The Lessons of Vietnam and the Future of Iraq

Currently, there are those who are peering fervantly into the past, trying to understand what happened in Vietnam in a way that will allow us to somehow figure out what we should be doing in Iraq right now. Many on the left and right are drawing their own comparisons to that failed war. Some supporters of the invasion riducule them for doing so (and are in turn ridiculed by TWM). Some are concluding that we cannot win no matter what we do in Iraq. Some are concluding that if we apply the lessons of Vietnam to Iraq, there's still a chance to bring peace to the country. Stephen Biddle writes in Foreign Affairs that while there are certainly similarities in the two conflicts, applying the lessons of Vietnam to Iraq would only result in failure. His argument is comprehensive and persuasive, and as far as I'm concerned this article should be required reading for anyone who dares to utter an opinion about what we should do in Iraq. Biddle says there are vast differences between Iraq and Vietnam, and doing what we should have done in Vietnam might be the worst possible thing we could do in Iraq right now. Of course, understanding the lessons of Vietnam requires a review of what we did there:

As it is in 2006, in 1969 Washington's strategy was built around winning hearts and minds while handing off more and more of the fighting to indigenous forces. From the outset of the Vietnam War, efforts to coax the Vietnamese people away from the communists and into supporting the Washington-backed government in Saigon were a crucial part of U.S. policy. Of course, the counterinsurgency was about more than winning hearts and minds; it was also about fighting. At first, following Congress' decision in 1965 to commit large-scale U.S. ground forces, Americans did much of South Vietnam's defensive work. But in 1969, the Nixon administration changed course and decided to transfer responsibility for ground combat to the South Vietnamese.

That of course is also our entire strategy in Iraq:

U.S. strategy in Iraq today is remarkably similar. To win the war, President George W. Bush has advocated following three parallel tracks -- one for politics, one for economics, and one for security. The first two involve using democratic reform and economic reconstruction to persuade Iraqis to side with the new government in Baghdad and oppose the insurgents. The goal of the Bush administration's third track is the creation of an Iraqi national military and an Iraqi police force that can shoulder the burden of counterinsurgency on their own -- a project many call "Iraqization," after its counterpart from Vietnam.

But Biddle says that root, Iraq and Vietnam are two very different types of conflicts:

Unfortunately, the parallel does not hold. A Maoist people's war is, at bottom, a struggle for good governance between a class-based insurgency claiming to represent the interests of the oppressed public and a ruling regime portrayed by the insurgents as defending entrenched privilege. Using a mix of coercion and inducements, the insurgents and the regime compete for the allegiance of a common pool of citizens, who could, in principle, take either side. A key requirement for the insurgents' success, arguably, is an ideological program -- people's wars are wars of ideas as much as they are killing competitions -- and nationalism is often at the heart of this program.

Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance.

To me it's obvious that Biddle is dead-on in describing the type of conflict present in Iraq, though he provides considerably more explanation for why he believes this to be true in the article. But what's most important to understand is why strategies designed with Vietnam in mind will not work in Iraq.

As to "winning hearts and minds":

The problem with recycling the Vietnam playbook in Iraq is that the strategies devised to win a people's war are either useless or counterproductive in a communal one. Winning hearts and minds, for example, is crucial to defeating a people's rebellion that promises good governance, but in a communal civil war such as that in Iraq, it is a lost cause. Communities in Iraq are increasingly polarized and fear mass violence at one another's hands...Economic aid or reconstruction assistance cannot fix the problem. This is not to say that Washington should not provide reconstruction assistance or economic aid; the United States owes Iraq the help on moral grounds, and economic growth could ease communal tensions at the margins and so promote peace in the long term. But in the near term, survival trumps prosperity, and most Iraqis depend on communal solidarity for their survival.

Democratization:

Rapid democratization, meanwhile, could be positively harmful in Iraq. In a Maoist people's war, empowering the population via the ballot box undermines the insurgents' case that the regime is illegitimate and facilitates nonviolent resolution of the inequalities that fuel the conflict. In a communal civil war, however, rapid democratization can further polarize already antagonistic sectarian groups.

"Iraqization":

The biggest problem with treating Iraq like Vietnam is Iraqization -- the main component of the current U.S. military strategy. In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq's Sunnis perceive the "national" army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids. Sunni populations are unlikely to welcome protection provided by their ethnic or sectarian rivals; to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hostile occupation. And the more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get.

Of incorporating Sunnis into security forces to "balance" them:

On the other hand, the harder the United States works to integrate Sunnis into the security forces, the less effective those forces are likely to become. The inclusion of Sunnis will inevitably entail penetration by insurgents, and it will be difficult to establish trust between members of mixed units whose respective ethnic groups are at one another's throats. Segregating Sunnis in their own battalions is no solution either. Doing so would merely strengthen all sides simultaneously by providing each with direct U.S. assistance and could trigger an unstable, unofficial partition of the country into separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish enclaves, each defended by its own military force.

In other words, nearly everything we're doing is the wrong approach. If you don't agree with Biddle after reading his thorough and comprehensive argument, then you know something about Iraq that I don't. Biddle doesn't seem much hope in the current alternatives to the Bush approach either:

Shifting from tactical offense to defense, for example, could make things worse. Krepinevich proposes an "oil-spot strategy" that focuses on providing security to civilians rather than on killing insurgents. There are too few Americans to protect more than a fraction of Iraq's population, and it is far from clear that Sunnis would accept their help anyway. So the plan would have to rely on Iraqi troops, which will inevitably end up being either integrated and ineffectual or segregated and divisive. Tactical defense by the wrong defenders can be fatal in a communal civil war, and in Iraq it will remain far from clear how to provide appropriate defenders until the communal strife itself has been resolved.

So withdrawal is our only option? Not quite says Biddle:

The case for withdrawing U.S. troops is no stronger, largely because the war does not hinge on the United States' winning -- or losing -- Iraqi hearts and minds. The war is about resolving the communal security problems that divide Iraqis, and it is too early to give up on achieving this goal via constitutional compromise. In fact, the very prospect that today's conflict could degenerate into attempted genocide if compromise fails should be a powerful lever for negotiating a deal. The presence of U.S. troops is essential to Washington's bargaining position in these negotiations. To withdraw them now, or to start withdrawing them according to a rigid timetable, would undermine the prospect of forging a lasting peace.

In this point, it's clear that some in the Bush administration have realized the same thing. Kaplan talks about as much in the article I blogged about last week, where he refers to American forces as the only "honest broker" in Iraq. Biddle then is clearly for staying in Iraq. What should our approach be?

First, Washington must slow down the expansion of the Iraqi national military and police. Iraq will eventually need capable indigenous security forces, but their buildup must follow a broad communal compromise, not the other way around.

Second, the United States must bring more pressure to bear on the parties in the constitutional negotiations. And the strongest pressure available is military: the United States must threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate...The only way to break the
logjam is to change the parties' relative comfort with the status quo by drastically raising the costs of their failure to negotiate.

Washington should also avoid setting any more arbitrary deadlines for democratization. Democracy is the long-term goal in Iraq, of course, but getting there will require a near-term constitutional compromise whose key provision must be an agreement to limit the freedom of Iraqi voters to elect governments that concentrate ethnic and sectarian power. Resolving the country's communal security problems must take priority over bringing self-determination to the Iraqi people -- or the democracy that many hope for will never emerge.

Biddle is optimistic that his plan could work. Unfortunately near the end of the article he tells us-without quite meaning to I think-why it will never happen:

Putting such a program in place would not be easy. It would deny President Bush the chance to offer restless Americans an early troop withdrawal, replace a Manichaean narrative featuring evil insurgents and a noble government with a complicated story of multiparty interethnic intrigue, and require that Washington be willing to shift its loyalties in the conflict according to the parties' readiness to negotiate. Explaining these changes to U.S. voters would be a challenge.

A "challenge" indeed! Can anyone imagine Bush abandoning the strategy of Iraqization, the best excuse for bringing our soldiers home? It allows them to claim success in Iraq no matter what chaos is unleashed in our absence. Never mind explaining anything else to the American people; getting them to understand that staying in Iraq is the best solution even as the country grows more violent could be difficult for the average American, and near about impossible for members of the anti-war crowd, especially as more and more Americans come to believe civil war is inevitible and that our only option is to get the hell out of there, and Bush continues his now-famed public denials of reality.

Nonetheless, I think Biddle's plan is our best, perhaps only, chance for success in Iraq. I don't speak for all of us here at TWM when I say this, but I believe that we our obligated to remain in Iraq until it becomes clear that we can do nothing else to bring peace to the country. As we have yet to adopt a single, unified and effective plan, I do not believe we've met that obligation yet.