Lessons From Vietnam

History is where the past provides lessons of caution for those directing the future. Vietnam was such a cautionary tale and there are many people today who don't know the complete story. That story goes back to the end of World War II in 1945. Truman secretly supported the French in Vietnam during the First Indochina War and provided economic and military aid in 1950.

The fear of communism was the bogeyman of the 1950s. Eisenhower adhered to the Domino Theory where non-communist South Vietnam was a lynchpin stopping the world spread of dreaded communism. Kennedy also adopted the Domino Theory and escalated U.S. involvement with American military “advisors.” Their numbers increased to 15,000 by 1963.

Lyndon Johnson, while doubting the chances of success, used a series of “events”, namely the first and second Gulf of Tonkin incidents, to justify a massive escalation of U.S. troops. The first incident was minor where North Vietnamese boats fired on the USS Maddox. The second incident was totally fabricated. It became the excuse for retaliating.

Nixon became the fifth president to be involved in the Vietnam, and it was involved in his undoing. While claiming to deescalate the war by turning things over to the South Vietnamese, he also ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia and sent ground troops there. Then the dam broke with Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers that showed that the entire war was a stack of lies, kept secret by four presidents.

Nixon attempted to censor the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers. He lost that effort in the Supreme Court 6-3. He established “The Plumbers” as a secret group of spies to conduct “special investigations” to discredit Daniel Ellsberg. They broke into his doctor’s office (psychiatrist) to dig up dirt on Ellsberg. They failed to find anything. They were later to screw up Watergate, ending the Nixon term.

The Pentagon Papers outlined the public deception and coverup. The public learned for the first time that the Gulf on Tonkin incident was a lie. They learned of the secret bombing in Cambodia. They learned of the falsification of data to claim that we were “winning” the war. They learned that the entire government policy surrounding the Vietnam War was bogus and that the government knew the war was unwinnable.

The cost of that war was the loss of over 58,000 American lives, 300,000 wounded, and an unknown number of the 2.7 million troops who came back psychologically damaged. The total human toll was estimated at 2,450,000.

A series of U.S. presidents believed in the threat of the spread of communism and used that threat to justify a 19-year, 5-month, and 29-day war. They each deceived the American public. They lied for political survival. They each feared “losing” the Cold War. Nixon purportedly created the perception of his own instability to help with negotiations with Hanoi. Secrecy and misinformation were used to manage public opinion and created a “credibility gap.”

Fast forward to today. Our president started a war for reasons that are difficult to articulate, possibly because even he doesn’t know why he did this. Perhaps he thought it would be another easy Venezuela-like victory. In hindsight, not much has changed in Venezuela. One dictator is swapped for another.

In Iran, one ruling cleric is swapped for another. The problem is that clerics don’t “rule” Iran. The IRGC, the BRF (Basij Resistance Force), and the IRGC Quds Force were established after the fall of the Shah in 1979. (The CIA and British MI6 had installed the Shah in a 1953 coup.) The latter Iranian group , the Quds Force, is like our CIA and is an unconventional warfare branch for external proxy militias around the world. The BRF is a paramilitary force used to control domestic dissent. At an estimated 1 million strong, the heavily armed BRF can easily put down any insurrection among its 93 million unarmed people.

The fall of the ruling cleric and the conventional navy and air force, did not defang Iran. Like Vietnam, their's is a war of attrition. They can continue their asymmetric warfare to the continued discomfort of the most powerful man in the world. He is powerful, but not a student of history. Unlike Nixon, he doesn’t have to fake instability.