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1 Introduction
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Few who achieve popular renown for a phrase are quoted (and misquoted) as often as George Santayana, who observed over a century ago that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The “present” for this book—and principal focus—is the half-dozen years of US military involvement in Iraq that commenced with a US aerial attack on Baghdad in March 2003 and culminated in the pullback of US combat troops from Iraqi cities on June 30, 2009 (in advance of a total US troop withdrawal from the country scheduled for the end of 2011). The “past” is the US effort in Vietnam that ended with the calamitous fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975, after nearly a decade of active US combat (1965–73) and the transfer of duty to the South Vietnamese army. It is a past that is easily remembered by an aging generation of American leaders who served (or chose not to serve) in that war, witnessed its fallout in social turbulence and political protest, and coped with a profusion of contradictory post-hoc “lessons” that the war supposedly offered. One legacy of the Vietnam War is that it is still fought by policy analysts and former US government officials who disagree over whether the United States could have succeeded given US military (and moral) disadvantages in combating chapter one Introduction 2 The Limits of U.S. Military Capability a people’s war, would have succeeded but for perfidious congressional intervention , or might have succeeded had the United States adopted an alternative military strategy. Into the 1990s, negative lessons of Vietnam inspired a backhanded acknowledgment of the limits to US military capability in the principles (of the so-called Weinberger-Powell Doctrine) that the United States must choose its battles, set winnable and publicly supportable goals, and intervene militarily abroad only with overwhelming force. The specter of Vietnam hangs over policymakers who explicitly reject the application of the Vietnam analogy, including President George H. W. Bush who declared after the Desert Storm victory over Iraq in 1991 that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”1 Why else exuberantly pronounce the syndrome’s demise—based, for that matter, on results of an engagement that bore no resemblance politically nor militarily to the Southeast Asian conflict? The Vietnam War as past stands in uneasy juxtaposition to successive US combat operations—foremost among them the 2003 Iraq War, which consumed the attention and political capital (both at home and abroad) of the George W. Bush administrationinsubsequentyears.WhereassomecriticsoftheUS(post-invasion) war strategy in Iraq saw clear parallels with Vietnam, administration officials resisted the comparison.2 An obvious question follows: How relevant were the lessons of Vietnam to fighting (and peacemaking) in the sectarian-driven conflict in Iraq? Some answers are found in examining what it means for a policymaker to “remember history.” Historical “lessons” do not stand tall for all to see. Nor are they imposed uncritically upon the present by policymakers who surrender their personal judgment, ideological perspectives, and political interests.3 As this book demonstrates, the relevance of lessons depends on the assumptions and reference points that policymakers, policy analysts, and social scientists employ when struggling to make sense of the past and the present. In applying insights from the Vietnam War to the Iraq conflict, this book argues that US military capabilities are fundamentally limited and that US costs rise and benefits diminish appreciably in wars in which the US stakes are low and its goals broad and ambitious. Specifically, it establishes that challenges are pronounced for the United States when reaching its goals depends on the choices of adversary leaders, their foreign allies, indigenous societal leaders, groups, and populations, and the American public such that a military operation essentially becomes a “leverage problem.” As the United States seeks to overcome adversary resistance, gain the acceptance of a local population, secure the participation of a host government, avoid antagonizing outside parties to a conflict, build national [52.90.235.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:54 GMT) Introduction 3 institutions to achieve or sustain progress in combat, and keep the US public on board, US influence is limited when other parties capitalize on political, psychological , or sociological conditions to offset US military and economic strengths. Viewing outcomes as products of such “asymmetries of conflict” redirects the focus of strategy and analysis usefully from the military...