Basra: Echoes of Vietnam
One battle rarely wins or loses a war, at least in the moment. Gettysburg crippled Lee’s army in 1863, but the Confederates fought on until 1865. Stalingrad broke the back of the German 6th Army, but it would be two-and-a-half years before the Russians took Berlin. War — particularly the modern variety — is a complex mixture of tactics, technology, and politics. Then there are the intangibles, like morale.
But while a single battle may not end a conflict, it can illuminate an underlying reality. This reality generally gets lost in the thunder of propaganda, illusion, and wishful thinking that always accompanies the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Now that some of the dust has settled over the recent battle of Basra that pitted Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army against the armies of the United States and Iraq, it is time to examine what that clash meant, and what are some analogies that might help bring it into focus. There were certainly echoes of Vietnam in last month’s fighting, and some of those parallels, particularly to the 1968 Tet offensive, are worth a closer look.
Remembering Tet
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.”
Which is exactly what Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army did.
According to historian Gareth Porter, the United States mistakenly concluded that the ceasefire Sadr declared six months ago was a sign that the Mahdi army was vulnerable. When the Americans began attacking Sadr strongholds — more than 2,000 militia members and leaders have been arrested since last July’s truce — and the Mahdi army did not react, the United States was convinced that the militia was weak.
Other Analogies
But Tet is not the only relevant Vietnam analogy. The other parallel was Operation Lam Son, the 1971 invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). The United States pushed South Vietnam to attack Laos in order to demonstrate that the ARVN could stand on its own two feet, and to make the point prior to the upcoming 1972 U.S. elections that Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization” was working.
Instead, U.S. audiences watched as panicked ARVN troops clung to helicopter landing skids in their desperation to escape from Laos. Lam Son “was a disaster,” writes historian A.J. Langguth in Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975: “Vietnamization became one more doomed fantasy. After 10 years of training and costly equipment, South Vietnam’s troops seemed to be no match for the Communists.”
Radey says the Lam Son analogy is a useful one. The invasion didn’t work “because the [ARVN] soldiers didn’t believe in the cause they fought for,” while their opponents, with far less fire power, “believed in what they were doing. Vive la difference.”
As for Iraq and the recent fighting: “Was anyone paying attention the last time this lesson was taught in Vietnam?” Radey asks. “Did anyone do the reading? Hello? Do I have to start throwing chalk?”
In Basra
On the surface, the battle of Basra — which quickly spread to virtually every major city between Basra and Baghdad — was a major setback for Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki and the Americans. As Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar points out in the Asia Times, the principal outcome of the fighting is that “the Bush Administration’s triumphalism over the so-called Iraqi ‘surge’ strategy has become irredeemably farcical.”
The fighting also exposed the Iraqi Army as a hollow shell, much as the Laos invasion revealed the incompetence of ARVN. While Petraeus was telling the Senate that “recent operations in Basra highlight improvements in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to deploy substantial numbers of units, supplies, and replacements on a very short notice,” journalists were reporting that thousands of Iraqi troops refused to fight and abandoned their weapons.
According to Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service, much of the Iraqi army simply disintegrated. A Baghdad police colonel told the reporters that the “Iraqi Army and police forces, as well as the Da’wa and Badr militias, suddenly disappeared from the streets, leaving their armored vehicles for the Mehdi militia to drive around in joyful convoys.” The Badr militia is associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major ally of Maliki’s Da’wa party. Like the Mahdi army, both parties are Shiite.
So, after three years and $22 billion in training and equipment, the Iraqi army got shellacked. The only thing that prevented a full-scale rout was the intervention of U.S. troops and air support.
While the Americans have tried to distance themselves from the disaster by claiming that Maliki never consulted with them, historian Porter argues that the claim is ludicrous. “No significant Iraqi military action can be planned without a range of military support functions being undertaken by the U.S. command,” he writes, pointing out that U.S. trainers are embedded with every unit in the Iraqi security forces.
It’s the Oil, Stupid
Rather than as an assault on “criminal militias,” virtually every independent observer saw the attack as an effort by Maliki and the Americans to take control of Basra’s oil resources preliminary to turning them over to private oil conglomerates. Standing in the way of both those goals was the nationalist-minded Mahdi army as well as Iraq’s oil and dockworkers unions.
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.
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.”
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) columnist.
Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies
It’s a curious thing that we individual American citizens could elect politicians who expend our resources and worldwide goodwill to fight wars “for oil”, when the result (because of both inflation of the dollar and mideast regional instability) appears to be that most American citizens can now much less afford “oil” than before they started this process. Methinks this makes us need to finally admit we are dumb and dumber.
“we are dumb and dumber”
Or, we are reaching the point of imperial overreach. Also, the quality of our democracy has eroded to the point that we have allowed a Bush administration to occur (historians and other students of imperial decay perhaps will argue that the two are related).
I read somewhere that Saddam Husein declared “victory” before his countrymen when he was expelled from Kuwait. If he could get away with that, we (with infinitely more propaganda resources) can certainly continue to declare ‘progress’ in Iraq for a while.
It’s Israel stupid.
“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.”
And people who blow up, and people who are severely injured, and concentration camps and torture, and massive environmental degredation that will last generations, centureis, eons, and massive wastes of public wealth, and individual and social trauma, and massive rape and degredation of women and children, and loss of jobs and skills that have taken centuries to develop, and destruction of education and infrastructure. This is only the short list of “things that blow up.”
The war in Iraq is lost.
All American and british troops can do is scurry out from their bases, shoot up the local area and kill some more non-combatants, call in air support when they start taking effective counter-fire, then run like hell back to their bases before they are pinned down and wiped out by mobile mortar fire.
THEY HAVE NO ABILITY TO TAKE OR HOLD TERRITORY!!
With no mobility, they have no advantage!
Thanks DD,
Dumb and Dumber says it all.
What’s amazing also is that the US keeps performing actions that are stupider and stupider than before.
What term could be used for absolutely dumb - you know, the ’stupid’ equivalent of absolute zero temperature-wise?
Conn Hallinan, excellent commentary! I too was so impressed by the two sentences tj quoted. And also the following: “The Americans thought that Vietnam was a war,” he said. “We knew that Vietnam was our country.” When will Americans ever get it? We will never win an occupation against an insurgency. Would we give up? Why can’t Americans think this through? Oh, I forgot - our press is lying to us.
The lines from Rudyard Kipling keep running through my head.
If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.
kathyodat
’stupid’ equivalent of absolute zero = brain dead ignoramus?
Al-Maliki lost a big showdown with Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra. As Napoleon (a war criminal and mass murderer, but someone who did understand how to win battles and wars) said, “If you’re going to take Vienna, then take Vienna.” Al-Maliki’s decision to attack followed by the failure means his days are numbered.
Military historian Jack Radey (who certainly seems to know what he is talking about) is quoted here venting rhetorically “Was anybody paying attention attention the last time this lesson was taught in Vietnam? Did anyone do the reading? Hello? Do I have to start throwing chalk”?
The most comprehensive response to Radey’s questions is in Andrew Bacevich’s superb book “The New American Militarism”. Plenty of people listened, read, took notes, rebuilt the US Army internally, and internalized the bitter lessons of Vietnam.
The problem was that from the late 70’s, through the Reagan era, culminating in the military adventurism of the two Bush regimes, there was a growing parallel movement afoot within the far right wing of the neo-conservative movement dedicated to simply re-writing all of that history. George I ironically termed this process “exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam” in the heady, triumphalist aftermath of the ‘91 Gulf War.
In the post-9/11 reign of George the Lesser, Colin Powell himself took the lead in junking the Powell Doctrine, so that it could be replaced with the present concept of high tech, low US casualty, preventive war. Revisionists from right wing think tanks took over civilian control of the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, while those within the career military ranks who had indeed paid attention in class were systematically purged or silenced, replaced at the top by a new caste of warrior true believers such as General Boykin, General Miller, General Sanchez, and General Petraeus.
It wasn’t that the lessons of Vietnam were never learned, or that those lessons somehow were forgotten. Those lessons were deliberately flushed down the memory hole for purely partisan, ideological reasons.
As Prof. Bacevich’s narrative relates, the regrouping and reemergence of the pro-Vietnam war faction within academe and the federal military/industrial bureaucracy took place alongside changes in popular culture. Top Gun trumped Apocalypse Now. Rambo and Billy Jack far outdrew Coming Home. Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge made middle America feel a whole lot better than Tom Cruise did as Ron Kovach in Born on the Fourth of July.
Civilian American consumers of the Pentagon’s latest infotainment releases, and the fair and balanced reports from embedded US journalists in Iraq, now have the luxury of picking which version of “reality” they wish to believe. Decreased violence in Anbar province proves the occupation’s surge strategy is working, just as surely as increased violence in Basra also proves the surge’s success. This gives a whole new meaning to the term “home spun.”
Only the soldiers stuck there (and the people of the Middle East of course) get stuck with the real reality.
Bill from Saginaw
I only know what I read in the papers, and I’m nervous about speaking up for someone who is, for the moment at least, being demonized by the Bush administration, especially someone who is currently shooting back at American forces, albeit in self-defense. But I must raise the question of whether Moqtada al-Sadr might not be one of the “good guys,” a strong, spiritual leader whom world opinion should now be ecumenically supporting.
Al-Sadr is apparently a wildly popular leader of the Shiite poor, who, time and again, has demonstrated his commitment to peacefully resisting the overwhelmingly-superior military forces bent upon murdering him. Aside from his courageous refusal to relinquish the ancient homelands of his followers to invaders who would steal and exploit them, and his stubborn unwillingness to be assassinated, what has he done to deserve universal media condemnation and abandonment in the west?
Because al-Sadr’s charismatic leadership is seen by the west’s most powerful leaders as a major barrier to their hegemony in the Middle East, few journalists seem willing to raise this question. Yet several times throughout this conflict, when it has seemed temporarily expedient for the U.S. to leave al-Sadr in peace, he has urged patience and forbearance among his followers even as the wide-scale destruction of his country by foreign occupiers has continued.
Currently, American forces are attacking al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in oil-rich Basra, which is right across the border from Iran. Perhaps Mr. Cheney hopes to provoke just enough Iranian retaliation for this particular aggression to finally justify his own longed-for invasion of Iran’s oil fields? Patriots in Basra and Iran share far more in common with one another than with their American attackers; surely the Iranian government cannot be expected to indefinitely contain the passions of their red-blooded youth, currently standing passively by, watching while their brother-Shiites in Basra are being slaughtered, however recent the Iraq/Iran war.
Isn’t it time we reconsidered the unquestioned place we have given Al-Sadr in our western pantheon of demonized enemies? He is a leader to whom the majority of Shiites in Iraq currently pledge their allegiance, one who has often turned the other cheek even while his beloved followers were being killed. Despite being repeatedly stalked, discredited, attacked, betrayed, and occasionally befriended by President Bush, his millions of followers trust him unreservedly to make their decisions for them. Shouldn’t journalists be speaking out loudly and clearly against the attacks upon him? Who are the bad guys here, and who are the good guys?
How can we expect al-Sadr’s forces to passively turn in their guns when our own country feels free to unilaterally initiate pre-emptive wars, invade, occupy and shoot up foreign country sides and villages and cities, interfere with sovereign nations’ internal affairs, drop nuclear and conventional bombs on civilian populations, disrupt livelihoods and lives, kill innocents, and stockpile armaments enough to end life on earth many times over? Al-Sadr has not invaded America. The reverse has happened.
The Bible does not say “the lamb shall lie down with the lion,” but “the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” In other words, powerful countries must first let their weaker neighbors live in peace. Our own interests, even as citizens of the mega-powerful United States, are served only when our leaders humble themselves to offer good will to all other nations, and treat all our neighbors as we would wish to be treated. It is the traditional moral duty of the military to protect the weak from those who would hurt them, not to push the weak around in order to get whatever a highly unpopular, unresponsive and unrepresentative administration wants when they want it.
The willingness to turn to violence to resolve conflicts, whether through state (military) terrorism or through civilian terrorism, turns out to be the problem itself, and not, as many have tried to persuade us, any particular ideology, ethnicity or religion. The burning question too often overlooked in every conflict is: which side is committed to accommodation, compromise and non-violent resolution of this conflict, and which side isn’t?
In the past, partisans loyally embraced only their own leaders as the “good guys,” regardless of their personal records of using violence or keeping the peace–whether Bush or bin Laden, Saddam or Arafat, Hirohito or Mao or Stalin or Cheney or Eisenhower or Hitler. In the future, we will realize that the “good guys” are those real leaders, found in homes, businesses, communities, nations, and throughout the world, who are committed to resolving difficult conflicts—which are perfectly natural and human—harmoniously and peacefully. On the other hand, all those who represent belligerent aggressors and extremist zealots–whether suicide bombers or soldiers–may be remembered by historians as “the bad guys” of our time.
All-out war makes sense to me only when people are cornered in their own homes, fighting for survival against overwhelming odds, as al-Sadr’s followers currently seem to be.
More and more people today are recognizing man’s inhumanity to man—whether seen in bulldozed homes, in the shattered bodies of innocent children, or in the maimed and traumatized minds and bodies of young soldiers from every land—-exactly for what it is, regardless of context, and despite all the attractive ideological, ethnic, religious, and national colors and flavors violence always comes wrapped in.
Around the world, journalists, activists and average citizens are turning away from the angry diatribes of opportunistic demagogues and ideologues bent upon stirring their fellow-citizens to torture and murder, and instead, embracing the world’s highest universal values: the oneness of all mankind and the sanctity of human life.
Shouldn’t we all be supporting those who are upholding these important values, and resisting the use violent solutions in the present conflict in Iraq?
(Nancy Pace blogs on breaking news at the intersection of war, peace, politics, culture and spirituality at www.epharmony.com.)
There is one sure thing to eliminate the enmity between the Badr Brigades and Mahdi Army and that would be an attack on and war against Iran. I am not a seer or one versed in Middle Eastern politics but rather I read the likes of very credible experts on the area as Scott Ritter. Should the US pursue anything that could be interpreted by the Iranians attacked as a war, all th horrors of hell will be released out of that Pandora’s Box of a region. The “Great Satan” will become the focus of Shiite hatred. Then we’ll find out how long McCain’s century of war will be.
Our leaders and press don’t wan to admit that Iran is the clear winner here. Iraq knows it. Iran sure as hell knows it. We figured we’d let our boy al-Maliki and his army attack Al-Sadr, and see what happened. Well, the rest is history. Iran needed to mediate a cease fire. How embarrassing for us and the Iraqi government. When they fight Al-Sadr, they’re only prolonging the inevitable.
Remember one thing. Our armed forces are voluntary and men and women are still enlisting and trained as “professional hitmen” for the “real national crime syndicate,” the United States government. People resist invading armies with all the capabilities available to them. But most folks haven’t much knowledge of world history and continue and take part in the same replication of folly, generation after generation. My heart goes out to the brave and courageous Iraqi resistance. May they prevail in retaking their country from the “world’s only superbully.”
Ignorance is not bliss, it is unforgivable. We all have a civic, as well as personal responsibility to understand why these types of aggressive actions occur and who starts them and for what purpose and for whose benefit.
OK you have lost the big picture here.
What IS happening is more and more troops will surround the oil fields away from the cities that is why the numbers are down. The troops are not there to get killed.
If the USA was there for the people and not the oil
IN 6 YEARS YOU CAN BUILD A FEW POWER AND WATER PLANTS, BUT THEY ONLY CAN BUILD AN EMBASSY?
Give the people of Iraq the basic things of life like water, power hospitals and jobs will start to come back and peace as well.
Thank you Nancy Pace, you rightly describe how rich and powerful nations should co-exist with smaller ones. Unfortunately, we live in an age when arrogance and aggression seem to be the political tools of choice, rather than diplomacy and restraint.
Peaceman - we are in a minority, when we recognise the culpability of our armed forces. The Iraqi people had no choice in their fate, they had no chance against the overwhelming technology employed in killing them. They did not attack or threaten us, but our leaders decided to put on a macabre show - “shock and awe”, with no thought of the consequences. The result is plain for all intelligent people to see (which rules out Bush, Cheney, Blair etc), a country destroyed, hundreds of thousands killed, millions displaced, the infrastructure decimated.
Meanwhile, there are young people enlisting in the armed forces, well aware of the situation, but only too eager to join the disaster. I have no pity for them, they have a choice - the Iraqi people didn’t.
Andy UK:
there are lots ( glad the numbers are down) people joining because in 7 years Bush has lost over 3.1 million jobs in America. The biggest loss since 1930’s The bar is being lowered more and more that I have read stories of people who had trouble with the law and others less than grade 8 education. If and by the looks of things these people joining don’t have very much of a choice of a future in America, as Bush has affected even his own people as well as Iraqi.
It ia amazing ( well not really) that as time goes on Iraq is starting to look more and more like Gaza? Walls put up, limited water, limited electrcity, and no freedom of movement. Who writes the USA foreign policy again, not we the people that’s for sure.
I was glad to see this article because it makes a conclusion I stated in a letter to the editor of my local paper (The Steubenville Herald Star)and published there this past weekend. That conclusion: Maliki’s offensive was supposed to be a military victory for U.S. proaganda consumption.
April 10, 2008
To The Editor:
I’ve been watching the news of General Petraeus’ testimony before Congress, and because American media continues to do such yeoman service for the war promoters in this country I felt compelled to write.
Bush and his Republican henchmen in Congress stand together as one and proclaim that the surge has been a success. Remember that when the voters in November of ’06 rejected the war policy by punishing the Republicans in the election, Bush responded by escalating the war. What he called “the surge.”
Of course the claim that the escalation has been a success is because what we the citizens are meant to understand is that U.S. casualties are down. And they have been, thank goodness. But the real story of the time of the surge is not a pretty picture and this apparent calm may be the calm before a nasty storm. For those that may be unaware, here’s some information gleaned from sources other than mainstream media. Not quack theories from the likes of Limbaugh, but verifiable facts and accounts from outside the propaganda loop.
Our new Sunni friends in Anbar and Baghdad, or “the Awakening” are being paid not to shoot at us. That’s right, we’re giving them arms and money not to attack us. How perfectly American, but as the dollar continues to decline, who knows? Could become a real primal lesson in the co-mingling of economic and military realities. Much of the reason Baghdad has been so quiet is because it is in lockdown, barricaded, hollowed out cleansed, and partially destroyed. There are signs that Iraqis from that capitol don’t truly appreciate this great progress we’ve made.
Another reason for the lull is that Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to a cease-fire that began the calm, yet Republican ninnies like McCain continue to blame al-Queda for all the troubles there. In Iraq is the Mhedi Army of al-Sadr, a Shiite nationalist that never left Iraq under Sadam’s rule; the Badr Brigade, another Shiite militia but trained in Iran by Iranians and which is the armed muscle of President Maliki; and there are the deposed Sunnis, mostly Baathist and nationalist. Can’t forget the Kurds who have quietly established a defacto independent region and begun their long-desired conflict with Turkey. Something they all have in common is a strong dislike of al-Queda and when the U.S. leaves, al-Queda won’t last longer in Iraq than a snowflake on a hot August day. McCain has proved he can’t tell the difference between al-Queda and Altoona. Maybe he should get somebody younger to explain it to him.
Now this is conjecture on my part, but I’ll bet the geniuses of the Bush war machine got together with our man Maliki and decided to have a grand old military victory before Petraeus date to testify, a successful Iraqi government military operation as proof of political progress. So Maliki launched a military assault on his Iraqi political rival and got his butt kicked and was only rescued by American air support. Wonderful progress.
Sincerely,
Vince Lawrence
AndyUK: I certainly agree with you.