Vietnam and victory

SUPPORTERS OF the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have often argued that it has little in common with the Vietnam War. But judging by President Bush's new ''National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,'' unveiled Nov. 30 and promoted in a series of recent speeches, the administration itself may have started to see some parallels.

The document envisions a three-pronged security strategy for fighting the Iraqi insurgency: ''Clear, Hold, and Build.'' It is no accident that this phrase evokes the ''clear and hold'' counterinsurgency strategy pursued by the American military in the final years of the Vietnam War. For months, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius and The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan have reported, influential military strategists inside and outside the Pentagon have been pushing to resurrect ''clear and hold'' in Iraq, claiming that the US effort to suppress the Viet Cong was actually a success.

The argument that ''clear and hold'' vanquished the Viet Cong is made most forcefully in ''A Better War,'' the 1999 book by Vietnam veteran and former Army strategy analyst Lewis Sorley. The book focuses on General Creighton Abrams, who replaced General William Westmoreland as supreme commander in Vietnam in 1968 and moved from Westmoreland's discredited strategy of seeking out and killing enemy soldiers (''search and destroy'') to one of controlling and defending patches of territory and population (''clear and hold''). In Sorley's telling, this new approach, combined with the severe losses the Viet Cong suffered during the 1968 Tet Offensive, virtually wiped out the insurgency. By late 1970, Sorley writes, ''the war was won.''

Sorley's book has reportedly been widely read this year by US military strategists, including the commander of US forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid. Its influence can also be seen in a key article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs by military analyst Andrew Krepinevich Jr., himself a Vietnam War historian, which called for adopting a ''clear and hold'' approach.

But the idea that the strategy that beat the Viet Cong could work in Iraq elides a fundamental question: Did ''clear and hold'' actually beat the Viet Cong? For most historians of the war, not to mention for those who fought on the winning side, the answer is no. And the lessons for Iraq are far from clear.

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''The Sorley analysis is wrong,'' writes David Elliott, author of the exhaustive and widely lauded ''The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-75.''

''For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would think [clear and hold] was a success in Vietnam,'' writes William Turley, author of ''The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975.''

''Lewis Sorley is completely wrong,'' concurred retired General Le Ngoc Hien in a recent interview. As deputy chief of staff for operations in the North Vietnamese Army, Hien was responsible for compiling the overall military strategies for both the army and the Viet Cong.

The argument is not about whether the Viet Cong suffered severe losses between 1968 and 1972; everyone acknowledges that it did. Hien agrees with Sorley that ''major mistakes'' were made in planning the Tet Offensive, including expecting pro-Communist uprisings by the urban populations in cities the Viet Cong seized (they never happened), and trying to hold on to the cities against overwhelming US and South Vietnamese counterattacks.

More importantly, in 1969 and '70, the Viet Cong lost control over huge swathes of countryside and population. The Viet Cong, Hien acknowledges, found it impossible to locally recruit new guerrillas to replace those decimated in '68; tens of thousands of regular soldiers had to be sent down from the North to fill out Viet Cong units.

The debate, then, is over the reasons for the Viet Cong's reversals-and their significance. Sorley claims the tide was turned by Abrams's use of smaller American units working in close concert with South Vietnamese Army and Civil Guard troops at the village level, and by the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development (CORDS) program, which targeted economic aid to government-controlled villages in a campaign to win the locals' ''hearts and minds.''

Elliott disagrees. He thinks Viet Cong setbacks resulted from a much simpler and more brutal tactic: The US and the South Vietnamese Army emptied Communist-controlled areas of people. ''Only the 'clear' part [of 'clear and hold'] was a success,'' according to Elliott. In terms of controlling the population, the key was ''indiscriminate bombing and artillery shelling which led to rural depopulation.''

Elliott's book is largely based on 400 interviews with Viet Cong defectors, some of which Elliott himself collected as a Rand Corporation researcher in South Vietnam during the war. Interviewees speak of villages hit by 300 or more mortar shells a day, of tiny hamlets with dozens of civilians killed by artillery and bombs. In one six-month operation in 1969, the US 9th Division came up with a body count of over 10,000 ''enemy'' dead, but only 751 weapons, suggesting huge civilian casualties. ''People hated the Americans,'' Elliott quotes one defector saying-a far cry from ''winning hearts and minds.''

In sum, where Sorley paints a picture of in-depth village-level deployments between cooperating American and Vietnamese units, combined with economic aid, building villagers' loyalty and sense of security, Elliott and Hien paint a picture of indiscriminate firepower driving villagers off of their land, creating an atomized and demoralized, but controllable, population. This, presumably, is not the new strategy the US envisions winning hearts and minds in Iraq.

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A second critique of Sorley's thesis goes to the significance of the Viet Cong's reversals. According to Hien, the aim of the Tet Offensive was only partly to seize the South's cities; it was also intended to break the will of the American political leadership to continue the war. In this, it succeeded.

Hien calls Tet ''a victory with heavy casualties.'' It may have been a sacrifice from which the Viet Cong never entirely recovered, but it was a sacrifice which helped drive the US from the field, ultimately enabling the North to win the war. ''The American historians want to isolate a short period of history and claim a victory,'' Hien remarks. ''But at the end of the war, which side achieved its strategic and political aims?''

Hien is right that some American analysts are eager to ''claim a victory'' in Vietnam. Sorley doesn't just argue that ''clear and hold'' beat the Viet Cong. He goes on to argue that the Vietnamization program in general was a success, and that by the time the last US troops left in 1973, the South Vietnamese Army was capable of defending the country. The villain, in this retelling of the war, is the US Congress, which cut off all funding for US military operations in late 1973-making it impossible for the US to provide the air support it had promised in case of an invasion by the North Vietnamese Army-and went on to cut aid to South Vietnam starting in 1975. If the US had just provided South Vietnam with a bit of military aid and air support, Sorley implies, we would have won the Vietnam War.

Sorley isn't the first to make this contention. It has been circulating ever since the late '70s, as Michael Lind pointed out in his 1999 Vietnam history, ''The Necessary War.'' But in recent weeks, as the issue of withdrawal from Iraq has become more pressing, the claim that congressional cowardice lost the Vietnam War has begun to be heard again.

In an article in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under President Nixon and self-proclaimed architect of ''Vietnamization,'' wrote that the US ''grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory'' when Congress cut off military funding for South Vietnam. And in the current issue of The American Enterprise, former Navy secretary James Webb, who served as a Marine in Vietnam, reprises the claim: ''In early 1975 the Watergate Congress dealt non-Communist Indochina the final blow. The new Congress icily resisted President Gerald Ford's January request for additional military aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia.''

It is hard to know what to make of the claim that South Vietnam, after fighting a horrendously bloody and interminable guerrilla and conventional war against Communist foes within and without for two decades, finally succumbed because of the refusal of a supplemental appropriations bill by the US Congress in the spring of 1975. Of half a dozen experts on the war queried via e-mail-including Elliott, Turley, Clemson's Edwin Moise, and several others-none besides Sorley thought South Vietnam could have held out for long. Its army was plagued by corruption and factionalism; it had never established firm popular support. ''There is no way that the RVN could have repulsed the Communist offensive of 1975,'' responded Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Studies Forum.

Ultimately, it's not necessary to make the claim of a squandered victory in Vietnam in order to argue that ''clear and hold'' was effective, or is the right strategy for Iraq. Even General Hien thinks ''clear and hold'' was superior to ''search and destroy.''

''I wouldn't say 'clear and hold' was a 'better' strategy,'' Hien says-since, obviously, he wanted the United States to lose. ''But it was a more appropriate strategy for the US.''

That testimony is all the more compelling coming from someone who has no interest in claiming that America won the Vietnam War.

Matt Steinglass lives in Hanoi, where he writes for the Gobe and other publications.