And it's One, Two, Three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. --Country Joe & the Fish
I always had a problem with that line. It was one of the more vocalized music phrases of the Vietnam era, and it attempted to persuade that the task at hand had no relevance. Don't ask me what we're fighting about, the song said. I don't really care. Like a lot of people of that time, Country Joe and his followers did not seek to learn what it was we were fighting for in Vietnam in the first place. I remember thinking at the time how stressful it must be to be that ignorant.
We've had a lot of time to reflect on the lessons of Viet Nam, and since some of those same ignorati are drawing comparisons between the two wars, I think it might be helpful for me to sort out some of the similarities and the differences, if for no other reason than to clarify what it is we are fighting for. That way, we wouldn't necessarily have to repeat the historical mistakes of either conflict.
We had 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. (source) Two thirds of them were volunteers. It was not a conscriptor's war, as many would have you believe. Over 300,000 had enough reason of their own to go over there and fight. Don't tell them that they were wasting their time.
In comparison, there are 120,000-140,000 serving or having served in Iraq. All of them are volunteers. I doubt if you'd find 10,000 of them who felt the cause wasn't just.
We were invited to Indochina by the government of South Vietnam. Our motivation and national interest was in preventing the scenario known as the Domino Theory. We finally won the overarching conflict in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.
Nobody in Iraq asked us over, but our motivation was not that different. The regimes of terrorism are every bit as evil as those of communism, fascism, naziism and the multitude of other isms. We do not know yet when the final battle will be fought and won over terrorism; however the fanaticism of the enemy suggests a longer time frame than 1964-1989.
We won the Vietnam War (New York Times notwithstanding). We lost not a single battle, and met every military objective. It was only when our objectives transformed into "nation building" that the problems began cropping up. We started financial backing of governmental entities who took the opportunity to profit from the corruption, and we learned that no useful solution can ever be secured by throwing money around (this also pertains to welfare and education, but that's a topic for another day). We withdrew from Vietnam having won the war, and having run out of useful military things to do. Things got messier for a while, after that. That happens in all the wars that matter.
We won the Iraq War (New York Times notwithstanding). We lost not a single battle, and met every military objective. Now we are trying our hand at nation building once again. This is perhaps the most important lesson we did not learn from Vietnam. By sticking around in Iraq dropping bags of money on every street corner, we are building another corrupt welfare state. We are also delaying the inevitable "fall of Saigon" moment, the Vietnam version being identified by the press as the "evidence of having lost that war".
We're pretty good at achieving the military objectives. It's those other non-military objectives we have found unwinnable. After the current troop surge, there must be an accounting. There simply must be a point where we decide whether we've done all that we can. If there are honestly more military objectives to be met, the government will have my complete confidence and blessing. Short of true military necessity, I can't figure out why we're still there.
There are still lessons to be learned from Vietnam, notably who are the equivalent entities to the Khmer Rouge, and who it is that will eventually rush in to occupy Iraq when we are gone. As I see it, unless we want to occupy Iraq as some latter day Roman Empire, our job is done.
We will have many more wars, and no feel-good collection of John Lennon, Country Joe or the mindless chants of countless ignorati will have any affect on that. The main lesson left to learn is that we just have to know when to declare Peace and get out of the friggin way.
