Defeatism Revisited

See if you can spot a trend:

"I feel like we’re winning the war over here and we’re losing the war back home.” These were the words of a Marine corporal at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, just a few weeks ago. They were not constructed political rhetoric, the product of a leading question or an outright fabrication, tailored to the politically charged debate back home. Rather, they were a reflection of a common state of mind among troops in the war zones. Whether an accurate assessment or not, it does bring to mind a similar dichotomy during the Vietnam War.

About an hour before we spoke with this corporal, the Marine general in charge of logistics for the region gave a quick briefing before we left for Fallujah. We were waiting for gunship escorts at Base TQ (Al Taqqadum), leaving our C-130 cargo plane for helicopters. On the table in his office was an issue of Foreign Affairs with the prominent headline “Iraq and Vietnam.” In an earlier article from the same journal, John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale professor and respected critic of the Cold War, had written, “Historians now acknowledge that American counter-insurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.” In one sense, Iraq could become similar to Vietnam.

At Camp Fallujah, troops routinely called for “perseverance and patience.” They argued that “timetables can’t control the political process; the political process must control the timetable,” and they voiced the belief that “back home they don’t understand; you don’t understand unless you see it.” “What we see on TV is not what we see on the ground,” a Marine complained. “The news is just a commercial industry. The news system benefits the terrorists.” The dichotomy these troops lamented sounded like an Afghan saying we heard later in the trip from a village elder in Jalalabad: “What you see and what you hear arenever the same.”

Neither in its military aspects, nor in the structure of the international political system which surrounds it, is the Iraq War like Vietnam. Because of a bipolar system of two superpowers, the North Vietnamese ended up with the military sponsorship of a powerful outside nation-state. Moreover, the communist North Vietnamese had a unified internal party discipline and a popular ideology of domestic reform and nationalism, both of which the fragmented enemies in Iraq lack. The insurgents are split between radical Islamists and minority Sunni restorationists. Most Iraqis want neither a return to Sunni domination nor a new Islamic radicalism. Both nationalism and domestic reform favor the new Iraqi government.

Nevertheless, the corporal’s comment brings to mind the way in which the Iraq war (or any war, for that matter) can be made like the Vietnam War — not in the war zone itself, and not internationally, but in our domestic politics. If people in the United States come to believe, through misunderstanding or misinformation, spread inadvertently or deliberately, for political or partisan purposes, that the Iraq war is like the Vietnam War, then in domestic political terms the misunderstanding becomes the reality. This prophecy can be self-fulfilling.

Since the Greeks triumphed over the Persians, military history has been absolutely clear on one thing: democracies fight better than dictatorships. The most common way democracies lose wars is simply to have their civilian populations quit on them.

It's simple---support the troops by supporting the war. In the process, you'll be supporting America, and staving off the day when she falls. Nothing good comes from defeat---we do not face America across the battlefield, as the Germans and Japanese were so fortunate to do.