Those Who Have Borne the Battle (35 page)

Vietnam could not be readily dismissed. By one count, during the first year of war in Afghanistan, the
New York Times
ran 245 stories that mentioned Afghanistan and Vietnam. During the first year in Iraq, it ran 584 stories mentioning Iraq and Vietnam. In 2004 25 percent of Americans thought Iraq could “turn out to be another Vietnam,” and in 2007 this figure was 46 percent. To be certain, the latter could have been a consequence of the linkage made in newspapers such as the
Times
, but this analogy, this haunting specter, was not something made up by journalists. Political and military leaders had become long accustomed to looking over their shoulders.
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There were many “lessons” of Vietnam to be parlayed into political if not scriptural truths, though each one often represented more the rationalization of an agenda, a resolve, than an understanding. Among these asserted lessons: do not fight a limited war—let the military proceed without “tying their hands” with constraints; do not fight an incremental war; always insist upon Congress's constitutional authority; go to war only with clear and unalterable military objectives; reinforce and follow military lines of authority; have consistent and unambiguous strategic goals; minimize American casualties through the use of technology; maintain public support for the war so that protesters and politicians do not again “pull the rug out” from under troops who have sacrificed for the nation; control better the media so that, as the critics demanded, the actual conditions are “honestly” portrayed. While advocates have argued for each of these propositions, none of the cases were consensus lessons of the Vietnam experience.

In the immediate post-Vietnam years, American policy makers and military officials continued debates that had commenced even during the war. These had to do with fundamental matters. There were efforts to clarify basic constitutional authority for waging war. Civilian and military officials sharpened a set of guidelines into a doctrine for circumstances that would justify war and the conditions under which it would be fought. The army especially undertook a review of how it would organize and conduct itself to maintain its professional role, even as it insisted upon the type of war that it would train to fight. The government faced the basic question of how it would raise a military force. And political and
other commentators asserted the importance of “supporting the troops” and being cautious about criticism of them. These were the fundamentals, most of them in one way or another debated and resolved, at least temporarily, by the founding generation two hundred years earlier. This time they would be firmed up with guidelines and even “doctrines,” and these quickly would founder when confronting the emotions of 9/11 and the reality of two troubling wars.

In 1973 Congress approved the War Powers Act, passing it over President Nixon's veto. It was not as restrictive as many had originally hoped; the legislation allowed the president to use military force for up to ninety days without congressional authorization. Congress had earlier repealed the authorizing principles of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This had been largely symbolic, but supporters of the War Powers Act sought to ensure that there would be no more Vietnams—or no more Koreas. There was by the early 1970s a wide recognition that both Korea and Vietnam had been major wars that were essentially actions of the executive branch.

As it turned out, the War Powers Act was limited in its controls. Over the first years of the War Powers Act, American troops were involved in the Mayaguez recovery under President Gerald Ford, the attempted Iranian rescue mission under President Jimmy Carter, and the engagement of US forces in Lebanon and Grenada under President Ronald Reagan as well as the latter's air strikes against Libya. These were all retroactively “reported” to Congress under the ninety-day executive discretion terms of the War Powers Act. Nothing in the War Powers Act could control a subsequent Congress from enacting legislation or resolutions that would cede authority to the president to wage war—and to allow the executive to determine the circumstances under which it would be initiated and the method in which it would be undertaken.

President George H. W. Bush bickered with Congress over his authority to send troops into Panama to depose and arrest Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He also questioned Congress's claim that he needed to seek authority to send several hundred thousand troops to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for Operation Desert Storm. He finally did seek and secure that approval. Bush and President Bill Clinton likewise
insisted that they did not require congressional authorization to send troops into Somalia.

Bill Clinton was very aggressive in asserting presidential authority to engage the American military without any congressional role. He fought with Congress about the dispatch of US troops to Haiti to stabilize the political tensions there. He sent troops into Bosnia without congressional authority, and Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader and the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, agreed that the president had authority “to do what he feels should be done,” telling
CBS News
that “no doubt about it, whether Congress agrees or not, troops will go to Bosnia.”
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In Kosovo, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, President Clinton used the military actively, seldom consulting with Congress. Typically, these were air strikes or missile attacks, with the Kosovo attacks involving extended air action.

After Somalia and the downed helicopter in Mogadishu, Clinton became more cautious in engaging any troops on the ground. Nevertheless, the leading student of the War Powers Act, Louis Fisher, concludes that “Clinton's military initiatives were remarkable both for their frequency and the absence of any institutional checks, either legislative or judicial.”
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Fisher pointedly notes that unlike President Clinton, President George W. Bush did come to Congress and secured authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan in September 2001 and in Iraq in October 2002. Congress balked at making the first resolution a full blank check to use force in order to preempt future acts of terrorism. The Iraq authorization had few restrictions—Fisher likened it to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in terms of the discretion it provided the president in terms of determining when and how to go to war. It allowed “unchecked power.” He believed that Congress failed to assert its independent authority, shirking its responsibility to confront the administration for its failure to provide “sufficient and credible information” to justify the wars.
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Even as American presidents following the Vietnam War would reassert executive war-making authority, in ways that likely would have made the founding fathers very nervous, these presidents never really escaped the varied memories of Vietnam. The shadow was always there, addressed largely by a whistle-past-the-graveyard acknowledgment—and explicit assurance that this time would be different. In announcing the
several actions they undertook, they would insist that this would not be “another Vietnam.” They inevitably meant that they were not going to get the United States involved in an open-ended, sustained and constrained, poorly supported military commitment. When George H. W. Bush announced the beginning of operations in Desert Storm, he assured, “I've told the American people before this that this will not be another Vietnam, and I repeat this here tonight.”
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One critic asked Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, how President Clinton could order the use of the military so readily, given his own background as an opponent of the war in Vietnam. She replied, “We are talking about using military force, but we are not talking about war. That is an important distinction.”
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It may indeed be an important distinction, but it has been clear, beginning with Korea, that policy makers cannot control the consequences once military force has been deployed. Many politicians came out of Vietnam resolved to avoid such situations in the future; the military even more emphatically did, particularly the army, which agonized most openly and resolved most firmly to seek to avoid again a war in which strategic objectives are unclear and there are political constraints imposed on the level and range of military force. Many army leaders believed that the Vietnam experience was so devastating that it was crucial to avoid such a conflict again. Of course, under the American system of government, the army does not determine when and where and how it will be deployed; nevertheless, the army had much to consider in the wake of the Vietnam experience, and its attitudes going forward would reflect their leaders' understanding of the causes of the debacle and the “lessons” to be derived from them.

 

 

In the 1980s, a promising young army major completed his PhD studies at Princeton University. David Petraeus had graduated from West Point in 1974 and then joined and was successful in the post-Vietnam army. It was an army engaged in tremendous reflection and committed never again to enter a Vietnam-type engagement. Major Petraeus's Princeton thesis was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.”
He determined that the primary lesson was that the army became far more cautious in engaging in the use of force. He observed that the post-Vietnam senior officers were convinced that this was more than a lesson, but a “truism,” and noted that “even during the heyday of the post-Korea never again club there was never the kind of universal conscription to lessons on the use of force as has characterized the period since 1973. The military super-hawks of the 1950s and 1960s have no counterparts in the contemporary landscape. . . . Vietnam made a difference with the military.”
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The record is quite clear that the army's “no more Vietnam” insistence was not a commitment to learn better how to engage in guerrilla war or counterinsurgency operations; the resolution was not to go to such wars. John Nagl observes that the army's 1976
Field Manual
did not mention counterinsurgency and that “the American army's involvement in the Second Indochina War from 1950 to 1972 demonstrates the triumph of the institutional culture of an organization over attempts at doctrinal innovation and the diminution of the effectiveness of the organization at accomplishing national objectives. The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of annihilating enemy forces. . . . The U.S. Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army—even if it had a hard time finding it.”
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In 1982 Colonel Harry Summers wrote an important review of Vietnam for the Army War College in which he insisted that the major mistake was that the United States Army got caught in a guerrilla war in South Vietnam when it should have focused on the source of the problem, North Vietnam. This was where American firepower could have been determinative. He wrote that the United States erred in believing that this war was counterinsurgency and that time was on the side of the superior force. It turned out that “it was American rather than North Vietnamese will that was being eroded.” US strategy was really a tactic, a failed tactic. Summers argued that the United States fought the symptom, the guerrilla war, rather than the cause. “Because it did not focus on the political aim to be achieved—containment of North Vietnamese expansion—our so-called strategy was never a strategy at all.”
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A Rand study published in 1989 was sharply critical of this attitude, believing it was marked by a fixation on World War II as being the army's preferred, and only acceptable, way of war. Senior army officers considered Korea and Vietnam to be “unpleasant aberrations.” The wars for which the army needed to prepare to fight would be more like the battle for western Europe in 1944 and 1945. As a result, the Rand report concluded, the army continued to focus on its troops in Germany and upon the Soviet threat as their mandate.
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Other scholars concurred that the army attempted to refocus on conventional concepts of warfare and to avoid counterinsurgency. Army leadership spoke of “NATO-oriented” wars. Indeed, they agreed to “concentrate on the prospect of a stand-up fight with the Soviet bloc on the ‘plains of Europe'rather than struggle with the discomforting lessons of Vietnam.” One student noted that “on the plains of Europe” was a phrase “repeated like a mantra in numerous military writings during the early 1970s, harkening back to the glory days of the Second World War.”
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The military's “no more Vietnams” commitment was codified in 1984 when Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger spoke at the National Press Club on “the uses of military power.” Weinberger's view was a very restrictive approach to the use of military force that hawks and doves could embrace in a post-Vietnam world, with a special resonance among many army leaders who were convinced that the conditions prescribed by Secretary Weinberger would protect the country from repeating such a tragedy as Vietnam. His speech and the necessary conditions described in it received the ultimate Washington imprimatur when it was labeled the “Weinberger Doctrine.”

Secretary Weinberger had consulted with senior military leadership, and they encouraged his strong statement. Weinberger insisted that the United States should never commit forces to combat unless there is a shared understanding that this is in the national interest, that the objectives are clear, that we are prepared to use the force necessary to realize these objectives, and that there is “reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.” He believed that sustaining this support would require candor and consultation. Perhaps a key principle was in the second of his points: “If
we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all.”
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