War Lessons Never Learned

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus.

[Excerpts]

For starters, people don’t like losing control of their country. With the exceptions of the Kurds and Maliki and his allies, Iraqis are overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. That disconnect between occupied and occupiers was summed up by Luu Doan Huynh, a Vietnamese veteran of the war against the Japanese, the French, and the Americans, and one of the key diplomats in the Vietnam peace talks. “The Americans thought that Vietnam was a war,” he said. “We knew that Vietnam was our country.”

As the Bush administration saw it, a successful attack on the Mahdi army would not only clear the way for privatizing the Iraqi oil industry, it would demonstrate that the Iraqi army was ready “to stand up,” thus boosting the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

But as Karl von Clausewitz once pointed out, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Historical analogies are tricky. They may obscure as much as they reveal. But history is the only guide we have, and it is one the Bush administration has willfully chosen to ignore.

As it did in Vietnam, the United States looks at Iraq though the lens of firepower and troop deployments. But war is not just about things that blow up, and occupiers always ignore the point of view of the occupied.

As Frank Rich pointed out in The New York Times, there was indeed a whiff of Tet in the debacle in Basra. Just before the 1968 attack, U.S. General William Westmoreland made his historic “light at the end of the tunnel” prediction. In recent testimony before the Senate, General David Petraeus said the United States was making “significant” progress in Iraq, and his spokesman, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, bragged that the United States had the Mahdi army on the ropes: “We’ve degraded their capability.”

“There is a parallel to Tet here,” says military historian Jack Radey. “’We have won the war, violence is down, the surge works’ [the U.S. told itself], and then Kaboom! The Green Zone is taking incoming.”

Radey argues that the American “victories” against the Vietnamese in the period leading up to the Tet offensive were an illusion. “If the enemy seems to be missing from the picture, this is not proof you have wiped him out,” he says. “It is more likely proof that you have lost track of him, and he will, at his own chosen time, find ways to remind you of his presence.”