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The Viet Nam experience provides lessons for Iraq
Friday, March 24, 2006 By Quang X. Pham

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The first Americans I met were military advisers, much like the ones who are training security forces in Iraq. That year, 1970, the United States was in the process of Vietnamization, turning the war over to the South Vietnamese as U.S. troops simultaneously departed.

I remember as a boy visiting my father’s South Vietnamese Air Force squadron and shaking hands with U.S. pilots who wore reassuring smiles, green flight suits and pistols.

Today, three years into the war in Iraq, memories of Vietnamization come back when I hear President Bush talk about his eventual plans to withdraw U.S. troops. “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” he has said. Yet, Vietnamization is not the model for Iraq.

If U.S. troops cannot extinguish the insurgency and end the carnage from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), should we expect the Iraqis to fare much better with less than two years of training? Today, not one Iraqi battalion is capable of fighting independently. Now, as more members of Congress clamor for withdrawal of U.S. troops, the lessons of Vietnamization appear to have been forgotten.

Just two weeks ago, an unprecedented conference took place at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, featuring American historians, journalists and leaders from the Việt Nam War era. Not a single Vietnamese was invited to speak.

How we got into Iraq should not matter as much for now as how we will exit. Two of the key participants in Boston — Jack Valenti, a special assistant to President Johnson, and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and national security adviser for President Nixon and the mastermind behind the “peace with honor” strategy in Việt Nam — offered no solutions for Iraq. Kissinger lamely reflected, “I know the problem better than the answer.”

In 1961, U.S. pilots began training South Vietnamese pilots, including my father, when President Kennedy dispatched advisers en masse to Việt Nam. They didn’t leave until the cease-fire agreement 12 years later.

The Iraqis, too, are doomed as an independent military force if the United States makes the same critical mistakes made with the South Vietnamese:

Vietnamization failed because U.S. advisers trained the South Vietnamese to fight the American way — with heavy firepower and air support, which vanished with our troops.

James Willbanks, author of “Abandoning Vietnam” and an Army adviser, recalled: “Advisers were needed for so long because we had trained the Vietnamese to fight the same way that we did, using massive firepower.”

U.S. advisers stayed too involved for too long, eroding the national identity of Vietnamese soldiers.

Bửu Viên, a personal aide to South Viet Nam’s president, recalled: “The presence of American advisers at all levels of the military hierarchy created among the Vietnamese leadership a mentality of reliance on their advice and suggestions.”

Lewis Sorley, author of “A Better War,” wrote about one Vietnamese officer who had 47 different U.S. advisers. The United States essentially micromanaged South Vietnamese military and political affairs while Vietnamization’s key assumption — that the South Vietnamese could successfully fight entirely on their own without U.S. advisers and air power — was never tested until the very end of the war.

In this war, we should hand over responsibilities to the Iraqis at a faster pace and put them to the test while U.S. troops are still in country. U.S. air power will not be available forever, so we should not train the Iraqis to depend on it the way U.S. troops do.

In 1975, when North Việt Nam invaded the South in violation of the 2-year-old cease-fire agreement, Congress rejected President Ford’s final plea to resume military support. The B-52s were no longer on call. Despite sporadic heroics, Sài Gòn’s million-man military, including an air force that ranked fourth in the world numerically, crumbled in two months.

There is no similar large-scale invasion threat in Iraq, yet taxpayers have to wonder what our trillion-dollar-war will bring to the American and the Iraqi people. The war in Iraq requires more than partisan politicking in favor of either “withdrawing our troops now” or “staying the course.” Congress has to stop shirking its duty and demand a rigorous review of the Iraqi training program instead of just reacting to quarterly reports from the Pentagon.

The last Americans I saw in Việt Nam were those who evacuated my family before Sài Gòn fell. One of them had served as an adviser alongside my father, who did not make it out at the same time as his wife and his children.

I wish the Iraqis better luck than the South Vietnamese. One can hardly imagine a scarier scenario than that of U.S. and Iraqi troops taking the fight to Iran or Syria. Or Iraqis killing each other using American know-how.

Former U.S. Marine Quang X. Phạm, an entrepreneur and author in Southern California, is exploring a run for Congress as an independent. He can be reached via
www.quangxpham.com.

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