Michael Goodwin: President misread Vietnam lesson

In his bizarre comparison of Vietnam to Iraq, President Bush last week skipped over a notorious broken pledge from Lyndon Johnson. In October 1964, LBJ, president for less than a year, promised that Vietnam’s civil war would not become our burden. “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” Johnson famously declared.

At the time, fewer than 400 of our soldiers had died. But as Johnson poured millions of men into Southeast Asia, our casualties soared. We lost about 200 troops in 1964, nearly 2,000 in 1965, more than 6,000 in 1966, over 11,000 in 1967, over 16,000 in 1968 and 11,600 in 1969. Not until 1972 did the annual number fall below 1,000, on its way to a total of more than 58,000 American deaths.

Vietnam, of course, is something of a historic Rorschach test – you see what you will. And Bush, after refusing for years to be drawn into comparisons, entered the fray to argue only that the slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia that followed our departure makes the case for why we can’t leave Iraq yet.

His facts are right about the slaughter, but his lesson is suspect. It’s not just that using a single aspect of the tortured Vietnam record to make a contemporary case is a shaky proposition. It’s that we’re making the same mistake in Iraq that LBJ made in Vietnam – we’re doing for Iraqis what they won’t do for themselves. We are fighting their war and propping up their government. And there is no end in sight.

That was the essence of the National Intelligence Estimate released last week. While Bush’s speech staked out a hard line as a new debate begins in Congress and the war becomes a campaign football, his case was undercut by the bleak report. While it found gains in security around Baghdad thanks to the surge of American troops, its prognosis was grim. It found little progress on the key issues of whether the Iraqi government and military are getting closer to doing their jobs so we don’t have to.

“Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively,” the report said as part of a daunting list of problems that included high levels of terrorism and sectarian killings. It saw “modest gains” in security in the next year, but predicted continued attacks on civilians and warned “the Iraqi government will continue to struggle” and even said its survival could become “precarious.”

Similarly, it said Iraqi forces “have not improved enough to conduct major operations” without American help on a sustained basis. It said any gains from planned changes “will take at least six to 12 months, and probably longer, to materialize.”

Those damning findings were mitigated only by one conclusion that supported Bush. The report predicted that, if American forces stop policing the civil war in Baghdad to focus on training Iraqis and fighting Al Qaeda, the move “would erode security gains achieved thus far.”

That’s depressing, but it’s not enough of a reason to keep doing what we’re doing. Indeed, you could also argue the erosion wouldn’t be much of a loss given that there is little prospect, according to the report, that what we have achieved is going to lead to much more beyond the bloody status quo.

When he announced the surge last January, Bush said it was necessary to give the Iraqi government “breathing room” to forge political reconciliation and get its police and army in fighting shape.

Eight months later, it’s not working, and it won’t as long as we’re doing for Iraqis what they should be doing for themselves. Of the many lessons that Vietnam teaches, that’s the one we must remember now.