Lessons from Vietnam: The 'errors of judgment'

Omar Kureishi, The Dawn, Asia News Network, Karachi, Pakistan

Robert S.McNamara was to the Vietnam war what Donald Rumsfeld is to the coming Iraq War. He was close enough to President Kennedy and Johnson to be their alter-ego. He was counted among the 'best and the brightest.'

Long after the war in Vietnam ended, he felt the need to unburden himself. He wrote a book, In Retrospect which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described as "brave, honest, honourable" and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Robert E. Pursley advised that the book "should be read and carried throughout their careers by every current and future military officer for decades to come."

The book was published in 1995, some eight years ago so that there are still many decades to go for "current and future military officers" to absorb "the errors of judgment."

In the preface to the book, Robert S. McNamara writes: "We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

I read In Retrospect when it first came out and wrote that the book was a kind of mea culpa. I have re-read it, to find any clues to understand what is happening today. Change the name of the enemy and there is the same high moral purpose, the same reliance on perceptions, the half-truths, the almost-truths, the same, concocted threats to national security and most of all, the insistence that there is a "just war." We are angels, they are the devils.

The United States never declared war in Vietnam. The closest it came was through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed by Congress and Johnson invoked the resolution to justify the constitutionality of the military action, 16,000 military advisers expanding to 550,000 combat troops almost overnight. McNamara expresses an unease about the naval incidents that occurred in the Tonkin Gulf but there is evidence to suggest that the incidents were either fabricated or had been deliberately provoked. And the rest, as they say, is history.

McNamara's is an honest book but he offers no apologies to the Vietnamese people, three million who were killed through "errors of judgment." Nor is there any mention of the use of chemical weapons, Agent Orange.

Neil Sheehan's book A Bright Shining Lie won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award. About Agent Orange he writes: "The planes dropped more than bombs. In 1966 specially equipped C-123 transports of Operation Ranch Hand destroyed nearly 850,00 acres of forest and crops by spraying them with chemical herbicides, also called defoliants. The spraying had begun in the early 1960s as another of John Kennedy's mistakes, urged on him by Diem in his cruelty and McNamara in his search for technological solutions.

With the arrival of the U.S. armed forces in 1965 the defoliation had, like everything else, expanded geometrically. By 1967, 1.5 million acres of forest and crops were being destroyed in an effort to deny the Communist soldiers food and places to hide." Sheehan claims that after the war, scientific tests indicated that the Vietnamese of the south had levels of dioxin in their bodies three times higher than inhabitants of the United States.

Does any of this have relevance to the imminent threat of war in Iraq? It could if one was prepared to learn any lessons from it. The most vital lesson is that you don't win hearts of the people by bombing them. In the beginning, the Vietcong was a small band of guerillas but as the war intensified, their numbers grew and there was a lot of support for them among the people. This support started as a trickle and became a stream. The stream became a river and the river became a flood.

Sheehan quotes a two-star general telling Ellsberg: "The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm ... till the other side cracks and gives up." It didn't happen the way the general said it would.

No sane man would want to see weapons of mass destruction in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein. Equally, no sane person would like to see weapons of mass destruction in the hands of someone like Ariel Sharon. In his speech at Davos, Colin Powell made a reference to "God's children." "God's children" embraces us all, white and black and brown, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, embraces Americans and Iraqis.

And in the end, what matters most is the value we attach to human lives. And we need to ask ourselves: Is there any possession more valuable than human life? If there is, then let's go and bomb each other to hell.