“Once you send American boys off to war, an invisible clock starts ticking and you have a limited amount of time before the public back home runs out of patience.”
- Richard Nixon

Public discourse on the current war in Iraq is littered with analogies to the Vietnam War. Some are prescient; some are not. Reasoning by historical analogy is a highly fraught endeavor, and it is prudent to keep in mind that no two situations are exactly alike. Nonetheless, I offer my thoughts about how the lessons of Vietnam bear on the war America is waging today:
At first blush, there are stark differences between the Vietnam War and the Second Gulf War (The current war is smaller in scale, has no Cold War dimension, involves a professional instead of draft military, has higher freedom of military action, is largely urban, etc.). All differences aside, however, three lessons from Vietnam are particularly relevant. First, an asymmetry of stakes in a military conflict can give a materially inferior enemy enormous advantage. Knowing its country’s future was at stake gave the NLF the fortitude to persevere, even while suffering enormous casualties. Second, when America sends troops to fight wars that do not bear directly on national security, public support for the war will be limited and finite. The non-imperative nature of the Vietnam War made the public intolerant of sustained casualties. Finally, the war exposed an American naivete – the belief that South Vietnamese would sacrifice, fight, and die for a concept, democracy, which was totally foreign to their way of thinking. Together, these lessons drove home an important point: American-led wars waged for ideological reasons rather than exigent security interests are inherently risky and difficult to sustain.
The US government took these lessons to heart for twenty-eight years following America’s 1973 exit from Vietnam. Carter eschewed military intervention in Nicaragua, Iran, and Afghanistan. The Reagan doctrine prescribed military intervention only where victory was a foregone conclusion, as in Grenada. In more uncertain climates like Nicaragua, America fought by proxy only. While Bush Sr. led a 1991 military intervention in Iraq, its objective was carefully circumscribed and America resisted an opportunity to broaden the conflict. Clinton sought multilateral support for all peacekeeping missions and pursued a militarily quiescent foreign policy.
Having retaliated against the actual perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack by invading Afghanistan, Bush made a conscious decision to broaden the scope of the conflict. Regardless of one’s opinion as to whether Iraq posed a security threat, the current conflict is largely framed as a “Good vs. Evil” ideological battle. The current war thus represents a decision by the Bush administration to either ignore, or discard as irrelevant, the lessons from Vietnam heeded by previous leaders.
The recalcitrance and doggedness of the Sunni insurgency, aided by pan-national terrorists from elsewhere in the Middle East, smacks alarmingly of the tenacity of the NLF, suggesting that Sunni fears of fundamental political change and subordination in a Shiite dominated democracy represent an asymmetry of stakes like that in Vietnam. Calls for disengagement by such formerly hawkish politicians as Rep. John Murtha and flagging public support for the war suggest Bush has been overly cavalier in ignoring the caveats of Vietnam.