American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  When the Cold War ended, they assumed the United States would greatly reduce its global military footprint and frequent interventions. It quickly became apparent, however, that American leaders wanted to maintain and even expand U.S. military power so that no one would dare to challenge the world’s lone hyperpower, the new Rome. The persistent quest for “full-spectrum dominance” of the globe led Bacevich and Johnson to rethink all their assumptions about the history of U.S. foreign policy and to become leading critics of American imperialism.

  Chalmers Johnson was particularly appalled by what he called the “empire of bases.” In addition to six thousand military bases on American soil, the United States maintains nearly a thousand bases in 130 foreign countries if all the secret sites were acknowledged. Many U.S. bases are built on prime foreign land and garrison large numbers of American troops who are not subject to the constraints of local law. The mere presence of such overbearing projections of U.S. power and privilege can be enough to outrage local populations. When it is combined with GI rowdiness and crime, along with a continuous string of military interventions, covert operations, occupations, maneuvers, and war games, it is a perfect prescription for the spread of anti-American sentiment and, among some, the desire for retaliatory acts of violence.

  Johnson introduced many readers to the CIA term for retaliation—“blowback.” Blowback specifically refers to the unanticipated consequences of covert American operations that were kept secret from U.S. citizens but were widely known about and resented in the nations that were targeted. His book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Tragically, it proved all too prescient. The secret CIA operation most directly related to 9/11 began in 1979, when the United States began to support an anti-Soviet movement in Afghanistan. The United States was so determined to attack the Soviets by proxy, it gave no attention to the people it was helping, many of whom were extreme anti-Western jihadists. The Carter and Reagan administrations cared only that the rebels opposed Soviet imperialism. The most effective recruiter of foreign anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden, who built and trained, partly with CIA-supplied cash and weapons, a private army from all over the Arab world. Once the Soviets were defeated, U.S. leaders lost interest in Afghanistan and the factions vying for power. When an extreme Islamic fundamentalist movement called the Taliban gained control of Kabul in 1996, it allowed bin Laden to establish al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. From there bin Laden soon declared war against the United States.

  U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War world led people like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich to rethink their view of the Cold War and the Vietnam War they had once supported. They began to share many of the views expressed by anti–Vietnam War critics in the 1960s—that U.S. military power and imperial interests undermined democracy at home and abroad, engendered anti-American hostility, stripped the nation of vital resources, and contradicted every claim of American exceptionalism. As Johnson put it in an interview twenty-five years after the Vietnam War ended, the antiwar movement of the 1960s had “grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. For all their naiveté and unruliness, the protesters were right and American policy was wrong. I wish I had stood with them.”

  Recent wars have drawn criticism from a fascinating mix of people—left, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—who disagree on many issues but agree that the American empire must either close up shop or face a nastier, protracted collapse produced by bankruptcy or endless opposition, or both.

  But critics have had an uphill battle. The foreign policy establishment has proved intensely resistant to change. Since World War II, all who have found a voice at its table, regardless of political party, have effectively signed a tacit oath to preserve U.S. military supremacy. Sometimes people within the establishment—whether from the White House, Pentagon, State Department, intelligence, defense industries, or think tanks—disagree about when, how, and where to utilize U.S. power, but no one can remain on the team unless they agree that the maintenance and exercise of military preeminence is a good thing for America and the world.

  Since 9/11 an inflexible commitment to militarism and intervention led policymakers to throw aside even some of the most modest cautionary lessons of the Vietnam War. The career of Colin Powell provides a classic example. As a junior officer in Vietnam, Powell learned firsthand the difficulties of fighting a protracted and unpopular war with a complex, perhaps unachievable, mission. It led him, in the 1980s, to develop a pragmatic and sensible set of conditions that should apply before the United States committed itself to war. According to the Powell Doctrine, the United States should engage in war only if there is a compelling threat to U.S national security, only if there is broad public and international support, only if we have the sufficient means to achieve a timely and decisive victory, and only if there is a clear exit strategy in case of failure. Yet after 9/11, as President Bush’s secretary of state, Powell threw aside his own principles and jumped on the interventionist bandwagon. Although the new wars he supported did not pass a single one of his own conditions, he did not want to give up his place on the team.

  At least Powell pushed back a bit in private before helping to sell the policy in public. The key architects of the Global War on Terror shared none of Powell’s reservations. For President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the memory of the Vietnam War was irrelevant to the present. It provided no cautionary lessons. And significantly, none of them had a strong personal connection to the Vietnam War. They had neither fought in the war nor opposed it. They were determined to squash any comparisons between Vietnam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They refused to use any expressions reminiscent of the Vietnam failure. Body count, insurgency, guerrilla, quagmire, escalation, search and destroy—all such language was forbidden.

  During the Vietnam War, “body counts” epitomized the ruthless military strategy that made killing the paramount measure of U.S. success. In 2002, General Tommy Franks told journalists curtly, “We don’t do body counts.” His goal was to discourage any comparison to the Vietnam War. He also wanted to nix any questions about civilian casualties. We would count our own dead, but no others.

  Defense Secretary Rumsfeld belittled journalists who called the anti-American attacks in Iraq an insurgency. There were no “insurgents” or “guerrillas,” Rumsfeld insisted, only “terrorists” or “regime remnants” or “dead-enders.” When asked if there was an exit strategy for Iraq he said: “The goal is not to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Iraq. It is not to develop an exit strategy. Our exit strategy is success.” When asked if the Iraq War was turning into a quagmire with no end in sight, he echoed Tommy Franks, “I don’t do quagmires.” He might just as well have said, “I don’t do Vietnams.”

  However, it did not take long for the forbidden words to appear again. As the insurgency intensified, the administration could no longer deny it away. And evidence of progress was so scarce Bush eventually fell back on body counts to demonstrate military success. Near the end of 2006, the president told reporters: “Offensive operations by Iraq and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.”

  But body counts were no more a sign of progress in Iraq than they were in Vietnam. With no end in sight, the Bush administration stopped talking about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. It was finally time to think of an exit strategy, a way to establish just enough stability to allow the United States to withdraw without appearing to be defeated. In 2007, Bush announced a new approach, an increase in U.S. troops to provide more security and training until Iraqi forces could do the job themselves. Once again avoiding a Vietnam coded term—
“escalation”—the buildup was called a “surge,” a word sounding more muscular and temporary. Along with that came a much-hyped approach to the war called “counterinsurgency.” Here, finally, was a Vietnam word that had been dusted off and reintroduced without embarrassment or denial.

  In fact, counterinsurgency was suddenly celebrated as if it were a brand-new military philosophy, a novel strategy with its own acronym: COIN. The most famous apostle of COIN was General David Petraeus. He soon became a media sensation, especially among the hard-core supporters of the Iraq War. In 2008, the Weekly Standard described Petraeus as a divine blessing: “God has apparently seen fit to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of need.”

  As Petraeus well knew, counterinsurgency was not a new idea. The United States had fought insurgencies throughout much of its history, most obviously in Vietnam. And in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration said it had a sophisticated understanding of counterinsurgency that would defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas of South Vietnam, not just by killing them on the battlefield but by winning the hearts and minds of the entire population. It was an utter failure. The vast majority of South Vietnamese never came to trust either the Americans or the U.S.-backed government in Saigon.

  Counterinsurgency was so discredited by defeat in Vietnam that the military establishment did everything possible to expunge its memory. Post-Vietnam military training focused almost entirely on conventional, big-unit operations, with American troops preparing for major tank battles against the Soviet Union in places like the Fulda Gap, in Germany. Ambitious officers in the 1980s and ’90s generally viewed counterinsurgency as a career killer.

  But not David Petraeus. He believed COIN would be resurrected as an effective combat strategy, and he hitched his very large ambition to that faith. A 1974 graduate of West Point, Petraeus came of age as the Vietnam War was winding down. He never served there. For him, Vietnam was not a harrowing personal experience, but a fascinating case study to be mined for lessons. It became the subject of his 1987 Princeton PhD dissertation. The Vietnam War, he argued, led the military to conclude that neither the public nor civilian officials could tolerate long wars. No matter how well the military executed its mission—and Petraeus had only minor criticisms of the military’s performance in Vietnam—the home front could not be trusted to support a long “dirty” war. Accordingly, Petraeus worried, the military came to doubt its ability “to conduct a successful large-scale counterinsurgency.” Vietnam had a “chastening effect” on the military’s “can-do” attitude and left it with too much “caution,” “uncertainty,” and “restraint.” Though he couched his criticism politely, Petraeus believed the “frustrating experience of Vietnam” had been “traumatic” enough to “exercise unwarranted tyranny over the minds of decision-makers.” As a result, there had been no fresh thinking about counterinsurgency.

  And for all the challenges of waging counterinsurgencies, Petraeus argued, the United States had to be prepared to fight them. In fact, it already was. Whatever reluctance the military establishment might have about fighting “nasty little wars,” the United States was directly or indirectly involved in a dozen of them in the 1980s.

  Starting in the late ’80s, Petraeus cultivated a group of protégés who shared his faith in COIN and promoted it with such enthusiasm they began calling themselves COINdinistas, as if they were themselves insurgents within the American military command. The vast majority of their peers were skeptical or disdainful of COIN because it required so much. In addition to fighting, soldiers were expected to train foreign troops, provide basic services, cultivate political relationships, and carry out a variety of other activities dubbed “military operations other than war” (MOOTW). Many old-school hard-chargers spat out the acronym like a swearword: “moot-wah.” “Real men don’t do moot-wah!” one general was said to have claimed.

  Petraeus was determined to prove that COIN could be cool, manly, and effective. Anyone who doubted it was welcome to join him for a blistering seven-mile run. In 2003, he had an opportunity to put his ideas into practice during his first tour in Iraq. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul he quickly realized that neither the Pentagon nor the Bush administration had a plan to secure or rebuild Iraq in the wake of the rapid defeat of Saddam Hussein and his army. As a result, Petraeus had complete latitude to implement his own. He turned his command into an exercise in nation building, hanging posters around his base reading “What Have You Done to Win Iraqi Hearts and Minds Today?”

  In Mosul, the Petraeus legend soared. He was his own best promoter. Journalists were cultivated and visiting congressmen were treated to slick PowerPoint briefings showing the great achievements—roads constructed, electricity restored, police trained, insurgents pacified. Petraeus was held up as an innovator and intellectual, a thinking man’s general, a man who could step into the most complex and volatile landscapes and work wonders. While the rest of Iraq descended into chaos, Petraeus seemed to be creating an oasis of security and hope.

  That was the tenor of his positive press. A closer examination of the facts suggests a gloomier reality. Where Petraeus claimed to have replaced aggressive cordon and search operations with friendlier door knocking, as his yearlong tour continued he significantly escalated the number of violent raids and roundups of suspects. And far from pacifying Mosul, the number of insurgent attacks climbed steeply from 45 in June 2003, to 72 in August, to 121 in December.

  And whatever he achieved soon came undone. In November 2004, the Mosul police force that Petraeus had trained and extolled quickly collapsed in response to an insurgent assault. Thirty-two hundred out of the city’s four thousand policemen abandoned their posts in an act of mass, simultaneous desertion. The police chief was among the deserters. Insurgents captured hundreds of weapons, uniforms, and police cars. But because Petraeus was no longer in Mosul when the disaster hit, his reputation was undamaged.

  In fact, it continued to grow, aided by an improbable literary success. Petraeus oversaw the 2007 publication of The U.S. Army and Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It represented the first time in a generation that the two services had revised their counterinsurgency doctrine. When it was first posted online, it was downloaded more than two million times in two months. A paperback edition was soon published.

  Given all that attention, you might expect the Manual to offer a ringing endorsement of counterinsurgency and specific new techniques for how to make it work. In fact, it offers neither. It is not a manual so much as a set of general principles served up with a basketful of caveats. COIN, we learn, is an “extremely complex form of warfare” that requires “unity of effort” at “every echelon,” along with “patience,” “mutual trust,” and “public support.” You have to understand the language, culture, and history of the “host” nation. You have to convince the people to support the government. You have to provide security and basic services. You have to keep the insurgents away from the people. You have to get reliable intelligence. You have to avoid killing civilians. And even if you do all of this and more, the result may not look anything like “victory.” The best that might be achieved is an improved level of order and stability.

  The emphasis on complexity may explain some of the Manual’s appeal. Many saw it as a sophisticated approach to the vexing challenges of insurgency and nation building. Surely officers this smart would not make the same mistakes made in Vietnam. Oddly, however, the Manual mentions the Vietnam War only in passing. The most extended reference (two pages) praises that war’s “most successful” COIN operation, a program called Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), which was “generally led, planned, and executed well.” It offers only the mildest historical criticism. For example, “the body count only communicated a small part of the information commanders needed to assess their operations. It was therefore misleading.”

  Nor does the Manual provide detailed instructions on how to implement COIN best practi
ces. It is full of vague, redundant platitudes like this: “Genuine compassion and empathy for the populace provide an effective weapon against insurgents.” But how do you train soldiers in, say, Helmand Province to be compassionate toward a populace that includes many people who regard Americans as hostile invaders and want to kill them? And how can soldiers effectively win hearts and minds where they are also conducting “kill or capture” raids?

  The Manual does not answer those questions. But it does insist that the military must produce positive stories about its mission. After all, counterinsurgency is largely a “war of perceptions.” Commanders need to be “proactive” with the media in order to “ensure proper coverage.” They must “help the media tell the story.” It is crucial, for example, to keep “transmitting the repetitive themes of H[ost] N[ation] government accomplishments and insurgent violence against the populace.” Whatever the reality, “proper coverage” stresses American success and insurgent evil. In the modern military’s obsession with news management you can hear the echo of Bush’s aide: We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

  Petraeus got the coverage he sought in Mosul despite the mounting insurgency. He was even more heralded once he took command of the entire war in June 2007. Within days of arriving, he gathered his top generals and urged them to cultivate reporters. “Sixty percent of this thing is information.” But with the “surge” of 35,000 more troops, Petraeus was under great pressure to demonstrate actual progress.

  With sectarian killing still rife in Baghdad, Petraeus directed attention to the “stunning reversal” in Anbar Province. It was true—there had been a substantial decline in violence there, but much of it happened before Petraeus took command and before the U.S. surge. The main cause was the so-called Sunni Awakening—a movement filled with former anti-American insurgents who had lost so many lives to Shia militias and U.S. forces they were ready to cut a deal. In return for bags of cash handed out by the U.S. military, the Sunnis effectively policed the province and eventually other parts of Iraq. It was an old-fashioned payoff to former enemies.