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— From the Archives —
Iraq and Vietnam: Back to the Future?
As the United States ponders whether and how to extricate itself from the conflict in Iraq, analogies to Vietnam have proliferated. It has been said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes; in that spirit, we offer the following selections from the Foreign Affairs archives, showing how an earlier generation of policymakers and commentators grappled with some similar agonizing choices.
Read a hawk's account of his conversion to dovishness in Clark M. Clifford's A Viet Nam Reappraisal from July 1969. In Vietnamization: Can It Work? (July 1970) Robert H. Johnson argues that withdrawing troops by itself wouldn't be enough to save the situation. General Matthew B. Ridgway called for bringing the troops home regardless of the consequences in Indochina: Disengaging from July 1971. The Essential Domino: American Politics and Vietnam from April 1972 is Leslie H. Gelb's story of the home front and how it was lost. Consequences of the End Game in Vietnam by Earl C. Ravenal (July 1975) offers a look at the fallout from the collapse of Saigon.
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Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam
During Richard Nixon's first term as president, most U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam while the South's ability to defend itself was improved. Speaking out for the first time in decades, Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird — one of the architects of those policies — argues that this approach produced a success, at least until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for the South in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy in Iraq today, he writes in this already much-discussed article, but this time it should finish the job properly.
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by Melvin R. Laird
The Iraq Syndrome
Public support for the war in Iraq has followed the same course as it did for the wars in Korea and Vietnam: broad enthusiasm at the outset with erosion of support as casualties mount. The experience of those past wars suggests that there is nothing President Bush can do to reverse this deterioration — or to stave off an "Iraq syndrome" that could inhibit U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.
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by Bruce Gilley
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