Two wars in which US military might hasn’t clinched final victory. Naturally the first idea is that the US focused only on the military victory and lost in the hearts & minds and political arena. Or not ?
Was Vietnam always impossible to win ? Is Iraq a dead end and also impossible to win ? The british also failed in Iraq in the past.
If positive … why ? What makes these “unwinnable” ?
continued…
If negative… then what does the USA do wrong to lose these wars ? Is there a disconect so big between military and political objectives ?
We might have won the war in Vietnam, if we had been better prepared for the Tet Offensive. (Like Iraq, a great failure in military intelligence.)
We have already won the war in Iraq, winning the peace may not be possible.
No, Vietnam was not always impossible to win IMHO. It was impossible to win the way we tried to ‘win’ it…which was to maintain the status quo. As long as there was a North Vietnam, final victory was impossible. In short the North was what kept the war going, and of course the Soviets and Chinese were what kept the North going. To ‘win’ in Vietnam the US would have needed to take a more active role…not in maintaining South Vietnam but in taking out North Vietnam. Of course, the political ramification of that (like the possibility of sparking a war between either the US and China, the US and the Soviets, or both) might have made it not worth while for the US to do this…but you asked a theoretical, and IMHO theoretically Vietnam was winnable.
Iraq is still very ‘winnable’…depending on what you mean by winning of course. The current insurgency isn’t supportable in the long run without outside support…support that would be suicide for any regional power to give overtly because it would bring down the wrath of the US on their heads. Covert support will be able to maintain a low level insurgency which won’t be as effective as what we’ve seen for the past year…remember that much of the current insurgency is running on weapons squirreled away by a paranoid Saddam. Eventually that supply will run lower and more support from outside will be needed.
The US merely has to find the political stomach to stick out the mess WE made for a few years until an Iraqi government of SOME form can get to its feet and fight its own battles. At that time the majority of the support for the insurgency (such that it is with the common Iraqi’s today…pretty low IMHO) will mainly evaporate and you’ll have cells of mostly foreign fighters to go along with the mostly foreign leaders currently running the insurgency…which will be marginalized.
WILL the US find that will? Gods know. I see so many people who simply want to cut and run at this point because of the ‘massive’ casualties we’ve suffered in nearly two years of fighting. I’m unsure of Kerry, who I think has at least a 50/50 shot of winning in November. I seriously doubt he’ll get the majority of the Europeans involved in anything more than providing some funds…certainly I can’t see France, Germany, etc providing TROOPS to Iraq. So it will remain the US and UK mainly…if the UK doesn’t also bow out at some point. Kerry has said he would like to begin pulling out in 6 months if conditions are good…but I don’t see conditions being ‘good’ for at least another year or so…maybe longer. Saddam squirreled away a LOT of weapons and ammunition after all. Kerry will be pressured from his own base to ‘do something’…and a lot of the cut and run types are also in that base. Will he cave into pressure from his base to pull out? I don’t know…its a worrying thought.
As for Bush…again I’m unsure. DOES he have a viable plan for making the situation better? Again, gods know…I don’t. However, I’m pretty sure that Bush will stick it out if nothing else. It might not be the optimal plan for Iraq, but the US will stay there, and in the end that is whets going to make the difference…giving Iraq TIME to get on its feet.
-XT
At the risk of repeating myself again:
I interpret some of the current “truce” arrangements between the Iraqi puppet government and some of the insurgents as a simple tactical retreat by the insurgents. Some of them, it would appear, have decided (correctly, IMO) that their best strategy at this point is to lie low for a while. In fact, if things calm down enough, maybe the U.S. will significantly reduce its troop strength in Iraq, which Rumsfeld is already talking about. Then, they can rise up again, knowing that no U.S. administration will be eager to send in more troops after pulling them out.
Whether you interpret the establishment of a nice, stable, fundamentalist Islamic republic as a “victory” or a “loss” for U.S. interests is another question, of course.
I just finished rereading Vietnam: A History by Karnow (I originally read it 15 years ago for a history class on the Vietnam War. ) If Karnow’s account is correct, a major reason the Vietnam War was unwinnable seems to be the fact that South Vietnam’s political leadership was composed primarily of scumbags and grifters. They spent more time fighting with each other than fighting the Communists, never won the confidence of the South Vietnamese population, and in short never inspired the widespread nationalist sentiments the way the Communists did. You notice that there was never a political leader in the large Vietnamese refugee community that the anti-Communists hoped to restore to power. Apparently the lack of a democratic tradition in Vietnam precluded the development of a “statesman” class, and unfortunately the only statesmanlike character who did emerge was a Communist.
Vietnam - unwinnable IMO, for reasons so well illustrated by others. But basically, without destroying the North and cutting off the supply chain, as well as getting rid of the ‘scumbags and grifters’ in charge in the South, it was unwinnable. That, plus the political dimension in the US not allowing the kind of force commitment required, made it pretty hard to do.
Iraq - all depends on what victory is defined as…
If victory is getting the US out without too much more blood on our hands, then yes. We should have a pretty strong Iraqi government in I would say 6 months to take over and really start running things, as long as US / UK troops are still there and the Iraqi government is still getting tons of support from outside countries. That would allow us to pull out, and have somewhat of an ability to say ‘not our fault’ when things go pear shaped in 8 months from tribal warfare and insurgents re-emerging.
If winning means a stable and democratic Iraq for the forseable future, then I have serious doubts. The Iraqi government is so weak it is having to make deals with the likes of Al-Sadr, and those deals will come back to haunt them. THere is no real unity in the country, with most individuals having no more than tribal alliances and no sense of nationalism. And unless the chaos gets under better control, with law and order and power and water nearly everywhere, then I still see disgruntled people turning to extremists and tribal leaders to find out who to blame, which will naturally be the US and the new Iraqi government.
If victory means the US doesn’t get directly attacked by terrorists again, then I seriously doubt it. We’ve given a whole new generation box cutters and maps to NYC as a result of the bungled war there. Too many people have lost children, too many children have lost parents, and all that rage is going to be directed back at us by fanatics. It’s already happeneing, with Iraq becomming a great training ground for learning how to be a terrorist in an urban setting. I can’t imagine all that training will go to waste.
My (very dark, yes) 2 cents…
I think the most critical issue is government in an executive sense. We brought urban warfare and terrorism into Iraq, and we have to make sure the Iraqis know how to combat it. This will take more resources than the current admin is willing to give, if Cheney’s comments during the VP debate are any guide. We will run right up against the same wall we had in South Vietnam: unchecked corruption forbidding a strong government to form. It is not of primary importance that Iraqis take over their country as soon as possible, it is of primary importance that they can maintain it once they do. The only way to do that is to both police the area for/with them, and ensure a legitimate or semi-legitimate government not only gets in place but stays in place.
Democracy is not what precipitates from killing all the revolutionaries. That’s Leninism.
I fear that we will have forced a trade from the capricious and malicious will of Hussein to the capricious and corrupt will of local police forces if we do not spend a lot of effort on this. You can’t hand one “good guy” a gun and another “good guy” a gavel and expect justice. With a meager job situation, you also can’t expect the huge numbers of people lining up to be part of the police force to actually give two shits. This is just plainly a recipie for disaster and failure.
I don’t know if Kerry truly has a better plan. What I feel very confident in is that the current admin’s plan will surely fail. We created a situation and are in position to leave them completely unprepared to handle it. The longer the war drags on, the more unpopular it will be in the states and the less politically feasible it will be to get the manpower and resources over there to do the job right.
But Tet was not a military defeat. In fact, some would argue that the Tet Offensive led to the destruction of the Viet Cong as a fighting force. It did serve as a political victory however which is just as good.
The reason we lost Vietnam is as xtisme pointed out, we were trying to maintain the status quo in an unstable situation. The larger strategy of Vietnam was to wear down Ho CHi Minh and force him to the negotiating table. Of course, history has shown that aerial bombardment alone cannot force a nation to capitulate. Basically Vietnam was unwinnable because we were attempting to prevent North Vietnam from filling a power vaccum created by an incompetant and corrupt South Vietnamese government.
The major difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that it is a very different political situation. Basically we are trying to reconstitute a government from scratch instead of propping up an existing corrupt regime. The situation is not “unwinnable” because it actually has specific conditions for “winning” which is to say a functioning government that can provide a reasonible level of security and services.
Will it be a country free from violence? Probably not. Then again, no country is. The trick will be to create a government that is representitive enough of the Iraqi people and inclusive enough that no major group feels that violence is the only answer.
I’d like to suggest that we “won” the war in Vietnam by leaving and allowing nature to take it’s course, so to speak. Staying and fighting would have resulted in many, many more Vietnamese and US dead. Now they are a semi-totalitarian government with lots of capitalism that could eventually become a democracy. IMO the only way to victory other than withdrawl would have been to support an active, non-corrupt democracy. Maybe even get Ho Chi Minh involved and support his government if he won, not that it would have been easy to convince them we would keep our word.
Likewise I believe the only victory in Iraq is possible via democracy and let nature takes it’s course, even if the short term result is a Islamic theocracy that hates us. The dangerous part there is if one faction starts to try to eradicate another, which means there will be some serious peackeeping needs for the foreseeable future.
I suppose we should have ‘let nature take its course’ in Korea also, ehe? After all, in that case the North (Korea in this case) ALSO wanted to take over the whole thing. Why shouldn’t we have let them…the North wanted it after all. The Soviets and Chinese ALSO supported the North. I assume that the Soviets and Chinese assistance constitutes ‘nature’…taking its course. The regime in South Korea was certainly as corrupt as that of South Vietnam…and remained so, on and off, until what? Late 70’s? Early 80’s? Mid-80’s? Depends I guess. Hell, they were corrupt…they deserved to die like dogs at the hands of the non-corrupt and rightous North. Of course, now South Korea is NOT a semi-totalitarian government…however they are certainly a democratic nation and capitalistic. I’m sure you can compare South Vietnam to South Korea from a productivity standpoint…and from a freedom standpoint and human rights one as well, yes?
Your opinion is of course your opinion. You may even have a point…if ALL sides were simply letting ‘nature take its course’. Of course, REALITY is so messy, ehe? My own opinion would have been that if the US was going to commit to war in Vietnam then we needed to eliminate the North and remove THEM from the board. Or we needed to put pressure on the Chinese/Soviets to stop massively supporting the North (though I’m at a loss as to what pressure we COULD have applied).
Why is it fair that the North staged basically a bit for re-unification and you think THATS the will of the people?? That the North was heavily (hell, MASSIVELY) supported by China/USSR and thats ‘nature taking its course’??
Ya, the South Vietnam government was heavily corrupt. So was the South Korean government…and look how THEY turned out. In fact, there were a lot of similarities between the South Vietnamese government and that of South Korea…but South Vietnam wasn’t given the time to reform. They were thrown into a war from the North and ultimately destroyed. Ultimately it was a US failure.
-XT
Woops. 
That SHOULD have been ‘I’m sure you can compare todays Vietnam to South Korea…’
-XT
I don’t get this, first people say fighting the insurgents only creates more insurgents, but when the Iraqi government says its going to bring them all to the table to negotiate, its accused of weakness. Someone help me out here?
Well that’s pretty much the problem, isn’t it? Once we vacated Vietnam, the North rushed in to fill the vacuum and took control of the country. Plenty of Vietnamese were killed even after we left but the country was stable.
If we pull out of Iraq there is not “NVA” to retake control and establish some kind of equilibrium. The best you could hope for would be one faction strong enough to create an Islamic theocracy. More likely there would be massive religeous civil war.
Well, my opinion is that most governments will eventually tend towards capitalism and democracy. I might be well off base on that one. But had we let South Korea fall to the North, maybe other internal processes/pressures would have come into play. For example, if we stayed out, would China and/or the Soviets have had as much invested in propping up Kim Jong Il (do I have the right Kim?) and his totalitarian governement? We have instead given them something to oppose. It might have been hellishly painful. BTW, I’m not so sure that the South Korean government isn’t still incredibly corrupt, but I don’t follow S. Korean politics that carefully.
In Vietnam, I’m not saying that all of the people or even a majority were for reunification; I don’t know that there is a way of knowing. My gut is that the average Vietnamese didn’t much care one way or another (were more interested in subsistence); the ruling families were in favor of the status quo, and a significant number of others were in favor of evicting “Western” influence, eg, the French and US. Why should we support a corrupt dictatorship versus an internal enemy? Heck, in Iraq we’ve (finally) done the opposite, on the pretext that the ruling bully was a threat to us. The common wisdom of the day was that if Communism was unopposed then all of the countries in the area would fall prey. Maybe so, but in the long run I believe it’s likely (although hardly provable) that all Communist governments are doomed to failure.
My long winded point is that I would encourage democracy, to the exclusion of capitalism, if necessary, so that it is eventually the choice of the governed what form their government should take. If sometimes that results in a form of government that you or I find distasteful then tough. In a perfect world we’d only meet force with force or in the defense of those who cannot defend themselves. In the real world this is more complicated, of course, and sometimes we’ll end up in things that in hindsight might not have been the best choice.
Yeah, that’s the sticky wicket. I admit that having created this mess we have a moral obligation to try and protect the weaker groups there, if we believe that our withdrawl would indeed lead to civil war and increased violence. I’ll reserve all judgement there until we see results (and breadth) of the planned elections, but I don’t see us realistically out of Iraq in the next five years, at the very least.
If the only option was leveling North Vietnam… then the Vietnam war was lost before it even began. I don’t beleive there was a waiting out till the resistance peters out possibility… vietnamese had fought the french till defeat before the americans came in.
Will Iraqis run out of unemployed pissed off young men and AK-47s ? Not within this decade I feel. Especially since Bush keeps calling people “evil”. Iran might as well openly support the insurgents.
Without support of the local population or of a major ethinic/religious group is it impossible to subdue a medium size country ? Seems so at least.
South Koreans were willing to fight for example… whilst South Vietnamese weren’t. Don’t know about you guys… but I have this feeling that there never was a possible scenario for Iraq, unless it involved heavily punishing the population into submission.
The only option was invading North Vietnam and taking it out of the picture if you wanted to keep the South ‘free’…and we didn’t take it. As long as the North continued to support and supply rebellion in the South (and act as puppets fro the Soviets/Chinese) things would have continued on as they were. The alternative of course would have been the US staying there and continuing to absorb losses…as long as the US stayed there, South Vietnam would have continued to exist, and EVENTUALLY the insurgency would have ground to a halt. Of course the cost of that in terms of money and men from the US, not to mention the political costs, would have been huge.
With the Soviets and Chinese massively supplying the North it was a no win situation (from a POLITICAL perspective) as long as the North persisted…so taking out the North in the early 60’s was the optimal solution.
Look at the Soviets in Afghanistan. As long as the US kept supplying the Afghan rebels the Soviets could never win. Cut off those supplies though and eventually they would have (IMO…we’ll never know). The North Koreans made the huge mistake of trying to invade South Korea head on instead of doing what the North Vietnamese did against the French and later the Americans…and it turned out to be a big mistake.
Will the Iraqi’s run out of unemployed pissed off young men? Probably…though it will be some time before that happens. Once their economy picks up unemployment will drop to acceptable (for the region) levels IMO. And it won’t take a decade either…I give it another year or so…say 3 years at the outside.
However you missed my point on this…what the Iraqi insurgency will run out of eventually is funds and supplies, not necessarily pissed off young men. Hell, there are plenty of pissed off young men in the ME who would love to go forth and kill Americans. Without outside support though, eventually the insurgency will dip down to ‘annoyance’ levels. It may not ever go away completely (look at Israel…yet their economy still functions), but it will go to manageable levels.
BTW, if Iran DOES openly start supporting the insurgents they are suicidal fools. You can’t imagine the ton of bricks that will fall on them…but THEY can. The US can basically air strike into Iran at will…and we WILL do that if Iran is found with its hand in the cookie jar of the Iraqi insurgency. There is absolutely nothing Iran can do about it either…the US has merely to rotate carrier battle groups or fly sorties from Iraq.
Without outside intervention and support its impossible to keep an insurgency going for any sustained period of time.
The South Vietnamese fought too RM. The problem was that it was a different kind of war. It was a sapping war from the inside, not an external invasion. Both governments were corrupt, but its easier to rally support of your citizens from an outside invasion than from an internal insurgency…even when said insurgency is really being driven, funded and supported by an outside agency.
As to the Iraqi’s…well, there are indications that they might be coming down off the fence. Certainly there have been a number of there National Guard killed recently, yet there seems no lack of men willing to continue to volunteer. I think the jury is still out on this and you are WAY jumping the gun in your evaluation. You’ve listened to all the bad parts (and there are certainly a lot of them)…but there are positive things going on there too. And the situation IS changing. You don’t need to heavily punish the population into submission to win…in fact that’s stupid. What you need to do is get them onboard…to make them think its THEIR country and its worth fighting (and dieing for). Perhaps the Iraqi population will come on board…perhaps not. Time will tell…and its too soon to really have a handle on that.
-XT
Anyone care to answer this?
Well, I neither think that ‘fighting the insurgents only creates more insurgents’, nor that negotiation is ‘weakness’. In fact, I think that negotiation with the IRAQI insurgents would be a master stroke…if they can pull it off. It could drive a huge wedge between the Iraqi insurgents and the foreign fighters and might seriously put a crimp in the insurgency. Not that anyone has replied to my thread on this, but I started a thread talking about indications that such a wedge might be forming already.
Sorry I couldn’t answer your question though.
-XT