President Bush’s recent trip to Vietnam for the APEC summit raised obvious comparisons to Iraq, so the President had to comment on the “lesson of Vietnam.” Last week, the New York Times and other media outlets emphasized his statement that the chief lesson was that “we’ll succeed unless we quit.” Most people were surprised.

The Vietnam War offers many possible lessons. Sadly, the American discussion of Vietnam has been stunted by ideological division since early in the war. The war wrecked many academic departments with specialists in national security studies: people who should have been able to responsibly engage each other to talk about the lessons instead took up partisan causes, and the quality of debate suffered. Before the Iraq War, a few analysts were beginning to offer reasoned analysis of various aspects of Vietnam, although the academic analysis was tinged by the modern turn away from the study of big events like wars to focus on social and cultural history (which certainly has some value, but nevertheless has also certainly undermined the emphasis on a serious discussion of Vietnam). And the median academic tends to be pretty liberal, which also tinges writing on Vietnam — whether more or less than the relatively overt ideologies of the inside-the-beltway think tankers is hard to say. But with implications for Iraq on people’s minds now, the Vietnam commentary quickly returned to polemics and bludgeons.

That said, of all the lessons of Vietnam, “we’ll succeed unless we quit” seems a tough one to draw.

These days, the real question is to figure out a reasonable definition of “success” in Iraq, and the same can be said for our retrospective analyses of Vietnam. If success in Vietnam was linked to the credibility of the U.S. commitment to our “core allies” in Western Europe and Japan, then the withdrawal probably helped ensure our success: the quagmire in Vietnam weakened the American ability to defend other countries, and leaving Vietnam enabled the U.S. military to recommit to its core alliance missions and to reinvest in equipment that made those missions a real success by the 1980s.

But we might also define success in Vietnam in terms of the ability of the South Vietnamese government to stand up to its adversaries (whether they were guerrillas from the South or regulars from the North doesn’t much matter for the overall success — both had to be dealt with — although the debate about which threat was more serious rages on among analysts). If that’s it, then it seems that the U.S. deployment helped, because South Vietnam rapidly collapsed without U.S. help. But it’s also hard to make the case that the Vietnamese government was steadily improving with the U.S. troop presence — that over time, South Vietnam would have been more able to stand up on its own, eventually allowing the U.S. troops to leave more gracefully than they did.

Alternatively, perhaps success in Vietnam should be defined by Vietnam’s economic development. President Bush pointed to Vietnam’s modern economic success in his speeches there, and development was apparently the key goal for some of the American political leaders of the Vietnam War (e.g., I’m told, Walt Rostow, LBJ’s national security advisor who became a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where I teach; sadly, Rostow died before I arrived and had the opportunity to meet him). But it’s hard to argue that the American troop deployment had much to do with current surge of economic growth in Vietnam.

And that’s an important point for President Bush’s implicit commentary about Iraq. The conventional wisdom now accepts that development — or at least economic reconstruction — is very important for winning a counter-insurgency war. But would staying in Vietnam longer (not “quitting”) have led to more economic growth and, therefore, victory against the guerrillas? Even if we presume for a moment that economic growth really does tamp down individuals’ incentives to fight, it also seems reasonable to think that continued fighting is a key restraint on economic growth — in fact, that the key to enabling growth was letting someone (the North in Vietnam) win the war or (more likely in Iraq) allowing the various warring parties to learn that none of them has enough power to win on its own, with the natural conclusion that all should accept a political compromise.

Sure, North Vietnam adopted crazy communist economic policies that hindered growth after 1975. Moreover, even after the troop withdrawal, the U.S. fought hard using economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation to stifle Vietnam’s economic growth. It’s hard to tell which caused more damage, but Vietnamese growth didn’t really take off until both policies changed. Yet, by the way, violence in Vietnam diminished greatly even without the economic growth — perhaps evidence against the theory that economic motivations dominate guerrilla fighting.

[By the way, my favorite lesson from Vietnam is that while perhaps a weak, developing country can "beat" the U.S. in an anti-colonial war, the cost is enormous: the U.S. killed millions of Vietnamese and helped keep the economy down for decades. The bottom line is that no one should conclude from the Vietnamese experience that it's a good idea to take on the U.S.]

Of course, the violence in Iraq really does look a lot different from the violence in Vietnam. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, the senior U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, claimed the other day that al Qaeda in Iraq is no longer an effective, organized force. Perhaps that’s true (although I’m skeptical about how Gen. Caldwell knows it). But if it is true, it makes very clear that the continuing high level of violence must be the result of an ongoing sectarian civil war.

And that’s the kind of fight on which I would expect reconstruction to have the smallest effect: these people are fighting for revenge and religion and power, not because they don’t have decent social services, schools, and electricity. In Vietnam, it was easier to argue that the struggle was a competition for the allegiance of the public between the North Vietnamese nationalist / communists and the pro-Western South Vietnamese elites and that the currency of that competition was the economic well-being of the general public. In Iraq, “victory” for a particular Iraqi group now has to look like the ability to protect its members — to assert the monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular geographic area, to paraphrase Max Weber.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno is about to take command of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, and today’s New York Times reports on his definition of a “win:”

“I would argue that with Saddam Hussein no longer in power in Iraq, that is a partial win,” he said. “I think what we need is an Iraqi government that is legitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi population, an Iraq that is able to protect itself and not be a safe haven for terror. That’s what I think winning is.”

Gen. Odierno has U.S. interests in mind: the U.S. had a problem with Saddam, and when we removed him from power, we met one of our key goals. But he also fears that chaos in Iraq will create a “safe haven” for anti-U.S. terrorists, and he thinks that the U.S. presence in Iraq helps to control that chaos. He plans, during his upcoming tour in Iraq, to try to influence political negotiations among Iraqi groups:

“A lot of the militias can be reconciled, and we have to figure out ways to reconcile with them,” he said. “And there are splinter, radical groups that cannot be reconciled. They have other agendas, and they will have to be dealt with in a different way.”

I’m very skeptical that the U.S. presence contributes constructively to political negotiations. What do we offer other than a way for leaders of warring groups to deflect blame from their failures (in government and on the battlefield) — to hope to gain by continuing to fight, even if they seem to be losing today, because their failures are due to the U.S. rather than to their own weakness? Well, I guess we offer one other thing: a way that groups can use American power to settle scores with their local enemies, because they can manipulate our imperfect understanding of what’s really happening among the groups that we can’t see and can’t talk to. We can’t even talk to our “friends” like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. What the U.S. needs is a strategy that will force the Iraqis to talk to each other — or to fight amongst themselves until they want to talk, because they can’t blame an outsider for their defeats anymore.

The best news about the American election a couple of weeks ago is that its results have breathed some air into the debate about U.S. policy in Iraq — a wider array of possible American strategies are now openly discussed. Too much of the discussion is still deceptive and defensive, with the Iraq debate mirroring the stifled debate about Vietnam. President Bush’s version of the lessons of Vietnam isn’t helping. But if we can keep working towards a serious discussion of the definition of a “win,” avoiding polemics and ugly accusations, we can improve our choice about what to do next.

Related posts:

1. Nothing is Too Good For Our Boys So That’s What We’ll Give Them: Nothing: Part 3
2. Nothing is Too Good for Our Boys, Redux
3. Goodbye to 2009: The year in review
4. Put Up or Shut Up