VIETNAM AND IRAQ: COMPARISON AND A POINT
OF VIEW, PART ONE
In its two largest wars during the past half-century, U.S. presidents determined upon war well before American troops attacked. Neither president told Americans the truth about why they took the country to war. They kept crucial
information secret, not because to reveal it would damage national security, but because it might damage them. Neither Vietnam nor Iraq was a threat to U.S. security.
Why did the U.S. go to war in Vietnam?
The inciting event of the war was the Gulf of Tonkin episode. When President Johnson reported to the public in August 1964 that North Vietnam, in an "unprovoked" attack, had fired on two American destroyers, he knew the evidence was at best very shaky and quite possibly incorrect. He did not report to the public or Congress that American ships in the gulf were there to support South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnamese ships and installations. If there was an attack, the U.S. provoked it.
President Nixon also kept secrets from the public, but not necessarily the enemy. In early 1970 he ordered bombing attacks on neutral Cambodia because, he said later, North Vietnam was using it as sanctuary. The North Vietnamese and the Cambodians certainly knew about the bombings, but not the American public. President Nixon, in a TV address to the public on April 30, 1970, said that the U.S. had "scrupulously respected" the neutrality of Cambodia.
By 1964, despite U.S. efforts to make South Vietnam a nation and to support it with money, weapons, and advice, the war with North Vietnam was going badly. President Johnson decided that only American troops could save the situation. His reasons included:
He wanted to avoid a humiliating defeat and maintain U.S. credibility as a world power He was convinced that North Vietnam could not stand up to overwhelming U.S. power He wanted to avoid right-wing attacks that he was soft on communism.
Why did the U.S. go to war in Iraq?
President Bush launched the war on Iraq after he, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Rice insisted that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons, was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, harbored al Qaeda operatives and was complicit in 9/11. All of these accusations, including virtually everything in Secretary Powell's UN speech, were not "facts" and were not based on "solid sources" or solid intelligence."
The president and other officials claimed later that any inaccuracy resulted from bad intelligence. But there is much evidence that they knew that their case against Iraq was at best very shaky and quite possibly incorrect. President Bush and administration officials publicized information that supported their claims and kept secret that which did not. The National Security Strategy of 2002 declares that the U.S. "will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, [and]
preemptively." The president "has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened. Our forces will be powerful enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military building in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the U.S." But as the New York Times reported, "a corollary embraced by the White House has held that policy makers must assume the worst about the intentions of adversaries, even with imperfect intelligence about their intentions and capabilities." (3/2/07)
Like President Johnson, President Bush had a mixture of reasons for war. Among them:
He was determined to demonstrate to the world, in general, and Middle East nations, in particular, that the U.S. meant what it said in its National Security Strategy.
He believed Iraq was weak and it would not be difficult to make an object lesson of Iraq.
Similarities
Common factors in the decisions to go to war in Vietnam and Iraq were 1) the conviction of the two presidents that the U.S. possessed such commanding power that the enemy would be overwhelmed and 2) the apparent ignorance of both presidents and their policy aides about the histories and cultures of Vietnam and Iraq.
President Johnson seemed unaware of the Vietnamese passions aroused during France's century-long colonial rule of Vietnam. Nationalism and anti-colonialism inspired the North Vietnamese and many in the south as well. They would fight any effort to control them for another century. The president did not seem to understand that they were willing to die for those beliefs and in far great numbers than Americans would be.
Similarly, President Bush seemed not to consider that the British had created Iraq after World War I from Ottoman empire territories and that Iraqis had strongly resisted British control in the 1920s. He seemed unaware of the sensitivities and resentments of Middle East people to their long domination by European colonial powers. He also seemed unaware of the history of Sunni-Shiite animosities and what they might lead to in a country that had been dominated by Sunnis who had suppressed the majority Shiites.
Despite its ability to inflict tremendous damage on an enemy, the U.S. in both Vietnam and Iraq became caught up in unconventional guerrilla wars. In conventional battlefield wars, the U.S. could overpower any nation. In Vietnam, the U.S. troops fought a jungle war, in Iraq a city war. In both cases, they fought combatants who were not necessarily in uniform, who would strike and disappear into a supportive civilian population, who would fight when, where, and how they chose to.
Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung described this kind of warfare: "Guerrillas are fish, and the people are the water in which they swim. If the temperature of the water is right, the fish will thrive and multiply." Inevitably, powerful U.S. bombing and other tactics to kill and root out guerrillas also killed civilians. Such killings created more guerrillas. Fighting in a faraway land drags on and on with no end in sight. More and more soldiers are maimed and killed. Thoughts of victory fade. Americans weary of such wars, presidents lose the public's support, and senators and representatives feel the voter disapproval and look for a way out.
VIETNAM AND IRAQ: COMPARISON AND A POINT
OF VIEW, PART TWO
All wars are brutal and murderous. This is why, in 1949, an international conference produced the Geneva Conventions, a detailed set of rules and regulations intended to reduce war's horror as much as possible. They include specifics about the humane treatment of noncombatants—civilians and prisoners of war. Most nations, including the U.S., have ratified the conventions. But in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as in "the war on terror," the U.S. has repeatedly violated them.
Vietnam
In November 1969 Americans learned of a village the Army called My Lai 4. More than 500 men, women, and children had been massacred there a year-and-a-half earlier in March 1968 by a platoon led by Lt. William Calley. Jr.
But it was not until more than three decades later, in October 2003, that a series of articles in The Toledo Blade revealed a murderous rampage from May through November 1967 by a reconnaissance platoon known as the Tiger Force of the 101st Airborne Division. "For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians-in some cases torturing and mutilating them. Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers. Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed-their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings." (Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss spent months researching the articles for the Blade and later published a book,Tiger Force. )
genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." In his 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry said nothing about his 1971 testimony despite attacks on him motivated, at least in part, by that testimony Lt. Calley was convicted of murder, sentenced to house arrest and paroled after three-and-a-half years by President Nixon. The Army insisted that My Lai was an isolated episode. There were no prosecutions of upper echelon officers under whom Lt. Calley and his platoon or the Tiger Force operated. Nor were there charges for obvious violations of the Geneva Conventions that should have led to war crimes trials and convictions. In November 1975 an Army report on Tiger Force actions concluded that "nothing beneficial or constructive could result from prosecution at this time." Air force bombings aimed at North Vietnamese ports and military facilities also inevitably killed countless North
Vietnamese. Vietnam was "free fire" zones in which U.S. troops fired at anything that moved. Villages reduced to ashes. Napalm attacks to defoliate forests that resulted in hideous burnings and deaths of the Vietnamese people. An enemy that often could not be identified. "Body counts" that were manufactured for PR purposes. Vietnam was a long war that increasingly made little or no sense to the troops on the ground or to their leaders.
Iraq
As My Lai became a symbol for war crimes committed by Americans in Vietnam, so a U.S-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, became a symbol for war crimes committed by Americans in Iraq as well as elsewhere since 9/11. Photographs shown around the world depicted American soldiers amusing themselves with what Major General Antonio Taguba in an official Army investigation called "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."
President Bush said the behavior at Abu Ghraib involved actions "by a few American troops who disregarded our country and disregarded our values." (5/4/04)
But such behavior has not been confined to Abu Ghraib or "a few American troops." The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported after its inspectors visited 14 places of detention in Iraq: "The ICRC medical delegate
examined persons presenting signs of concentration difficulties, memory problems, verbal expression difficulties, incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions, abnormal behavior and suicidal tendencies. These symptoms appeared to have been caused by the methods and duration of interrogation." The ICRC called some of the abuses at Camp Cropper, a detention center in Iraq, "tantamount to torture."
An official panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger declared: "The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels."
Such official reports as well as those from the ICRC, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights First provide many examples of U.S. prisoner treatment in many detention centers. A small sample:
Preventing a prisoner from sleeping Waterboarding a prisoner
Subjecting a naked prisoner to extreme cold and pouring ice water over him Sodomizing a prisoner with a chemical light
Forcing a prisoner to crawl on his stomach while guards spit and urinate on him Placing a lit cigarette in the ear of a prisoner
Chaining a prisoner in the fetal position of 24 hours without food, water or toilet facility
Shackling a prisoner in his underwear to a chair and subjecting him for hours to strobe lights, rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers while air conditioning is turned up to maximum levels
Chaining a prisoner to the ceiling an kicking and beating him until he dies Detaining a prisoner indefinitely without charge
During the initial "shock and awe" air force bombings of Iraqi cities, countless civilians were maimed and killed. During the regular bombings since then to kill insurgents and terrorists in a number of Iraqi cities, additional countless civilians have been maimed and killed. Despite all efforts to avoid them, civilian casualties are inevitable in attacks on cities. They are "countless" because neither U.S. nor Iraqi officials keep records of them. But U.S. bombings and other military actions have clearly resulted in tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
Vietnam and Iraq
U.S. actions in Vietnam and Iraq have not demonstrated to the world the model its leaders have celebrated of "a city upon a hill." They have revealed instead its "dark side."
The people of every nation have a hard time recognizing and absorbing the dark side each has. Japanese leaders, for example, have often refused to or allow Japanese school books to describe their nation's forced sex slavery of Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Filipino women during World War II. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently declared, "There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it." But a Japanese historian in 1992 found documentary evidence to the contrary. Other historians support his findings, and "many former sex slaves have stepped forward in recent years with their stories." ( New York Times , 3/2/07)
Similarly, American leaders have been unwilling to acknowledge the dark side of American power revealed by the wars Vietnam and Iraq, fearing a huge outcry and a political cost. Announcing four years after the end of the Vietnam War that he would run for president, Ronald Reagan declared, "We will become that shining city on a hill." In his 1981 inaugural address, he said, "We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not have freedom." This refrain was untempered by the Vietnam experience.
As for Iraq, the officer in charge of Abu Ghraib, Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was demoted to colonel. The only other Americans punished for the widespread abuse and torture of prisoners are lower level soldiers. No high-ranking officials have been accused of anything. Nor do these officials generally discuss the Iraqi civilian casualties of a war now four years old.
The American philosopher George Santayana wrote long ago, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And perhaps those who do not absorb their dark side are condemned to repeat it — as the U.S. has done in Iraq and "the war on terror."
Name: ____________________ Discussion Questions: Comparing Vietnam to Iraq
Part I:
1. What secrets did Presidents Johnson and Nixon keep from the public?
a. Were their reasons to protect U.S. national security?
b. According to the commentary, why or why not?
c. How might these presidents argue that they had good reasons for secrecy?
2. What secrets did President Bush keep from the public?
a. Was his reason to protect national security?
b. According to the commentary, why or why not?
c. How might the president argue that he had good reasons for secrecy?
3. Using the bullet points from the reading, summarize the reasons for war & add in supporting/opposing evidence Presidential
reason to go to war in Vietnam
Evidence to support that
reason
Evidence to oppose that
reason
Presidential reason to go to
war in Iraq
Evidence to support that
reason
Evidence to oppose that
reason
Name: ____________________ Discussion Questions: Comparing Vietnam to Iraq
Part II:
1. These portraits of American behavior in Vietnam and Iraq are very unpleasant and very critical. In your opinion, are they fair? Why or why not?
2. The reading accuses Americans of war crimes. What evidence is there to support such accusations?
b. To oppose them?
3. Why do you think no high-level civilian U.S. officials have been accused of war crimes or, indeed, any crime in connection with Tiger Force operations?
a. Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq?
b. Guantanamo?
c. Civilian deaths in Vietnam?
d. In Iraq?