency attacks. Opposition forces operated not as a unified political-military front, but as militias, terrorist bands, and death squads under the leadership of a host of leaders. In the process, cities became the battleground and civilians the frequent targets as the various sides fought for dominance and to settle feuds both old and new. The United States did not expand the Iraq War beyond that country’s borders, even though it asserted that Iran and Syria were harboring and supporting Iraqi insurgents.

Commentators see far more parallels of the political side of the Iraq War with the Vietnam War, although not all agree on what they are. Melvin Laird, who served as Secretary of Defense under Nixon during Vietnam, observed one point of similarity: Both wars were launched on the basis of faulty intelligence and “possibly outright deception.”41 By “possible deception,” he was referring to the weapons-of-mass-destruction charge leveled against Saddam Hussein and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Similarities are also found in the decisions made by presidents early in the war and then as it became clear that victory no longer seemed attainable. For Kennedy and Bush, Vietnam and Iraq became testing grounds 98for new strategic doctrines.42 For Kennedy, it was an opportunity to move away from Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation to one of graduated escalation. Massive retaliation, with its emphasis on the all-out use of nuclear weapons, left presidents with few options in dealing with regional threats like Vietnam. For Bush, Iraq provided a test case for preemption as the new American strategic doctrine as a replacement for deterrence, which was judged as too passive and unable to dissuade leaders of rogue states.

Nixon and Bush also used similar language in explaining an American exit strategy to the public. Nixon said, “As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.” Bush asserted, “As the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down.”43 However, political differences are present. The depth of support for the Vietnam War was far wider and deeper than that for the Iraq War. In the early 1960s, few questioned the domino theory and the need for an American presence in Vietnam. No equivalent rationale for action existed at the outset of the Iraq War. Unlike the war in Afghanistan that preceded it, the link to the global spread of terrorism did not seem as evident to most. 

The Korean War  In June 2007, the Bush administration publicly raised the possibility of a long-term deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of the present mission. The historical analogy put forward is South Korea, where U.S. forces continued to be based for decades after the Korean conflict formally ended. The Korean model was presented by both Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as superior to the Vietnam model, in which U.S. forces left “lock, stock, and barrel.” The analogy is attractive because of the economic prosperity and political stability that South Korea has experienced since the armistice was signed. However, critics quickly pointed out that, given the animosity toward American forces in Iraq, the continued presence of U.S. troops would likely be a lightning rod in domestic Iraqi politics and a target of military and terrorist attacks. Beirut in the 1980s, where U.S. Marines established a presence after fighting between Lebanon and Israel, was cited as a better analogy. At first the U.S. military forces were welcomed by all factions, but a suicide bomber driving a truck struck the Marine barracks in 1983, killing 241 soldiers.

 

Operations Decisions The United States faced two sets of operations decisions about how to fight the Iraq war: coinsurgency (COIN) and rebuilding Iraq.

Fighting COIN Operations  The recognized differences between the political and military battlefields of Vietnam and Iraq noted earlier have led to a major debate over the military lessons of Vietnam for Iraq when it comes to fighting COIN operations. On one side are those who argue that the most relevant strategy in Vietnam was the abandoned “strategic hamlet” 99 program, in which the United States sought to pacify specific areas and then gradually expand control outward. In Iraq this has been referred to as the “oil spot” strategy.44 At the other end of the spectrum are those who argue that the different political situations in Iraq and Vietnam negate the relevance of any Vietnam COIN strategy for Iraq. They argue that the issue in Iraq is not the people against a government so much as it is a security problem driven by mutual fear of all people about what will happen if the opposing group(s) seizes control. Winning the hearts and minds of the people does not address this problem, nor does promoting democracy. In fact, democratization may only further polarize the situation by increasing anxieties over what the new government will do.45

The search for lessons from the past that the United States can use in fighting insurgents in Iraq also yields a cautionary note. David Kilcullen argues that today’s insurgents differ greatly from their predecessors in terms of policy, strategy, operational art, and tactics.46 For example, given the global and instantaneous nature of communications today, the success of the insurgents may not ride on the legitimacy of the local government but on the ability to mobilize public support around the world for their cause. Kilcullen continues by saying that, whereas it was once believed that COIN operations were 25 percent military and 75 percent political, they may be 100 percent political today. He concludes by echoing the observation of Bernard Fall, a noted Vietnam-era COIN specialist: “If it works, it is obsolete.”

Rebuilding Iraq the post–World War II American occupations of Germany and Japan were put forward by the George W. Bush administration as the starting points for thinking about rebuilding Iraq. Bush observed, “America has made and kept this kind of commitment before . . . after defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments.”47 A closer reading of the American experience in Germany and Japan would have provided reason for utilizing caution with regard to both process and outcome. Douglas Porch maintains that, for nearly a full decade, many of those involved in these reconstruction programs considered their efforts to be nearly a complete failure.48 Rather than encounter a welcoming population, they found resentment and resistance. Actions taken to bring about reform were often counterproductive. General Lucius Clay, who was in charge of the American occupation zone in Europe, called de-Nazification his biggest mistake. It was in his mind a “hopelessly ambiguous procedure” that linked together small and big Nazis and engendered the hostility of the population at large because implementation often appeared arbitrary and hypocritical. Yet, the United States moved quickly to “de-Baathify” Iraq by dismissing party members from government positions and decommissioning the army.

It can be argued that the reasons for the ultimate success of the occupations of Germany and Japan had little to do with American foreign policy 100or the presumed natural inclination of people liberated from tyranny for democracy. Rather, it had to do with factors such as enlightened domestic leadership, economic miracles fueled by the Marshall Plan in Europe, and the Korean War in Asia, along with the prior experience of democracy and entrepreneurship in these two states. The key American contribution was creating domestic and regional security, laying the ground rules for democratic reform, and then getting out of the way.

Germany and Japan were not the only efforts at reconstruction (or, more broadly, nation building) that might have been looked to for lessons. Fourteen other cases exist, including Cuba (1898–1902, 1906–1909, and 1917–1922), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965–1966), South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Afghanistan.49 In only two cases, Panama (1989) and Grenada, was democracy in place after ten years. In seven cases, the United States established governments that almost totally depended on the United States for survival. In none of these cases did democracy emerge. One lesson drawn from these experiences is that the ideal form of transition involves a quick transfer of power to legitimately elected local leaders, but this presupposes a functioning electoral system and moderate local leaders who have genuine support among the populace.

The Iraq War and Iran, 2019 Standard discussions of the lessons of the Iraq War, such as those presented here, stress the legacy of the manner in which the United States entered the conflict and then became trapped as a result of poorly conceived strategies and a failure to understand the political and historical context in which it was operating. An alternative view argues that Iraq was winnable, that the problem (and lessons to be learned) are ones of execution. In particular, it is argued that Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops sealed defeat.50 Supporters of both views are present within the Trump administration as it seeks to find a path forward in its dealings with Iran following the U.S. exit from the 2015 nuclear agreement and the onset of the conflict spiral discussed at the outset of this chapter. The conventional set of lessons suggests caution about the use of force and the ability to achieve a quick and lasting victory. The other lessons see the Iran conflict as a potential vindicator of that strategy.51

Over the Horizon: The Challenge to R2P

Learning from the past is not easy.52 Past successes and failures are often obscured by the pressing foreign policy issues of the day. Not long after 9/11, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage gave voice to this political reality when he asserted, “History starts today.”53 Yet the pull of the past is never completely gone. As much as Obama wished to escape the Vietnam syndrome, he could not. When members of his administration brought up Vietnam, all Obama could say was “ghosts.”54

As we look over the horizon, the 2019 Venezuelan crisis holds potentially important implications for the future of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P holds that sovereignty is not just the right of a government to rule but brings with it the responsibility for protecting and advancing the lives of its citizens. When a government is unable to do so, the international community has a responsibility to intervene, with force if necessary and as a last resort. R2P also obligates intervening countries to help rebuild the affected country.

R2P was not invoked in the 2019 Venezuelan crisis by Trump when he threatened to use military force. Proponents argue that R2P saves lives and is ethically required. It provided the justification for intervening into Libya in 2011 and has been a primary rationale advanced by those favoring intervention into Syria. 55 Citing Libya as an example, opponents argue that R2P serves as little more than a cover for countries to intervene to protect their own narrowly defined national interests.

Trump’s silence on R2P is consistent with his rejection of international organizations and international law as constraints or stimuli of U.S. foreign policy. The question now becomes, will R2P reestablish itself as a guideline for interventions (for better or worse) or will it fall by the wayside?

Critical Thinking Questions

1. What is the most important lesson that can be learned from the U.S. experience in Vietnam, and why?

2. What lessons does Iraq hold for involvement in Afghanistan?

3. What are the dangers of looking to the past for lessons on how to deal with current foreign policy problems?

Key Terms

· analogies, 78

· closed belief system, 79

· cognitive consistency, 79

· generational events, 79

· guerrilla war, 87

· Iraq syndrome, 84

· noise, 78

· proxy war, 86

· shock and awe, 93

· signal, 78

101

Further Reading

Jon Finer,” The Last War—and the Next War,” Foreign Affairs 98 (July 2019), 183–91.

This review essay of a U.S. Army official history of the Iraq War raises the question of whether we are learning the right or wrong lessons from Iraq.

102

David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

This author focuses on the evolution of COIN doctrine, beginning with Vietnam and continuing through to Iraq, emphasizing the difficulty of learning from the past and how military leaders use history in formulating policy.

Robert Gallucci, Neither Peace nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

The U.S. experience in Vietnam has produced many excellent volumes. This book is particularly noteworthy for its treatment of bureaucratic politics and the overall decision-making process.

Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

This classic volume introduces readers to the many ways in which perceptions and misperceptions manifest themselves in foreign policy decisions.

Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Diem Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decision of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

This book examines the process of analogical reasoning and shows how policy makers used three key analogies from the past to make a key decision in the Vietnam War.

Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

This foundational work on analogies and American foreign policy advances three arguments: policy makers are influenced by what they believe history teaches them; they tend to use history badly; and they are capable of using history better.

Dominic Tierney, “Intelligent Failure,” Foreign Affairs 98 (January 2019), 41–8.

The author examines how U.S. officials think about past versus future losses, arguing that too often U.S. officials neglect the possibility of disaster.

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