IRAQ AND VIETNAM:

DIFFERENCES, SIMILARITIES, AND INSIGHTS

Jeffrey Record

W. Andrew Terrill

May 2004
ii

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ISBN 1-58487-159-8
iii

FOREWORD

U.S. political and military diffi culties in Iraq have prompted 

comparisons to the American war in Vietnam. How, in fact, do 

the two wars compare? What are the differences and similarities, 

and what insights can be gained from examining them? Does the 

Vietnam War have instructive lessons for those dealing with today’s 

challenges in Iraq, or is that war simply irrelevant?

In the pages that follow, two highly qualifi ed analysts address 

these questions. Dr. Jeffrey Record, formerly a civilian pacifi cation 

advisor in Vietnam and author of books on both the Vietnam and 

Iraq wars, and W. Andrew Terrill, author and co-author of several 

SSI studies on Iraq, conclude that the military dimensions of the two 

confl icts bear little comparison. Among other things, the sheer scale 

of the Vietnam War in terms of forces committed and losses incurred 

dwarfs that of the Iraq War. They also conclude, however, that failed 

U.S. state-building in Vietnam and the impact of declining domestic 

political support for U.S. war aims in Vietnam are issues pertinent to 

current U.S. policy in Iraq.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph 

as a contribution to the national security debate over Iraq.

 

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

JEFFREY RECORD joined the Strategic Studies Institute in August 

2003 as Visiting Research Professor. He is a professor in the 

Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air 

Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of 

six books and a dozen monographs, including: Making War, Thinking 

History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to 

Kosovo; Revising US Military Strategy: Tailoring Means to Ends; Beyond 

Military Reform; Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War; The 

Gulf War; The Gulf War The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam; and 

Failed States and Casualty Phobia, Implications for U.S. Force Structure 

and Technology Choices. Dr. Record has served as Assistant Province 

Advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, Rockefeller 

Younger Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis 

Staff, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 

the Hudson Institute, and the BDM International Corporation. He 

also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as Legislative 

Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn and 

Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate 

Armed Services Committee. Dr. Record received his Doctorate at the 

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

W. ANDREW TERRILL joined the Strategic Studies Institute 

in October 2001, and is SSI s Middle East specialist. Prior to his 

appointment, he served as a senior international security analyst for 

the International Assessments Division of the Lawrence Livermore 

National Laboratory (LLNL). In 1998-99, Dr. Terrill also served as a 

Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air War College on assignment from 

LLNL. He is a former faculty member at Old Dominion University 

in Norfolk, Virginia, and has taught adjunct at a variety of other 

colleges and universities. He is a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant 

colonel and a Foreign Area Offi cer (Middle East). Dr. Terrill has 

published in numerous academic journals on topics including 

nuclear proliferation, the Iran-Iraq War, Operation DESERT 

STORM, Middle Eastern chemical weapons, and ballistic missile 

proliferation, terrorism, and commando operations. Since 1994, 
v

at U.S. State Department invitation, Dr. Terrill has participated in 

the Middle Eastern Regional Security Track 2 talks, which are part 

of the Middle East Peace Process. He holds a B.A. from California 

State Polytechnic University and an M.A. from the University 

of California, Riverside, both in Political Science. Dr Terrill also 

holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Claremont Graduate 

University, Claremont, California. 

vii

SUMMARY

Unfolding events in Iraq have prompted some observers to 

make analogies to the American experience in the Vietnam War. 

The United States has, they argue, stumbled into another overseas 

“quagmire” from which there is no easy or cheap exit.

Reasoning by historical analogy is an inherently risky business 

because no two historical events are completely alike and because 

policymakers’ knowledge and use of history are often distorted 

by ignorance and political bias. In the case of Iraq and Vietnam, 

extreme caution should be exercised in comparing two wars so far 

apart in time, locus, and historical circumstances. In fact, a careful 

examination of the evidence reveals that the differences between the 

two confl icts greatly outnumber the similarities. This is especially 

true in the strategic and military dimensions of the two wars. There 

is simply no comparison between the strategic environment, the 

scale of military operations, the scale of losses incurred, the quality 

of enemy resistance, the role of enemy allies, and the duration of 

combat.

Such an emphatic judgment, however, may not apply to at least 

two aspects of the political dimensions of the Iraq and Vietnam 

wars: attempts at state-building in an alien culture, and sustaining 

domestic political support in a protracted war against an irregular 

enemy. It is, of course, far too early predict whether the United 

States will accomplish its policy objectives in Iraq and whether 

public support will “stay the course” on Iraq. But policymakers 

should be mindful of the reasons for U.S. failure to create a politically 

legitimate and militarily viable state in South Vietnam, as well as for 

the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ failure to sustain suffi cient 

domestic political support for the accomplishment of U.S. political 

objectives in Indochina. Repetition of those failures in Iraq could 

have disastrous consequences for U.S. foreign policy.
1

IRAQ AND VIETNAM:

DIFFERENCES, SIMILARITIES, AND INSIGHTS

Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill

INTRODUCTION

Many of those who questioned the U.S. invasion of Iraq and now 

doubt the chances of creating a stable and prosperous democracy 

in that country have invoked America’s experience in Vietnam as 

an analogy. In their view, the United States has yet again stumbled 

into a foreign quagmire--a protracted and indecisive political and 

military struggle from which the United States is unlikely to extricate 

itself absent expenditure of considerable blood and treasure and 

abandonment of its policy objectives. 

Conversely, proponents of the Iraq War and optimists over Iraq’s 

future have dismissed the Vietnam analogy as misleading, even 

irrelevant. For them, the differences between the two wars vastly 

outnumber the similarities; the appropriate analogy is not Vietnam, 

but rather the total destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan 

and their transformation into democratic allies. Still others believe 

some elements of Vietnam are present in Iraq--e.g., both wars 

involved counterinsurgency operations, but not others--e.g., there is 

no counterpart in the Iraq War to North Vietnam, and that the nonanalogous elements dominate.1

The Vietnam War’s entry into the debate over the Iraq War and 

its aftermath probably was inevitable. The Vietnam War continues 

to infl uence American attitudes toward the use of force overseas, 

and the analogy of Vietnam has been a staple of critics of U.S. 

intervention in foreign internal wars since the fall of Saigon in 1975. 

The Vietnam War was moreover a defi ning foreign policy event for 

the generation of political and military leaders now in power. It was 

also the last major counterinsurgency experience of the U.S. Army 

and Marine Corps, which re-encountered the counterinsurgency 

mission in Iraq. 

Are there instructive comparisons between the U.S. military and 

political experiences in Vietnam in the 1960s and the challenges it 

faces in Iraq today? If so, can those comparisons usefully inform 
2

current U.S. policy in Iraq? Are there lessons from America’s defeat 

in Vietnam that can be applied to promote U.S. success in Iraq? 

Indeed, what were the lessons of the Vietnam War?

At fi rst glance the contrasts between the Vietnam and Iraq wars 

would seem to overwhelm the similarities. To begin with, Vietnam 

in the 1960s was a country with a long national history and powerful 

national identity forged by centuries of fi erce resistance to foreign 

rule and domination. The Communists had successfully mobilized 

that nationalism against the French (as they were subsequently to do 

against the United States) and had developed a doctrine of protracted 

irregular warfare that pitted Vietnamese strengths against Western 

weaknesses. In contrast, Iraq is a relatively young state plagued by 

ethnic and religious divisions that threaten national unity.

In Vietnam the United States went to war with a pre-GoldwaterNichols conscript military against a highly experienced, skilled, 

disciplined, and operationally fl exible enemy that enjoyed enormous 

external material support and considerable international legitimacy. 

In Iraq, highly-professional U.S. joint forces quickly overwhelmed 

a politically isolated and militarily incompetent foe. Additionally, 

whereas in Vietnam the nature of war evolved from an insurgency 

into a predominantly conventional confl ict, in Iraq it moved exactly-

-and quickly--in the opposite direction, from major conventional 

combat into an insurgent war. 

The nature of insurgent warfare in Vietnam and Iraq also 

differed. In Vietnam, the Communists waged a classic, peasantbased, centrally directed, three-stage, Maoist model insurgency, 

culminating in a conventional military victory. The Communists 

also had a clear and well-publicized political, economic, and social 

agenda. In Iraq, small, scattered, and disparate groups wage a much 

smaller-scale war of ambushes, assassinations, car bombings, and 

sabotage against U.S. and other coalition forces and reconstruction 

targets, including Iraqis collaborating with coalition forces. Nor do 

the insurgents have an explicit set of war aims.

U.S. war aims and freedom of military action were also much more 

limited in Vietnam than they are in Iraq. The United States sought 

only to defend South Vietnam, not overthrow North Vietnam. 

American military power in Indochina moreover was checked by 

the threat of Chinese intervention, and more broadly by the Soviet 

threat worldwide. Today, the United States enjoys uncontested 
3

global military primacy and seeks nothing less than revolutionary 

regime change in Iraq. 

In Vietnam, the United States committed a peak-strength force 

of over 500,000 troops and withdrew after 8 years of major combat 

operations that incurred 58,000 American dead and 305,000 

wounded.2 In Iraq, U.S. forces overwhelmed Iraqi military resistance 

in 3 weeks and continue to conduct operations against a small and 

manageable insurgency, all at a cost of—as of mid-April 2004—685 

dead.

From neither a strategic nor an operational standpoint does 

there appear to be any signifi cant and meaningful comparison 

between Iraq and Vietnam. The wars and the backdrop of the 

global distribution of power against which they were waged were as 

different as night and day. 

It is from the political standpoint that Vietnam may harbor some 

pertinent lessons, or at least warnings, for U.S. policymakers on 

Iraq. This seems especially the case in the areas of legitimacy and 

sustainability. The United States is now seeking to do in Iraq what 

it failed to do in South Vietnam: create and sustain an indigenous 

government and political order that the Iraqi people will accept as 

legitimate and successfully fi ght to defend. The Republic of Vietnam 

was a Cold War creation of the United States and for its brief and 

corrupt 20-year history remained utterly dependent for its survival 

on America military power and economic and technical assistance. 

As such, it was a politically attractive target to the Communists, who 

claimed that the regime in Saigon was illegitimate. In the end, there 

were simply not enough South Vietnamese who were prepared to 

fi ght, and if necessary die, to preserve the non-Communist political 

order as it was then confi gured. 

It did not help, of course, that the United States eventually 

abandoned South Vietnam to its fate, which brings us to the issue 

of sustainability. The Communist strategy of protracted war 

succeeded in part because it correctly identifi ed the American center 

of gravity as public opinion. The limited and abstract nature of U.S. 

objectives in Indochina meant that there were limits to the domestic 

political sustainability of the American war effort. Over time, the 

combination of continuing losses of blood and treasure with no 

apparent defi nitive policy progress turned public and congressional 

opinion against the war, at least as it was being conducted. This 
4

situation prompted a steady withdrawal of U.S. forces and accession 

to a negotiated settlement that effectively abandoned South Vietnam 

to its Communist foe. (The Paris Peace Accord of January 1973 

mandated the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces from South 

Vietnam, while leaving in place there over 200,000 North Vietnamese 

Army troops. Under the circumstances, it was unrealistic to expect 

South Vietnamese forces alone to accomplish what U.S. and South 

Vietnamese forces had failed to accomplish after 8 years of major 

combat operations.)

State-building in Iraq is still a work in progress, and it is 

impossible at this juncture to make conclusive judgments on the 

domestic political sustainability of U.S. policy in Iraq. Though the 

United States incurred unexpected casualties and occupation costs 

in post-Saddam Iraq, they bear no comparison with those of the 

Vietnam War. On the other hand, by virtue of the Vietnam War 

(and subsequent failed interventions in Lebanon and Somalia), U.S. 

public and congressional tolerance levels for protracted, indecisive 

confl ict are not what they were in 1965. 

This monograph seeks to identify and examine key comparisons 

between the challenges the United States faces in Iraq today and 

those it confronted in Vietnam for the purpose of offering historical 

insights to U.S. policymakers responsible for policy and operations 

in Iraq. We believe that differences between Iraq and Vietnam can be 

just as important as similarities in providing policy insights. 

The monograph assesses differences and similarities in the 

following areas: relative U.S. military power; war aims; nature, 

duration, and scale of the war; U.S. manpower loss rates; the 

enemy; military operations; pacifi cation; role of indigenous and 

international allies; challenges of state-building; and challenges of 

sustaining domestic political support. It ends with conclusions and 

recommendations.

COMPARISONS: THEN AND NOW

Relative U.S. Military Power.

Profound differences separate the global and regional military 

balances of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The balances of 1965 

signifi cantly limited U.S. freedom of military action; those of 2003, 
5

in contrast, encouraged preventive war. In 2003 the United States 

enjoyed uncontested conventional military supremacy, global in 

scope. As the sole remaining superpower and possessor of the most 

combat-effective conventional military forces on the planet, the 

United States was not militarily dependent, as it had been during 

the Cold War, on major allied force contributions. Furthermore, it 

could use force with strategic and operational impunity relative to 

the constraints America faced in Vietnam in 1965, which was a Cold 

War-driven intervention.

During the Cold War, U.S. freedom of military action was 

checked in much of Eurasia by the Soviet Union and China, the 

dominant land powers in their respective regions. Any local war 

with a lesser Communist state risked provoking escalation by 

Moscow or Beijing. Additionally, war with the Soviet Union risked 

uncontrollable escalation into a mutually suicidal nuclear exchange. 

In the case of the Vietnam War, fear of provoking direct Chinese 

and even Soviet intervention signifi cantly restrained the application 

of U.S. military power. President Lyndon Johnson, mindful of 

China’s surprise intervention in the Korean War and its disastrous 

political consequences for the Truman administration, prudently 

restricted the pace and parameters of the U.S. air war against North 

Vietnam for fear of igniting China’s entry into the war.3 Even 

absent direct Chinese or Soviet military intervention, Beijing and 

Moscow provided massive assistance that enabled the Vietnamese 

Communists to sustain military operations, modernize their forces, 

and “attrit” American will. 

In contrast, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was isolated in 2003; his 

former superpower patron had disappeared and his military forces, 

largely wrecked in 1991, had been subsequently denied access to 

modernizing technologies. Moreover, the post-1991 U.S. threats to 

support a military coup in Iraq appear to have prevented Saddam 

from training his units in urban warfare, which he seemed to view 

as regime-threatening.4 Training in general was not a priority for 

the Iraqi military, and this shortcoming quickly became apparent 

after the beginning of the U.S. invasion of 2003. Thus in 2003 

U.S. and coalition forces required less than a month to crush Iraqi 

conventional military resistance, take Baghdad, and overthrow 

Saddam Hussein.

At the regional level, the military balance between the United 
6

States and the Vietnamese Communists was not nearly so favorable 

in the 1960s. Most U.S. “general purpose” forces were tied down 

across a host of Cold War commitments outside of Southeast Asia; 

indeed, at the peak of U.S. force deployments in 1969, the U.S. Army 

withheld only one division in strategic reserve in the United States. 

The Communists benefi ted from massive Soviet, Chinese, and 

other Bloc materiel and manpower assistance, including transfers 

of highly competitive Soviet military technologies, and they had 

also perfected a style of warfare that capitalized on both their own 

strengths as well as U.S. weaknesses. Additionally, though there was 

never any question that the United States had the power to destroy 

North Vietnam, the limited scope of U.S. war aims (in contrast to the 

total war the Communists waged) and fear of escalation encouraged 

imposition of considerable restraints on the U.S. application of force. 

Moreover, by the early 1970s the war and U.S. and South Vietnamese 

military and pacifi cation initiatives had crippled (though not 

destroyed) the original insurgency in the South.

War Aims.

A major contrast between the Vietnam and Iraq wars is the 

political objectives sought. In the 1960s, the United States was the 

counter-revolutionary power in Southeast Asia; it sought to preserve 

the non-communist status quo in South Vietnam by containing the 

expansion of Communism south of the 17th Parallel that separated 

the Communist North from South Vietnam. In 2003, the United 

States was the revolutionary power in the Middle East by virtue 

of its proclaimed intention to democratize Iraq for the purpose of 

providing an inspirational model for the rest of the Arab world. In 

contrast to U.S. war aims in not only Vietnam but also in the 1991 

Gulf War, containment was rejected in favor of radical regime 

change. Democracy was not an issue in the Vietnam War. Rather, 

the United States was prepared to tolerate an absence of democracy 

in South Vietnam (and in many of its other Third World client states) 

so long as it promoted policies favorable to U.S. objectives in the 

Cold War.

The aim of regime preservation in the Vietnam War, which boiled 

down to the related but quite different challenges of pacifying 

an indigenous insurgency and coercing North Vietnam to cease 
7

its military intervention in South Vietnam, required a massive 

and protracted military effort against a determined and skilled 

foe. In contrast, the more ambitious objective of regime change 

in Iraq entailed a much smaller and shorter war to defeat Iraq’s 

conventional military forces, although the abrupt and complete 

collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime created a vacuum of political 

power which afforded regime remnants and other anti-occupation 

groups the opportunity to mount insurgent attacks on U.S. forces 

and reconstruction targets.

There were other differences in war aims. The primary declared 

objective of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was to disarm Iraq of its 

suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Such weapons were 

not an issue in the Vietnam War, which was a struggle over territory. 

Additionally, the war on Iraq was justifi ed as part of a larger war 

on terrorism that was sparked by the horrendous al-Qaeda attacks 

on the United States of September 11, 2001. Homeland security 

from external terrorist attack was not an issue in the 1960s, though 

Vietnamese Communist forces did conduct terrorist attacks against 

Americans and South Vietnamese government targets in Vietnam, 

including South Vietnam government offi cials and U.S. civilian 

personnel. Such attacks, however, were peripheral to main force 

Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military operations in the South.

Perhaps the most publicly repeated U.S. war aim in Vietnam was 

that of maintaining the credibility of U.S. defense commitments 

worldwide. As stated apocalyptically by Secretary of State Dean 

Rusk,

There can be no serious debate about the fact that we have a 

commitment to assist the South Vietnamese to resist aggression 

from the North. . . . The integrity of the U.S. commitment is 

the principal pillar of peace throughout the world. If that 

commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would 

draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly 

to a catastrophic war.5

The defense of South Vietnam, argued the Johnson administration, 

demonstrated the willingness of the United States to go to war on 

behalf of prior declared commitments to do so; failure to defend 

South Vietnam would cause other American allies to question the 

credibility of the U.S. commitment to their defense. It would also 
8

encourage communist advances elsewhere in the Third World; 

indeed, abandoning South Vietnam would, it was argued, have a 

“domino” effect in the rest of Southeast Asia, with the Communists 

toppling one government after the other in the region.

The credibility of U.S. defense commitments worldwide was not 

an issue in 2003. The Communist threat that gave rise to U.S. Cold 

War alliance system had all but disappeared, and Operation IRAQI 

FREEDOM was not a response to Iraqi aggression. On the contrary, 

it was a preventive war designed to forestall what was believed to be 

Iraq’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons and the expansion of 

a perceived Iraqi biological weapons capability. That said, the war 

did serve the purpose of demonstrating U.S. willingness to use force 

on behalf of a newly proclaimed security doctrine that embraced the 

principle of anticipatory military action against nuclear weaponsaspiring rogue states seeking a deterrent against future American 

military intervention against themselves.

Nature, Duration, and Scale of the War.

The American phase of the Vietnam War6 began as a rural, 

peasant-based, materially self-sustaining Communist insurgency 

in the South waged by the National Liberation Front (NLF) against 

U.S.-supported South Vietnamese governmental infrastructure and 

security forces, and ended up primarily as a conventional military 

clash between U.S. and North Vietnamese regular forces (the 

People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN). In contrast, Operation IRAQI 

FREEDOM began as an overwhelming U.S. conventional military 

operation that quickly crushed Iraq’s regular forces and ended up as 

counterinsurgent campaign against Ba’athist regime remnants and 

their terrorist allies. 

In Vietnam, the Communists waged a classic, centrally-directed, 

three-stage Maoist-model revolutionary war complete with territorial 

sanctuaries and a detailed political and economic program designed 

to mobilize peasant support. The Communists had a perfected 

strategy of revolutionary war, well-indoctrinated and –trained troops 

and political cadre, and a wealth of revolutionary war experience 

in the French-Indochinese War (1946-54). The Communist war in 

Vietnam also enjoyed critical external assistance. 

The insurgency in Iraq bears little resemblance to this model. 
9

Largely urban-based and relatively small in number, the Iraqi 

insurgents appear to be a mélange of former Ba’athist regime 

operatives, sympathetic Sunni Arabs (including disbanded Iraqi 

military offi cers and soldiers), al-Qaeda and other Islamist suicide 

bombers, hired gunmen and more recently militant anti-American 

Shi’ites. As such, the insurgency does not seem to be centrally 

directed the way the Vietnamese Communists were. The insurgency 

also has no declared agenda--a function probably of its disparate 

composition, though implicit in the targets of insurgent attacks is 

the aim of driving the United States out of Iraq and destabilizing 

the country, perhaps on behalf of a restoration of Sunni Arab rule. 

Indeed, until very recently, the Iraqi insurgency rested mainly on 

the minority Sunni Arab community, whose members account for 

only 20-25 percent of the population (the remainder being Kurds 

and Shi’ite Arabs). Now the insurgency has expanded (at least 

temporarily) to include militant Shi’ites, but the Iraq situation still 

stands in stark contrast to Vietnam where a class--the peasantry, 

comprising 80 percent of the total population in 1965--formed the 

indigenous manpower pool from which the Communist insurgency 

recruited its forces. 

In terms of duration of confl ict, there is also--so far--no similarity 

between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Operation IRAQI FREEDOM 

was initiated in March 2003, and U.S. counterinsurgency operations 

continue as of this writing (mid-April 2004). In Indochina, U.S.-

supported and -advised South Vietnamese counterinsurgency 

operations began in the early 1960s and steadily expanded throughout 

the decade. In 1965 the United States initiated a sustained air war 

against North Vietnam and began introducing major ground combat 

units into South Vietnam. The United States continued to conduct 

military operations in Indochina until January 1973, when it signed 

the Paris Peace Accord formally terminating further U.S. combat 

participation. Thus, for the United States the major combat phase of 

the Vietnam War lasted eight years (1965 through 1972).

The disparity between the two wars is even greater when it comes 

to scale. There is simply no comparison in forces committed and 

losses sustained. In terms of the former, U.S. military personnel 

deployed in South Vietnam peaked at 543,000 in April 1969; this force 

included nine U.S. Army and Marine Corps divisions plus selected 
10

subdivisional combat units. An additional 87,000 U.S. military 

personnel in Southeast Asia outside Vietnam supported in-country 

forces. Third country allied forces (supplied by Australia, South 

Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Thailand), including 

two South Korean divisions, deployed in South Vietnam peaked in 

late 1968 at 65,000 troops. In that same year, the South Vietnamese 

armed forces fi elded 820,000 troops (a number that grew to over one 

million by 1972).7

Communist troops in the Vietnam War, including regular PAVN 

personnel in the North and South and NLF (also known as Viet Cong, 

or VC) personnel in the South, numbered 300,000 in 1963, 700,000 in 

1966, and almost one million in 1973.8 On the eve of the strategically 

decisive Tet Offensive of 1968, Communist troops in South Vietnam 

alone, excluding self-defense militia, other part-time paramilitary, 

and political cadre, numbered between 250,000 and 300,000, of which 

84-85,000 conducted the offensive (losing in the process 45-54,000 

dead).9 By comparison, the enemy in Iraq is numerically small, with 

insurgent Sunni Arab fi ghters estimated at no more than 5,000, not 

counting individuals performing noncombat tasks and passive and 

active political sympathizers.10 Militant Shi’ites, both formally and 

loosely associated with the Muqtada al-Sadr movement and his 

Mahdi Army, may on the other hand number up to at least a few 

thousand fi ghters. It is unclear if this force will be able to exploit its 

confl ict with coalition forces to increase its numbers or instead will 

be wiped out as a result of its challenge to the coaltion.

The Vietnam War, unlike the Iraq War, also had a huge and 

protracted aerial bombing component. Indeed, air operations in 

Indochina consumed about one-half of all U.S. war expenditure and 

consisted of sustained land- and sea-based bombing operations in 

South Vietnam, over Laos, and against North Vietnam. From 1962 to 

1973, the U.S. Air Force tactical aircraft fl ew a total of almost 550,000 

combat sorties in South Vietnam alone.11 In terms of bomb tonnage 

dropped, it was the largest air war in history. During the 1962-73 

period, tonnage dropped throughout Indochina totaled almost 

8,000,000 tons, compared to the 1,235,000 tons dropped by AngloAmerican bomber forces in the European theater during World War 

II.12 (Additionally, U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam expended 

almost 7,000,000 tons of munitions compared to 3,600,000 in World 

War II.13) 
11

U.S. aircraft and air crew losses due to hostile action and accidents, 

though not in the same league as World War II, were also staggering, 

in large part because of North Vietnam’s robust and technologically 

sophisticated Soviet-supplied air defenses and the unusual 

vulnerability of helicopters in South Vietnam’s tactical settings. 

From 1962 to 1973, theater-wide U.S. aircraft losses, including 

helicopters, totaled 8,588, including 2,251 fi xed-wing planes, and 

2,700 airmen killed in action, not including helicopter crews; another 

1,800 airmen were captured and became prisoners-of-war in North 

Vietnam.14

In Iraq, U.S. air power comprised a large component of the initial 

phase of major combat operations and enjoyed two great advantages 

over U.S. air operations against Vietnam: an enemy that lacked a 

functioning air force and effective air defenses, and the availability 

of plentiful quantities of precision strike munitions that maximized 

air-to-ground effectiveness at minimal human and political cost in 

collateral damage. As in Vietnam, however, helicopters proved 

vulnerable to small arms, machine guns, and hand-held missile 

and grenade launchers. During the major combat phase of the war 

(March 20-May 1), Iraqi gunfi re downed one Apache helicopter (its 

two-man crew was captured) and struck another 30 helicopters. In 

a March 24 encounter near Karbala, Iraqi fi re prompted the ordered 

withdrawal of elements of the 11th Aviation Regiment.15

So far, during the insurgent phase of the war, enemy fi re and 

accidents have claimed a total of eight U.S. helicopters, and shoulderfi red surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) have damaged three fi xed-wing 

transport aircraft.16 Helicopter losses are likely to continue and could 

increase because Iraqi reliance on roadside bomb attacks encourages 

greater U.S. reliance on helicopters; rocket-propelled grenades 

are ubiquitous in Iraq; and it is believed that insurgent forces are 

acquiring advanced SA-16 and even SA-18 missile systems.17

U.S. Manpower Loss Rates.

During the 8 years of major U.S. combat operations in the Vietnam 

War--1965 through 1972, the United States suffered a total of 55,750 

dead and 292,000 wounded, which translate into loss rates of 6,968 

dead/36,600 wounded per year, 134/703 , 134/703 per week, and 19/100 per 
12

day.

18 These loss rates are well below those sustained in World War 

I (108 dead per day), World War II (305 per day), and the Korean 

War (48 dead per day), but considerably above those of the 1991 

Gulf War (7 dead per day) and--so far--Operation IRAQI FREEDOM 

and its aftermath (in fl ux at about 1.5 - 2.0 per day at the time of this 

writing).19

On May 1, when President George W. Bush declared the 

termination of major U.S. combat operations, U.S. military forces 

had suffered a total of 138 battle and nonbattle deaths in Iraq.20

These losses were later eclipsed by post-May 1, 2003, casualties. By 

mid-April 2004, U.S. casualties had reached 685 dead and over 3,000 

wounded.21

The issue is whether these losses in Iraq are politically sustainable 

over time, a subject discussed below. In the Vietnam War, the Tet 

Offensive, although a major military setback for the Communists, 

undermined confi dence within the Johnson administration that 

the enemy could be defeated soon and at an acceptable cost in 

American blood. Accordingly, the administration and its Nixon 

administration successor halted additional force deployments to 

Vietnam, entered into negotiations with the Communists, dropped 

insistence on withdrawal of North Vietnamese from South Vietnam 

as a component of a peace settlement, and began a series of unilateral 

U.S. troop withdrawals to reduce American casualties in Vietnam, 

which dropped dramatically from 1969 on. 

The Enemy.

The enemy in the Vietnam War was numerically impressive, but 

then so too were peak-strength U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. 

Indeed, taken together, U.S., South Vietnamese, and third-country 

allied forces considerably outnumbered Communist forces. U.S. 

forces also enjoyed, as they did in 2003 in Iraq, an immense fi repower 

advantage over the enemy. In the end, however, the United States 

abandoned South Vietnam to the Communists. Why?

The conventional explanation for U.S. defeat is that it was selfinfl icted by some combination of civilian intrusion on U.S. military 

operations, a hostile media, and a large domestic anti-war movement. 

This judgment is not necessarily wrong as it is incomplete. For one 

thing, it ignores shortcomings in the U.S. military’s performance 
13

within the political limitations imposed on the employment of force. 

More importantly, it ignores the enemy’s performance; after all, the 

Sioux had something to do with General George Armstrong Custer’s 

destruction along the Little Big Horn.22

A key to understanding the outcome of the Vietnam War as well 

as the outcome of many other confl icts in which the objectively 

weaker side prevails over the stronger (e.g., the American War of 

Independence, the Spanish guerrilla against Napoleon, the FrenchIndochinese War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan) is asymmetry of 

stakes.23 If the Vietnamese confl ict was a limited war for the United 

States, it was a total war for the Vietnamese Communists; and if 

the United States curbed the employment of its military power in 

Indochina, it grossly underestimated the “fi ghting power” (as Israeli 

military historian Martin van Creveld has used the term24) of the 

Communists, especially their willingness to die. Because the war 

was about national reunifi cation, independence, and who would 

govern Vietnam, it could never have been remotely as important 

to the United States as it was to those Vietnamese who had been 

fi ghting since 1946 to rid Vietnam of foreign rule and infl uence. And 

nowhere was the Communists’ superior will to prevail more evident 

than in the astounding casualties they were prepared to--and did--

incur.

In April 1995 the government in Hanoi announced that 

Communist forces during the “American period” of the Vietnam 

War had sustained a loss of 1,100,000 dead, a fi gure that presumably 

included the Communists’ 300,000 missing in action. (Hanoi also 

estimated 2,000,000 civilian dead.)25 The military dead represented 5 

percent of the Communist population base during the Vietnam War 

of 20,000,000 (16,000,000 in North Vietnam and 4,000,000 in those 

areas of South Vietnam effectively controlled by the Communists). 

No other major belligerent in a 20th century war sustained such a 

high military death toll proportional to its population.26 Another 

way of putting the 5 percent loss in perspective: it would equal 

about 15 million dead from the current U.S. population of almost 

300,000,000. (The 600,000 total military dead in the American Civil 

War, by far the deadliest of all of America’s wars, represented but 1.9 

percent of the nation’s 1860 population of 31,000,000.)27

Richard K. Betts comments on the effects of the “fundamental 

asymmetry on national interests” at stake in Vietnam:
14

The Vietnamese Communists were fi ghting for their country 

as well as their principles, while the Americans had only 

principles at stake--and as the antiwar case became steadily 

more persuasive, even those principles were discredited. The 

only possibility for decisive victory for the United States lay 

in the complete obliteration of North Vietnam, an alternative 

unthinkably barbaric, unimaginably dangerous, and pointless. 

Hanoi bent but never broke because it preferred endless war to 

defeat; Washington bent and fi nally did break because the public 

preferred defeat to endless war.28

The insurgent enemy in Iraq is smaller in number, less 

ideologically and organizationally cohesive, and has no counterpart 

to North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Sunni 

Arab-based portion of the insurgency appeared tough but militarily 

manageable by U.S. and growing Iraqi security forces prior to Shi’ite 

cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s uprising which, at the time of this writing, 

appears worrisome but has not actually proven its staying power. 

Most insurgencies fail, especially if denied external assistance. That 

said, the insurgency’s manageability could dramatically change if 

signifi cant segments of Iraq’s majority Shi’ite population rally to 

radical elements within their community and take up arms against 

U.S. forces. The April 2004 uprising of politically radicalized Shi’ites 

in Baghad, Kufa, Najaf, and other cities in southern Iraq killed 

dozens of U.S. troops and now threatens to open a Shi’ite front in 

what until then had been a primarily Sunni-based insurgency.29

In the early stages of the Iraqi insurgency, the most important and 

dangerous enemy elements were clearly Ba’athist regime remnants 

apparently fi ghting to restore some semblance of the old Saddamist 

order. The enemy’s identity has since seemed to be changing with 

the increasing appearance of anti-American Islamic militants in 

the struggle with coalition forces and their Iraqi collaborators. 

In January 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Deputy 

Director claimed that over 90 percent of the insurgents were 

Ba’ath Party loyalists, with the remainder being jihadists.30 This 

judgment was probably true at the time, though since then the 

jihadist component seems to have grown relative to the Ba’athist 

component. In a February 12 interview, Lieutenant General Ricardo 

Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, stated that religious 

extremists and foreign fi ghters were beginning to supplant Ba’athist 
15

remnants as the primary members of the insurgency, a judgment 

seemingly validated by growing insurgent use of suicide and other 

types of bombings.31 The Ba’athists and the Islamists may also be 

working to establish a level of operational cooperation that would 

make both groups more effective in opposing the coalition and its 

Iraqi collaborators.

The leadership of Iraq’s insurgency remains unclear. Certainly 

there is no Iraqi insurgent equivalent of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh 

or the military mastermind Vo Nguyen Giap. The insurgency’s 

continuation after Saddam Hussein’s capture on December 13, 2003, 

strongly suggests that he was not playing a major role in its direction 

before then, notwithstanding the periodic release of audiotapes of 

Saddam calling upon Iraqis to wage a holy war against coalition 

forces.

Insurgent groups associated with the Ba’athists include the Return 

Party and Mohammed’s Army. The former is known for mounting 

attacks on U.S. forces and distributing leafl ets warning Iraqis not 

to cooperate with U.S. authorities. Mohammed’s Army is a group 

apparently composed of former Iraqi intelligence and security 

agents; it has also attacked U.S. forces and issued leafl ets vowing 

to take over cities vacated by coalition forces.32 Additionally, an 

unknown number of criminals and unemployed former soldiers 

have been hired by the Ba’athists to engage in attacks on coalition 

forces for pay.

The Ba’athist insurgents may also have a large number of 

sympathizers and potential recruits among the Sunni Arab 

community in Iraq. Despite Saddam Hussein’s abysmal record on 

human rights, many Sunni Arabs regarded him as a strong protector 

of their community, and even those Sunni Arabs who disliked 

Saddam have the least to gain from a genuinely democratic Iraq in 

which the country’s Shi’ite majority, long the victim of Sunni Arab 

persecution, would exercise political power commensurate with its 

numbers. Moreover, high unemployment in the Sunni Arab areas, 

resentment over U.S. raids, the nature and scope of de-Ba’athifi cation, 

and a lack of non-Ba’athist Sunni Arab leadership (except tribal 

chieftains) all contribute to potential Sunni Arab sympathy with the 

insurgents.33

If the Ba’athists still account for most insurgent fi ghters, the 

Islamists and foreign fi ghters may be the most threatening for Iraq’s 
16

future. Saddam Hussein’s overthrow brought foreign terrorists into 

Iraq and gave them a freedom of movement that was previously 

unthinkable. Under Saddam’s regime, a pervasive and effective 

internal security apparatus blocked any serious insurgent activity, 

and 8 years of war with the Islamic Republic of Iran eliminated any 

potential sympathy Saddam might have had for Islamic extremists 

no matter how anti-American they might be. Moreover, some of 

Saddam’s most dedicated domestic enemies were Islamic radicals 

who engaged in anti-regime terrorism.

Foreign fi ghters are currently entering Iraq from Syria and Iran, 

countries that have been historic rivals. They are also believed to 

have infi ltrated from Saudi Arabia, while some have traveled from 

Yemen. Their numbers are uncertain. Most estimates by U.S. offi cials 

suggest that in early 2004 there were fewer than 1,000, with less than 

10 infi ltrating per day, though some Iraqi offi cials reportedly believe 

the total inside Iraq could be as high as several thousand.34 The 

quality of foreign fi ghters appears to vary substantially from skilled 

hard-core jihadists to restless and untrained youths.

The best known Islamist terrorist group in the country is Ansar 

al Islam (Partisans of Islam), which is predominately a Kurdish 

organization of limited appeal to Arab Iraqis, including Islamists. 

Ansar developed and fl ourished during the last years of Saddam 

Hussein’s rule in the areas of Iraqi Kurdistan along the Iranian 

border that were beyond the regime’s control. Before the Iraq War, 

Ansar was widely believed to have links to al Qaeda and to Iranian 

intelligence services. Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agents were 

sometimes also linked to Ansar as part of Saddam’s periodic efforts 

to play off Kurdish groups against one another.35

Ansar al Islam has grown stronger since Saddam’s fall. According 

to Coalition Authority Administrator Paul Bremer, hundreds of 

Ansar fi ghters returned from exile in Iran, and Ansar may be willing 

to put aside its confl ict with the Ba’ath in order to strike U.S. forces.36

It is also a natural ally for any al Qaeda operatives in Iraq.

In addition to Ansar, al Qaeda is sometimes described as having 

a signifi cant presence in Iraq, taking advantage of the political and 

security vacuum created by the abrupt and utter disintegration of 

Saddam Hussein’s regime. Evidence of this presence is scattered 

but highly plausible. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born 

terrorist leader with suspected strong ties to al Qaeda operatives, 
17

is believed to be in Iraq and is the leading suspect in all of the 

major suicide bombings that have been conducted in that country.37

Indeed, the ongoing effectiveness of suicide and other large-scale 

bombings is often viewed as strong evidence of al Qaeda or its 

affi liates conducting operations in Iraq. These attacks have targeted 

the Jordanian embassy, UN headquarters, Kurdish political parties, 

and recruiting centers for new Iraqi army and police recruits. None 

of these targets, however, are exclusively enemies of al Qaeda, 

and in some cases there are more likely enemies for such attacks. 

Nevertheless, the techniques of attack suggest Islamic extremists or 

those inspired by them.

An often overlooked insurgent component consists of individuals 

who seek personal revenge against occupation forces for previous 

actions against themselves or their families; anecdotal information 

from Iraq suggests that a number of insurgents fall into this 

category.38 They may be individuals who lost family, including 

soldiers in the war itself, or individuals offended by U.S. troops 

during the occupation. The blood vendettas of the Arabs often are 

completely unforgiving in these circumstances.

Whatever their origins or motivations, it is also clear that Iraqi 

insurgent forces are nowhere nearly as capable as the Vietnamese 

Communists of the 1960s and early 1970s. Iraqi fi ghters often 

seem to favor soft targets, whereas the Vietnamese Communists 

were willing to take on large U.S. Army and Marine Corps combat 

units. The Communists were also organized into regimental- and 

divisional-size units, whereas Iraqi fi ghters seem to operate in 

groups no larger than squads. The Communists in South Vietnam 

also had large-scale external access to increasing quantities of ever 

more sophisticated weaponry that the Iraqi insurgents can only 

dream of. That said, the Iraqi insurgents are better armed today than 

were Communist insurgents in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, 

who at that time were compelled to rely largely on stolen, captured, 

and home-made weapons. As under Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains 

a heavily-armed society with weapons and ammunition available in 

abundance throughout the country.

Finally, unlike the Vietnamese Communists, the Iraqi insurgents 

have no apparent unifying ideology, strategy, or vision of a future 

Iraq. Their operations often appear decentralized and uncoordinated, 

and if they share the objective of forcing the Americans out of Iraq, 
18

it remains unclear that they have an agreed-upon strategy for doing 

so. Simply kill enough U.S. troops to undercut domestic American 

political support for a continued military presence in Iraq? Terrorize 

Iraqis away from cooperating in Iraq’s political reconstruction? 

Foment a chaotic civil war in Iraq (complete with Iranian and 

perhaps Turkish intervention) beyond U.S. ability to control?

Military Operations.

In Vietnam, the United States waged two parallel albeit 

overlapping wars: an attritional ground war in the South and a 

coercive air war against the North. Both ultimately failed.

In the South, the U.S. Military Command, Vietnam (MACV), 

concluded that prohibition of ground force operations in Laos and 

across the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone left it no alternative to 

waging a war of attrition against Communist forces inside South 

Vietnam itself. The MACV believed that American fi repower could 

infl ict intolerable casualties on the Communists, that it could force the 

enemy beyond a “cross-over point” or “breaking point” at which he 

could no longer replace his losses. The strategy, however, ignored the 

Communists’ demonstrated tenacity and capacity for sacrifi ce as well 

as their substantial manpower pool. More importantly, the strategy 

mistakenly assumed that U.S. forces would have the initiative, more 

often than not forcing the enemy to fi ght on U.S. terms. In fact, it was 

the Communists, not the Americans, who initiated 70-80 percent of 

all fi refi ghts, which meant that they could control their losses by, 

among other things, refusing combat altogether when it suited them 

to do so.39 Observed Douglas Blaufarb:

By and large, then--and this is the essence of the [VC/PAVN’s] 

ability to survive in the teeth of American superiority--the enemy 

was able to control the pace and scope of combat and thus the 

level of combat losses by evading contact when it did not suit 

his purpose. By this means, he managed to keep losses within 

his capacity to replace them, even despite the length of his 

supply and replacement lines and his lack of mobility and heavy 

fi repower. Generally alerted in advance to American intentions, 

he avoided battle until he was ready. To him, losses--at least up to 

a high level never actually reached--did not matter, terrain did not 

matter. What mattered was to keep the force in being, its morale 
19

high, and its minimum supply requirements assured—and to 

exact a price from the Americans which in the long run would be 

felt painfully.40

Counting enemy bodies on the battlefi eld (even had the process 

not been corrupted) thus counted for nothing as a measure of 

strategic success as long as those bodies were replaceable. 

To be sure, the Communists incurred terrible losses when, as in 

their Tet Offensive of 1968 and Easter Offensive of 1972, they tried 

to take and hold fi xed positions against U.S. fi repower. But this 

behavior was exceptional. At no time did the MACV come close 

to pushing the Communists to their manpower breaking point. 

On the contrary, it was the Communists who forced to Americans 

to their manpower breaking point; by 1968, additional U.S. force 

deployments would have necessitated a massive Reserve call-up, 

which President Johnson refused to contemplate.

The attrition strategy and its attendant search for high body 

counts also encouraged a less than discriminating employment 

of fi repower in Vietnam’s rural areas that produced substantial 

levels of collateral damage that hardly endeared the peasantry to 

the South Vietnamese government. Much of the countryside was 

destroyed or otherwise rendered untenable, creating a burgeoning 

fl ow of refugees to urban areas where they found little in the way 

of housing or gainful employment. Precision-guided weapons were 

then in their infancy, to be sure; that said, however, the elevation of 

the body-count as the sole measure of battlefi eld success offered no 

incentive to be discriminating.

The air war against North Vietnam also rested on an 

underestimation of Hanoi’s will to win and capacity to absorb 

punishment. As a pre-industrial totalitarian state, North Vietnam 

was a poor candidate for defeat through air power. It was also, 

thanks largely to Soviet advice and generous military assistance, 

capable of imposing signifi cant costs on attacking American aircraft. 

Unlike Iraq in 2003, North Vietnam had a small but effective fi ghter 

interceptor force, a powerful and integrated air defense system, and 

a signifi cant capacity for rapid bomb damage repair--especially of 

its critical railroad network. Hanoi also profi ted from repeated 

U.S. bombing pauses undertaken for diplomatic reasons and, with 

respect to Operation ROLLING THUNDER (1965-68), a gradualist 
20

application of U.S. air power that permitted North Vietnam to adapt 

its defenses and tactics. U.S. air losses in North Vietnam totaled 925 

fi xed-wing aircraft from 1966 through early 1973.41

Factors other than the enemy and political constraints on the 

use of force adversely affected U.S. military performance. Aside 

from the inherent limitations of American conventional military 

power in the revolutionary war setting of Indochina, there was no 

unifi ed command of the war. Goldwater-Nichols was 20 years in 

the future. There was no joint warfare in Vietnam; on the contrary, 

inter-service rivalry dominated, producing disunity of command 

and precluding the provision of timely and useful military advice to 

civilian authority. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were joint in name only; 

they served up confl icting advice, lowest-common-denominator 

advice, or no advice at all. H. R. McMaster comments on the crucial 

decisionmaking period of mid-1964 to mid-1965:

[E]ach of the services, rather than attempt to determine the true 

nature of the war and the source of the insurgency in South 

Vietnam, assumed that it alone had the capacity to win the war. The 

Air Force believed that bombing North Vietnam and interdicting 

infi ltration routes could solve the problem of insurgency in the 

South. . . . The Army viewed increased American involvement 

in Vietnam in the context of a protracted commitment of ground 

forces and believed that bombing the North might intensify the 

war in the South. . . . [The Marines] advocate[d] bombing as only 

the fi rst step in a larger program that included the introduction of 

large numbers of Marines into South Vietnam to establish secure 

“enclaves” along the coast.42

Service parochialism was especially pronounced in the 

organization and conduct of air operations. Air operations in 

Indochina were fragmented across four commands: the Strategic 

Air Command (Omaha, Nebraska), 7th Air Force (Saigon), the 

Pacifi c Command (Honolulu), and 13th Air Force (Philippines). 

Additionally, the U.S. ambassador in Laos exercised a veto over any 

proposed air operations in that country. Air operations against North 

Vietnam were divvied up into seven “route packages,” three farmed 

out to the Air Force and four to the Navy.43 After the war, former 

7th Air Force Commander William Momyer conceded that the route 

package system “compartmentalized our air power and reduced 
21

its capabilities and inevitably prevented a unifi ed concentrated air 

effort.”44 Henry Kissinger concluded that the “bizarre way the air 

campaign was organized throughout the war told more about the 

Pentagon’s bureaucracy than about military realities; indeed, it 

showed that Washington’s organizational requirements overrode 

strategy.”45

The MACV’s manpower policies were no less debilitating to 

military effectiveness on the ground. Rotational tours of duty 

of 1 year for enlisted personnel and 3-6 months for offi cers, 

though important to morale (especially to conscripted and draftinduced “volunteers”), sapped small unit cohesion under fi re and 

compromised the ability of offi cers and men alike to accumulate and 

sustain knowledge of and skill in fi ghting the strange war in which 

Americans found themselves in Vietnam. “In and out like clockwork 

. . . just long enough to fi gure out what they didn’t know,” observed 

combat veteran David Hackworth.46 Westmoreland’s concern for 

troop morale and his reliance on massive fi repower to “attrit” the 

enemy also fostered very high ratios of support to combat troops, 

which undermined the potential military productivity of the halfmillion troops he was granted to fi ght the war. For considerations of 

morale, huge base camp facilities were constructed, complete with 

movie theaters, swimming pools, snack shops, ice cream factories, 

slot machines, steam baths, baseball diamonds, post offi ces, and 

lawns. To maximize fi repower and supporting logistics, the MACV 

authorized construction in South Vietnam of seven jet-capable 

and 75 smaller airfi elds, six deep water ports, and dozens of huge 

warehouse complexes.47 

The result was that, by 1968, no more than 80,000--or 15 percent-

-of the 536,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were actually 

available for sustained ground combat operations; indeed, less than 

10 percent of the total of 2,800,000 Americans who served in what 

was fi rst and foremost an infantry war served in line infantry units.48

Given the high fat content of U.S. forces and the relatively low 

tail-to-teeth ratio of the Communist side, the MACV was probably 

outnumbered in effective soldiers. Communist forces were leaner 

because they relied more on stealth and cunning than fi repower, 

and because they recruited hundreds of thousands of peasant 

coolies to perform logistical tasks. They also lived in the fi eld, 

as had U.S. forces in World War II and Korea. Bruce Palmer, Jr., 
22

one of Westmoreland’s deputies, believed the base-camp idea was 

even worse than the 1-year tour for enlisted men: “The manpower 

it soaked up was appalling, not to mention the waste of material 

resources and the handicap of having to defend and take care of 

these albatrosses.”49

The Vietnamese Communists, for their part, brought to the 

battlefi eld not only a superior will, but also a strategy dictated by 

their materiel inferiority and dedicated to exploiting the Americans’ 

inferior will. Revolutionary war as they practiced it was a weapon 

for the seizure of political power from a militarily superior foe; it 

was designed for insurgent groups in pre-industrial states seeking 

to overthrow foreign rule or neocolonial governments. 

Vietnamese revolutionary war, which drew heavily on Chinese 

Communist theory and practice, combined mass political 

mobilization of the peasantry and a reliance on guerrilla tactics that 

deprived a fi repower superior conventional foe of decisive targets to 

shoot at. The keys to success were elusiveness and protraction. The 

presence of a fi repower-superior enemy mandated refusal to present 

decisive targets, which in turn dictated avoidance of pitched battles, 

heavy reliance on camoufl age and night operations, hit-and-run 

attacks, and use of terrain and populations as means of concealment. 

The fact that Communist forces sometimes violated these tactics to 

their great loss simply underscores their effectiveness. Nor does 

the Communists’ turn to primary reliance on conventional military 

operations in the early 1970s invalidate the utility of revolutionary 

war as a weapon against the Americans. Communist revolutionary 

war doctrine anticipated such operations in the fi nal stage of 

confl ict. More to the point, the purpose of pre-conventional military 

operations was to weaken the enemy’s will through protraction 

of hostilities, which is exactly what the Communists succeeded in 

doing during the 3 years of major combat operations culminating in 

the Tet Offensive.

Protraction essentially pitted time against American materiel 

superiority. Protraction played, as it had against the French in 

the First Indochina War, to the inherent impatience of Western 

democracies with costly and seemingly interminable wars waged 

on behalf of interests ultimately regarded as less compelling than 

those at stake for Vietnamese Communism. For the Communists, 

there was no alternative to protraction because a swift victory over 
23

the Americans was impossible. Protraction was thus both politically 

and militarily imperative. And it worked.

In Iraq, the U.S. leadership did not seem to expect protracted 

irregular warfare beyond the termination of major combat 

operations. As liberator of all Iraqis from a brutal tyranny, U.S. 

forces, it was widely believed, would be as welcomed in Iraq as had 

been Anglo-American and Free French forces in France in 1944.50

Some argue that the prospect of guerrilla warfare was dismissed 

because, among other things, it raised the prospect of a Vietnam-like 

quagmire. Frank offi cial discussion of possible intractable postwar 

political and military challenges in Iraq would have impeded efforts 

to mobilize public support for going to war.

Insurgent attacks in Iraq have been directed at a variety of targets, 

including U.S. and coalition troops, American civilian contractors, 

Iraqis working with Americans, and oil and electrical power 

infrastructure. Moreover, just as the Viet Cong targeted South 

Vietnamese government offi cials in the 1960s, Iraqi insurgents have 

attacked members of the Interim Governing Council (assassinating 

two of them at the time of this writing), mayors and other local Iraqi 

politicians, police stations and police offi cers, and members of the 

New Iraqi Army and other security forces. 

Insurgent tactics have evolved over time as the various groups 

have engaged in trial and error. They include ambushes with small 

arms and especially rocket-propelled grenades, use of improvised 

explosive devises (IEDs), shoot-and-scoot mortar attacks, and vehicle 

and other types of bombings. IEDs are the weapons most frequently 

used against U.S. and coalition forces, while car bombs are more 

often directed against softer targets, including New Iraqi Army 

and police force units and individuals. As of early February 2004, 

almost 400 IEDs were reported to have exploded near U.S. convoys 

traveling Iraqi roads, and more than 2,500 had been discovered and 

disarmed. Many IEDs are mortar and artillery shells, some of them 

strung together, and most are very well-camoufl aged.51

Iraqi police offi cers and other security forces are special targets 

because they are viewed as successors to eventually withdrawn 

U.S. forces. They are also more vulnerable because they carry less 

lethal weaponry than U.S. troops, suffer tactical communications 

diffi culties, receive limited and hasty training in force protection, 
24

and often lack body armor and even lightly armored vehicles. 

Translators and even laundresses working for Americans are also 

targeted for the purpose of deterring other Iraqis from serving the 

Coalition Provisional Authority and U.S. forces.52

Pacifi cation.

One of the ironies of the Vietnam War is that the original southernrooted insurgency that prompted U.S. military intervention in 

the fi rst place was signifi cantly pacifi ed--though by no means 

extirpated--by the time the last major U.S. ground combat forces 

departed South Vietnam. The magnitude and destructiveness 

of U.S. intervention imposed manpower losses upon NLF forces 

that were unsustainable without increased assistance from regular 

PAVN forces. The turning point was the 1968 Tet Offensive, which 

was conducted primarily by NLF forces with PAVN units held in 

reserve (except at Khe Sanh). The NLF incurred horrendous losses 

taking and attempting to hold towns and cities against massive U.S. 

fi repower delivered with perfunctory regard for avoiding collateral 

damage. During the half-decade separating the Tet Offensive and 

the fall of Saigon, PAVN regulars--as both formed units and as 

individual fi llers in remaining NLF formations--came to dominate 

the Communist military effort. By 1972, a confl ict that had begun as 

an indigenous guerrilla war against the Saigon regime had evolved 

into a conventional military contest between the U.S. and regular 

North Vietnamese forces.

NLF manpower losses on behalf of a manifest military failure 

not only depressed recruiting but also prompted unprecedented 

defections to the Government of Vietnam (GVN) side. But the shock 

of Tet alone was not enough to pacify the insurgency. Tet initially 

disrupted pacifi cation, but it also galvanized the MACV and the 

GVN to undertake long-contemplated measures that crippled the 

insurgency by 1973 but failed to counter the burgeoning Communist 

conventional military threat. Even before the Tet Offensive, the United 

States had undertaken a complete reorganization of its pacifi cation 

efforts, which had been scattered across a host of agencies, accorded 

low priority, and lacked any unifi ed strategy. In 1967, with strong 

presidential backing, pacifi cation was granted heightened priority, 

and pacifi cation activities were centralized and coordinated under 
25

Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support 

(CORDS) headed by a civilian deputy to the MACV for pacifi cation 

and administered through interagency civil-military advisory teams 

at the national, regional, provincial, and district levels.53 The effect 

was a major boost of resources dedicated to pacifi cation and their 

much more effi cient and effective administration. CORDS provided 

advice, assistance, and training across virtually the entire portfolio of 

normal government functions, as well as such war tasks as training 

village militia and provincial paramilitary forces and funding and 

advising a national program to encourage Communist defectors and 

reintegrate them into society.

CORDS took advantage of the temporary political vacuum the 

Tet Offensive had created in the countryside to move back into the 

villages with an Accelerated Pacifi cation Program (APC) carried 

out by U.S.-advised South Vietnamese Revolutionary Development 

cadre teams supported by dedicated U.S. military operations. 

Beginning in November 1968 and continuing through the end of 

1971, the percentage of South Vietnam’s rural population under 

effective government control steadily increased, especially in the 

Mekong Delta. According to perhaps the defi nitive assessment 

of U.S. pacifi cation efforts in South Vietnam, “the APC marked 

the start of a period, roughly 1969 to early 1972, of uninterrupted 

gains in population security throughout South Vietnam and further 

erosion of the Viet Cong.”54

A major reason, aside from Tet losses, why the strength of VC 

guerrilla units dropped from 77,000 to 25,000 during the period 

January 1968 to May 197255 was the GVN’s belated decision to 

mobilize fully its available manpower for military and paramilitary 

service, which had the effect of drying up much of the manpower 

pool from which the VC recruited.56 Making matters worse for 

the guerrillas were GVN decisions to restore traditional political 

autonomy to villages (taken away by the regime Ngo Dinh Diem) 

and to create village militias (People’s Self Defense Forces). But 

perhaps the greatest blow to the VC’s political fortunes among the 

peasantry was the sweeping land reform Saigon fi nally enacted in 

1970 (the Land to the Tiller program), which redistributed 2.5 million 

acres of landlord controlled land free to approximately two-thirds 

of the tenant farmers in South Vietnam (the GVN compensated the 

landlords).57
26

Pacifi cation initiatives did not, however, destroy the VC’s 

network of political cadre in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong 

Infrastructure (VCI). Though thousands of political operatives died 

in battle and though the controversial Phoenix Program targeted the 

VCI, the VCI retained its structural integrity, albeit at substantially 

reduced strength and quality, by recruiting and training new cadre 

in South Vietnam and bringing in more from the North.58 Indeed, 

one of the very negative trends in South Vietnam during the postTet years was a signifi cant increase in VC terrorist attacks on local 

government offi cials and civilians participating in government 

pacifi cation programs, with civilian casualties in 1969 and 1970 

alone averaging 26,000.59

It is nevertheless fair to say that by the time the Paris Peace 

Accord was signed, the Viet Cong insurgent element of the war-

-as opposed to PAVN’s conventional military element--had been 

defeated to the point of being militarily peripheral, even irrelevant 

to the war’s fi nal outcome, given the PAVN’s fi nal offensive to 

come. This does not mean that South Vietnam, even had it been left 

alone by North Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accord--an impossible 

counterfactual if there ever was one, had already immunized itself 

from an existential insurgent threat. Despite genuine land reform, 

some progress toward democratic institutions, improved standards 

of living, and political stability in Saigon, pacifi cation failed to create 

a genuine political community in South Vietnam60 in large measure 

because it made no progress--it was not intended to--against the 

GVN’s greatest weakness: rampant corruption.

Pacifi cation in South Vietnam was directed against a classic, 

peasant-based, Maoist-model insurgency; as such, pacifi cation efforts 

involved signifi cant nonmilitary programs and initiatives aimed at 

swaying peasant loyalties away from the Communists and toward 

the GVN. No such insurgency or pacifi cation program exists in Iraq. 

The mélange of disparate groups that comprise the smaller and until 

recently largely Sunni Arab and urban-based insurgency in Iraq has 

no national political program, makes no pretense of competing for 

the loyalty of most Iraqis, and seems much less selective than the 

Vietnamese Communists in the use of high-collateral damage tactics 

and weaponry.

These features of the Iraqi insurgency, together with the absence 

of the kind of powerful external allies the Vietnamese Communists 
27

enjoyed, have led to an approach to pacifi cation emphasizing 

“sticks” over “carrots” when dealing with proven supporters of 

the insurgency. Because the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ended 

centuries of Sunni political domination of Iraq and its predecessor 

entities, and because the restoration of that dominance would be 

impossible in any genuinely representative new government, there 

is little in the way of political “carrots” that the Coalition Political 

Authority or its Iraqi successor could offer as a means of “pacifying” 

Sunni Arab hardliners. The “carrots” that can be offered center 

on material aid, efforts to keep Sunni Arabs employed, and more 

sweepingly a limited tolerance of Sunni militias in places such as 

Baghdad that could serve as a reassurance against bullying by a 

Shi’ite-dominated government.

Accordingly, U.S. forces have relied heavily on “sticks” in Sunni 

Arab strongholds. In an effort to break the insurgency, those forces 

have conducted numerous raids into potentially hostile areas with 

the aim of arresting suspected insurgents, fi nding documents of 

intelligence value, seizing illegal weapons and explosives--and in 

so doing, crippling the insurgency’s ability to continue attacking 

coalition forces and reconstruction targets.61

The success of raiding remains unclear. Suspects have been 

arrested, and weapons and valuable documents seized. Raids can, 

however, alienate innocent people swept up in them or offended 

by the terrifying surprise intrusion of foreign troops in private 

family settings. The employment of attack aircraft as a weapon of 

counterinsurgency in Iraq62 certainly risks the kind of overkill that 

impeded U.S. pacifi cation efforts in South Vietnam. Additionally, 

the de-Ba’athifi cation campaign in Iraq is widely viewed within the 

Sunni community as callous and excessive, going far beyond simply 

punishing the collaborators and henchmen of the Saddam Hussein 

regime.63 Within the conspiracy-minded Middle East, a variety of 

Iraqi Sunnis believe the United States favors a Shi’ite-dominated 

Iraqi government which will be a source of ongoing repression of the 

Sunni. This belief is widely held among Arab elites in neighboring 

states. Necessary U.S. efforts to reassure Iraq’s Shi’ites are often 

misinterpreted by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs as a policy of favoritism 

toward the Shi’ites.

As in Vietnam, moreover, the United States is fi nding it diffi cult 

to identify reliable measures of counterinsurgent success in Iraq. 
28

Insurgent body counts (killed and captured) are unreliable if the 

insurgency can replace its losses; the supply of suicide bombers, 

for example, seems to be inexhaustible. Additionally, given the 

predominantly urban setting of the Iraqi insurgency, territorial 

control is a more or less meaningless measure of success.

Role of Allies.

In 1965 the United States did not bother to seek U.N. authorization 

for intervention in Vietnam because of the certainty of a Soviet 

veto. In 2003, the United States sought an authorizing resolution 

but failed to garner even a majority among the U.N. Security 

Council’s membership. Indeed, in both cases, much of the rest of the 

world, including key allies, regarded U.S. military intervention as 

illegitimate, wrongheaded, or both. Not a single NATO ally joined 

the United States in Vietnam; on the contrary, notwithstanding the 

Johnson administration’s obsession with the need for international 

allies to legitimize its war in Southeast Asia, only fi ve other states 

aside from South Vietnam itself (Australia, New Zealand, the 

Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand) contributed combat troops 

to what were then called Free World Forces in Vietnam, and of the 

fi ve, only one (South Korea) contributed a substantial force (50,000 

men organized around two combat divisions).64 Moreover, the 

Korean divisions were funded and equipped entirely by the United 

States, and they were contributed to South Vietnam as a substitute 

for the redeployment of U.S. forces from South Korea to South 

Vietnam.65 

In its South Vietnamese ally, however, the United States enjoyed a 

signifi cant asset that it lacks in Iraq: large, U.S.-trained and -equipped 

indigenous army and security forces capable of shouldering static 

defense and para-police functions nationwide, thereby releasing 

U.S. combat forces for other tasks. At its peak strength, the Army 

of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), by far the largest component of 

the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF), which consisted 

of a national regular force of 13 divisions and more than a dozen 

independent elite units supplemented by separate forces maintained 

at the regional and provincial levels, numbered over 1,000,000 strong, 

or almost double peak-strength U.S. forces.66 South Vietnam also had 
29

a sizeable air force (peak strength: 39 operational squadrons) and a 

navy (672 amphibious, 450 patrol, and over 300 other vessels).67

Notwithstanding the ARVN’s numerical strength, two great 

weakness doomed it as a contestant against Vietnamese Communist 

forces both before and after U.S. major military intervention: a venal 

and professionally inferior senior offi cer corps, and a poorly trained 

and motivated soldiery. The United States decided to commit major 

combat forces to Vietnam in 1965 precisely because the ARVN was 

rapidly losing to Communist forces; a decade later, the ARVN, again 

fi ghting without assistance from U.S. combat forces, disintegrated 

in the face of the Communists’ fi nal offensive. “Vietnamization,” 

the post-Tet Offensive U.S. program to simultaneously withdraw 

U.S. forces from Vietnam and expand and modernize the ARVN, 

was destined to fail absent U.S. military reintervention in the war 

because it assumed that the ARVN could succeed where the MACV 

had failed. The ARVN nonetheless accounted for considerable 

Communist dead; if the ARVN performed poorly on the offensive, 

many units often fought effectively on the defensive (for example, 

against the Communist Tet attacks), and its capacity for sacrifi ce was 

evident in the more than 250,000 dead it sustained during the decade 

leading up North Vietnam’s fi nal offensive.68

If America’s allies in the Vietnam War were few and unimpressive 

by U.S. standards, the opposite was true for the Vietnamese 

Communists. Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, the

Communists in Vietnam had powerful and ultimately decisive allies. 

Behind the NLF in the South stood North Vietnam, and behind 

North Vietnam stood the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union 

supplied Hanoi 5-10 million metric tons of war materiel valued, 

depending on the method of calculation, between $3.6 and $11 

billion (in then-year dollars); deliveries included several hundred 

fi ghter aircraft, thousands of antiaircraft guns and fi eld artillery 

pieces, hundreds of surface-to-air missile batteries, thousands of 

tanks, helicopters, and military trucks, and huge amounts of infantry 

weapons and ammunition.69 The Soviets also sent thousands of 

technical advisers to train the Vietnamese to operate the sophisticated 

weaponry the Soviets were supplying.

For their part, the Chinese, who had provided the Vietnamese 

Communists critical artillery and other materiel assistance in 

the French-Indochinese War, also delivered huge quantities of 
30

weapons and munitions to Hanoi. Unlike the Russians, however, 

the Chinese provided over 300,000 antiaircraft and engineer 

troops who, in the face of escalating U.S. bombing, manned air 

defense systems and constructed, reconstructed, maintained, and 

defended North Vietnam’s transportation network, especially its 

railroad system.70 This assistance not only released considerable 

Vietnamese manpower for other military tasks but also underscored 

the seriousness of Beijing’s commitment to North Vietnam, which as 

we have seen was a sensitive point for President Lyndon Johnson, 

if not for his successor (who sought to engage China as a potential 

strategic partner against the Soviet Union).

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, the United States has sought international 

support both to reduce its military burden and to enhance the 

legitimacy of its policy, although it strongly resisted giving the 

United Nations a major voice in postwar Iraq policy. In Iraq, as 

in Vietnam, this effort produced disappointing results, although 

the number and variety of countries contributing forces to Iraq’s 

postwar stabilization is much more impressive than those that sent 

troops to Vietnam. In both cases, the United States bore the primary 

manpower burden of the fi ghting, although in Vietnam, unlike Iraq, 

a large indigenous force performed important static defense and 

other military tasks. 

In Iraq, invading U.S. ground forces numbered three divisions, a 

brigade combat team, and various support units for a total of more 

than 115,000 troops; the U.S. force presence in Iraq subsequently 

peaked at about 140,000 as reinforcements arrived and the mission 

shifted to stability operations. The most notable allied contribution 

came from the United Kingdom, which contributed 26,000 troops; 

Australia contributed an additional 2,000.71

Since the termination of major combat operations on May 1, 

2003, a number of other countries, for a variety of motives, some 

of them having little to do with support for U.S. policy in Iraq, 

have committed limited force contingents to assist Iraq’s postwar 

stabilization. Britain, not surprisingly, has maintained the largest 

force contingent after the United States, with 8,200 troops in Iraq as of 

March 2004.72 British-commanded multinational forces in southern 

Iraq now include contingents from Italy (2,900), the Netherlands 

(1,060), Denmark (545), Romania (514), the Czech Republic (271), 
31

Norway (129), Portugal (128), Lithuania (95), and New Zealand 

(55).73

Poland, which has 2,500 troops in Iraq, commands the southcentral sector consisting of additional troops from Spain (1,300), 

Ukraine (1,000), Bulgaria (650, including police), El Salvador (380), 

Honduras (370), Dominican Republic (250), Nicaragua (250), 

Romania (230), Philippines (178, including police and civilians), 

Mongolia (171), Latvia (106), Slovakia (85), and Kazakhstan (27).74

By late February 2004, South Korea and Japan had also agreed 

to send troops to Iraq. Approximately 900 Australian troops are 

also deployed in and around Iraq.75 Nicaragua sent 115 troops 

but withdrew them for fi nancial reasons. Additionally, Thailand, 

Hungary, Azerbaijan, Albania, Georgia, Estonia, and Macedonia 

have sent noncombat contingents ranging in size from 28 to 400 

troops.76

South Korea originally contributed 675 troops, but later agreed 

to provide another 3,000. These additional troops were scheduled 

to deploy to the northern city of Kirkuk by the end of April and 

were supposed to operate under their own command. In March 

2004, however, Seoul cancelled the planned deployment to Kirkuk 

because of questionable security in the area and concern that its 

troops would have to participate in offensive military operations. 

South Korea emphasized that it still planned to deploy these troops 

in Iraq, but that the deployment was now expected to be delayed 

until June, when a new site for deployment could be determined.77

The South Korean government continues to face strong domestic 

opposition to its military involvement in Iraq.

Japan, another major U.S. Asian ally, has sent approximately 

1,000 troops to Iraq, where they are deployed to the southern city 

of Samawah in cooperation with the British and also to Baghdad 

International Airport. Japanese public opinion, though initially 

strongly opposed to deployment, had softened by March 2004, 

though it remains unclear how the Japanese public might react to 

casualties. Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, has stated the 

he expects that casualties will generate a surge of support for the 

government, although it would seem equally possible that many 

Japanese would reconsider the wisdom of sending troops to Iraq.78

The political staying power of key allied troop contributors 

remains uncertain, however, because their troop presence in Iraq 
32

generated domestic political controversy from the start. Many 

democratic governments sent troops against the wishes of public 

majorities back home, and domestic opposition groups have 

naturally latched on to popular discontent in efforts to challenge 

sitting governments. Opposition parties in Australia, Portugal, and 

the Netherlands have demanded offi cial inquiries into governmental 

decisions to support the war, especially into what they believed 

about Iraq’s WMD before the war was launched.79 In Spain, 3 days 

after devastating al Qaeda bombings in Madrid that killed almost 

200 people on March 11, 2004, the electorate voted into offi ce a new 

government dedicated to withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq 

and repudiating its predecessor government’s unpopular strategic 

alignment with the United States. Indeed, the Madrid attacks 

underscore the homeland vulnerability of states contributing forces 

in Iraq and the potential political vulnerability of governments that, 

in following the United States into Iraq, have bucked the wishes of 

their domestic electorates.

Insurgent attacks on non-U.S. coalition forces in Iraq also may 

increase domestic political pressures on governments contributing 

contingents. Italian, Spanish, and Polish forces have already been 

attacked by car bombers. Unilateral withdrawal of several or more 

allied contingents could be a serious setback for U.S. Iraq policy 

because they usually do not draw the ire that U.S. forces do and 

because their contributing governments are not perceived to have 

imperialist agendas in Iraq. Additionally, the more “Americanized” 

the already heavily American foreign presence in Iraq becomes, 

the more likely it is that it will provoke increased Iraqi nationalist 

opposition. Some Iraqi nationalists may be drawn to the insurgent 

cause by what they view as a prolonged U.S. troop withdrawal 

and the continued absence of a new U.N. effort to take over the 

establishment of a new Iraq, The United Nations, for all of its 

shortcomings, has greater legitimacy in the Arab world than does 

the United States.

State-Building.

The Vietnam War ended as a war between two states, the northern 

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the southern Republic of 

Vietnam (RVN). Ho Chi Minh declared the former state established 
33

in September 1945, whereas the latter state was formed in 1954 on the 

basis of an antecedent French surrogate in the wake of the Geneva 

Accords that concluded the French Indochinese War and mandated 

the withdrawal of France from Indochina. Both states, separated by 

what was supposed to be a temporary dividing line along the 17th 

Parallel pending nationwide elections in 1956, claimed to be the sole 

legitimate government of all of Vietnam.

The United States supported the RVN from its inception as a 

bulwark against further Communist expansion in Southeast Asia; 

it is fair to say that but for U.S. political sponsorship and economic 

and military largesse, the anti-Communist regime of President Ngo 

Dinh Diem and his successors could have been neither created 

nor sustained. Indeed, the impending military collapse of South 

Vietnam in 1965 prompted major U.S. combat intervention, and the 

absence of that intervention a decade later doomed the U.S. Cold 

War client state.

The United States embraced state-building in South Vietnam for 2 

decades. It fostered, advised, and funded governmental institutions 

and activities across the board; it armed and trained the RVN armed 

forces (RVNAF) and security services; it fi nanced the RVN’s war 

costs and subsidized South Vietnam’s economy; and it attempted 

to guide the RVN toward adoption of democratic institutions. In the 

end, however, state-building failed. Why? The obvious answer is 

the RVN’s military defeat in 1975. But this begs the question of why 

the RVN was defeated so quickly, surprising even the Communists, 

who expected their fi nal offensive to take 2, even 3, years.80 Why did 

the RVNAF, well-equipped and numerically strong, disintegrate in 

less than 2 months, with senior offi cers fl eeing ahead of their men? 

Why did the RVNAF, which for all practical purposes was the South 

Vietnamese state by virtue of its monopoly of RVN administrative 

authority, fail to fi ght effectively for the non-Communist order it 

represented? 

It is easy to blame United States. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, 

the United States reduced its principal war aim from securing 

an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam to seeking an 

honorable withdrawal; it then proceeded unilaterally to withdraw 

its combat troops from the fi ght, and in 1973 signed a treaty 

that barred their return while leaving the NVA undisturbed 

inside South Vietnam.81 During this same period, in the name 
34

of “Vietnamization,” the United States also funded the RVNAF’s 

expansion and modernization well beyond the RVN’s capacity to 

man and maintain it. And when the fi nal Communist offensive was 

launched in 1975, the United States failed not only to re-enter the 

war but also to provide the materiel assistance (mostly replacement 

equipment, ammunition, and spare parts) Saigon desperately 

requested in the wake of the ARVN’s abandonment of massive 

weapons and equipment in its pell-mell retreat from the Central 

Highlands. 

But none of this excuses the RVN from some share--in our view, 

the primary share--of responsibility for its demise. In its life-anddeath struggle with the DRV, the RVN was crippled from the start 

by three main weaknesses that no amount of American intervention 

could offset: professional military inferiority, rampant corruption, 

and lack of political legitimacy.82 Joseph Buttinger, a renowned 

scholar of Vietnamese history and society, concluded in the wake of 

South Vietnam’s destruction that:

The swift and dramatic collapse of the South Vietnamese army 

and the Saigon regime was not the result of an overwhelming 

attack by superior military forces. It came about because of the 

degree of moral disintegration the South Vietnamese army had 

reached in 1975. This in turn refl ected the degree of moral and 

political decay to which South Vietnamese society had sunk after 

years of increasing political terror, mass misery and corruption. 

Moral disintegration alone can explain why an army three times 

the size and possessing more than fi ve times the equipment of the 

enemy could be as rapidly defeated as the ARVN was between 

March 10 and April 30, 1975.83

Cao Van Vien, the RVNAF’s last Chief of Staff, described a domino 

doomed to fall by 1975:

South Vietnam was approaching political and economic 

bankruptcy. National unity no longer existed; no one was able to 

rally the people behind the national cause. Riddled by corruption 

and sometimes ineptitude and dereliction, the government 

hardly responded to the needs of a public which had gradually 

lost confi dence in it. . . . Under these conditions, the South 

Vietnamese social fabric gradually disintegrated, infl uenced in 

part by mistrust, divisiveness, uncertainty, and defeatism until 

the whole nation appeared to resemble a rotten fruit ready to fall 

at the fi rst passing breeze.84
35

From the RVN’s inception in 1955 until its collapse 20 years 

later, its leadership failed to create a military establishment of 

suffi cient integrity and competence to give as good as it got from 

the PAVN and Viet Cong. If the RVNAF enjoyed a numerical and 

fi repower advantage over its Communist foe, it suffered--before, 

during, and after the war’s Americanization--a decided inferiority 

in the intangibles that make up genuine fi ghting power. With some 

notable exceptions, RVNAF units were poorly led and motivated, 

and in great contrast to both Communist and U.S. combat forces, did 

not seek contact with the enemy. The RVNAF was also, again with 

notable exceptions, corrupt, from the chicken-stealing private to the 

kickback-receiving province chief, and, by most accounts, thoroughly 

penetrated by Communist agents.85 A 1967 State Department 

assessment of the RVNAF concluded that it suffered from poor 

leadership, poor morale, poor relations with the population, and 

low operational capabilities including poor coordination, tactical 

rigidity, overdependence on air and artillery support arising in 

part from inadequate fi repower, overdependence on vehicular 

convoy, unwillingness to remain in the fi eld at night or over 

adequately long periods, and lack of aggressiveness.86

The conventionality of the RVNAF’s force structure, widely 

criticized as unsuited for the challenges posed by Communist 

revolutionary war, probably did not really matter in the long run. 

The effectiveness of any force structure hinges upon the professional 

ability of its offi cer corps to lead and upon the willingness of its 

soldiery to be led, and the RVNAF proved fatally defi cient in 

both respects. The RVNAF was as incapable of dealing with the 

Communists’ conventional offensive of 1975 as it was with the 

Communist insurgency of the early 1960s.

The sources of the RVNAF’s professional incapacity were evident 

to close observers of South Vietnam’s armed forces. At the center 

of that incapacity was a highly politicized and venal offi cer corps 

and a soldiery whose high desertion rates refl ected at bottom an 

understandable unwillingness to die for “leaders” who cared only 

for themselves. Both President Ngo Dinh Diem and his military 

successors elevated political loyalty over professional competence 

as the key to promotion and other rewards. Key RVNAF units 

were withheld from combat to protect the government from the 
36

ever-present threat of a coup d’etat, and generals that displayed too 

much professional skill were always regarded as potential political 

threats. Additionally, military promotions and such important 

administrative offi ces as province chieftainships were more often 

than not offered to the highest politically acceptable bidder. An 

ambitious and politically acceptable colonel, for example, would 

pay to become a province chief, a position fi nanced in turn by the 

sale of subordinate district chieftainships and the shakedown of 

local merchants.

There was also widespread theft of American military and 

economic aid. Stealing became obscenely profi table in a relatively 

small and poor country suddenly fl ooded with American wealth, 

and it was certainly easier and much safer than fi ghting the enemy, 

which, after all, the Americans in 1965 had volunteered to take care 

of anyway. Black market operations traffi cking in U.S. goods stolen 

or bribed away from vast U.S. and RVN warehouses was a major 

feature of RVNAF corruption. There was nothing that could not 

be had for the right price on the teeming black market, including 

U.S. arms, ammunition, military radios, and medicine. Communist 

agents plied the market, especially for items, such as medicines, in 

short supply among Communist fi eld forces. No wonder that the 

professional attractiveness of combat command that was paramount 

in other armies was notable for its absence in the RVNAF, where 

the lure of material gain was well-nigh irresistible. The National 

Military Academy in Dalat (South Vietnam’s West Point) graduated 

offi cers that wanted staff rather than line billets; in one 1966 class, 

every graduating offi cer expressed preference for assignment to a 

division headquarters rather than an infantry company.87

A postwar survey of exiled South Vietnamese military offi cers 

and civilian leaders revealed that “corruption was considered more 

than a problem that could have been solved by the fi ring of a few 

generals or civilians. It was regarded by many of the respondents 

as a fundamental ill that was largely responsible for the ultimate 

collapse of South Vietnam.”88 Stewart Herrington argues that 

venality was so pervasive that purging the corrupt would have 

“decimated the offi cer corps . . . . To have attempted to cut out the 

cancer would have killed the patient.”89

The ultimate corruption--and testimony to Vietnamization’s 

innate futility--was spiritual: the RVNAF’s unwillingness to seek 
37

battle with the Communists. Vietnamization armed and trained, 

but it could not create superior and combative leadership.90 The 

RVNAF undoubtedly recognized the Communists’ superior fi ghting 

power which, as Anthony James Joes correctly points out, stemmed 

in no small measure from (1) presentation of an attractive political 

program of “expel the foreigner, give the land to the peasants, and 

unite the nation,” (2) a totalitarian political system that disciplined, 

controlled, and directed society far more effectively than possible 

in South Vietnam, and (3) a “military doctrine and fi elded armed 

forces well-suited to both the aims and the territory for which they 

were fi ghting.”91 The RVNAF leadership also hoped, after 1965, and 

probably believed, that the Americans would win the war for them. 

However, even when it became apparent that the Americans were 

going to leave without having done so, the RVN, preoccupied with 

politics and rotted with corruption, proved incapable of endowing 

its offi cer corps or soldiery with the ingredients necessary to become 

competitive with the PAVN.

Lack of aggressiveness was reinforced by class antagonisms 

within the RVNAF. The rank and fi le was drawn from the 

peasantry, whereas the offi cer corps was recruited almost entirely 

from among the urban, educated, and socially advantaged strata of 

society. A greatly disproportionate number of senior offi cers were 

also Catholic--in a predominately Buddhist and animist country. 

(The legendary U.S. Army adviser John Paul Vann regarded these 

class and other differences separating the offi cer corps from the 

ranks as unbridgeable and, as such, a powerful argument for U.S. 

assumption of direct control of the RVNAF.92) The differences were 

all too often refl ected in offi cer contempt for the common soldier 

(similar to the class arrogance and callousness that separated offi cer 

from enlisted man in the pre-1914 British army), to which the latter 

predictably responded with fear, distrust, and desertion. At no time 

during the Vietnam War did South Vietnam’s senior leadership see 

fi t to provide its troops even minimally adequate pay, dependent 

housing, medical care, and rotation out of isolated and vulnerable 

outpost duty. Open physical abuse of enlisted men and even junior 

offi cers for sins real and imagined was not uncommon.

The RVNAF’s high desertion rates93 came as no surprise, nor did 

the soldiers’ propensity to supplement their meager pay through 
38

theft of foodstuffs from villages they entered by day but abandoned 

before dark. Unlike the Communist enemy it faced, the RVNAF 

lacked the two things that could have compensated for the perennial 

poverty, homesickness, and fear of death common to soldiers 

on both sides: superb discipline and a powerful and unifying 

patriotism capable of eliciting a willingness to sacrifi ce one’s life on 

behalf of a larger cause. “The South Vietnamese soldier, in the end,” 

concludes Guenter Lewy, “did not feel he was part of a political 

community worth the supreme sacrifi ce; he saw no reason to die for 

the [government]. The country lacked a political leadership which 

could inspire a sense of trust, purpose, and self-confi dence.”94

At bottom, the RVN was unsustainable because it failed to 

achieve the measure of political legitimacy necessary to compete 

with the Communists. William J. Duiker, the leading American 

historian of Vietnamese Communism, argues persuasively that 

the most important factor underlying the defeat of the RVN was 

the Communist Party’s “successful effort to persuade millions 

of Vietnamese in both North and South that it was the sole 

legitimate representative of Vietnamese nationalism and national 

independence.” This success was personifi ed in the charismatic 

Ho Chi Minh, whose public personality, “embodying the qualities 

of virtue, integrity, dedication, and revolutionary asceticism, 

transcended issues of party and ideology and came to represent . . . 

the struggle for independence and self-realization of the Vietnamese 

nation.”95

In Vietnam, anti-Communism was always burdened by its initial 

association with detested French rule (many senior RVNAF leaders 

had fought on the French side during the First Indochinese War) and 

by its antipathy to the powerful Vietnamese nationalist sentiment 

mobilized by Ho Chi Minh against both the French and their 

American successors. Additionally, as the Americans assumed ever 

greater responsibility for the anti-Communist struggle, the more 

they compromised the RVN’s claim even to a pretense of national 

legitimacy. The situation became acute with the Americanization of 

the war beginning in 1965. The deployment of over half a million 

U.S. troops to South Vietnam, observes Timothy J. Lomperis,

made it diffi cult for the Saigon government to hold on to its 

claims of traditional legitimacy, and correspondingly easy for 
39

the Communists to depict themselves as champions against 

yet another foreign intervenor and to link themselves with all 

the heroes of the past who had fought against the intrusions of 

outsiders. If the Americans thought they were very different 

from Frenchmen, they did not appear to be to the villagers.96

The anti-Communist side was simply noncompetitive.

What made the situation even worse was that the South 

Vietnamese leaders had very few claims of their own to national 

legitimacy. Although Ngo Dinh Diem was a nationalist, he did 

very little to show his sentiments during the struggle against 

the French. The subsequent leaders, Nguyen Cao Ky and 

Nguyen Van Thieu, both served in the French armed forces; 

thus, whatever sympathies they had for independence did not 

come into public view. Naturally, these facts and the presence 

of American troops redounded to the credit of the Communists. 

They also played a useful role in defl ecting attention from the 

fundamental incompatibility between Marxism and the nature of 

traditional Vietnamese legitimacy. The Communists might not 

have gotten away with this if American troops had not been so 

conspicuously present.97

An inescapable conclusion is that the RVN, sponsored and 

sustained in the wake of what was intended to be a temporary 

division of Vietnam, was little more than an artifact of U.S. Cold 

War diplomacy, and in its short life failed to achieve the political 

legitimacy necessary to survive without a powerful U.S. military 

presence. “We are so powerful that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat 

us militarily. By its own efforts, Hanoi cannot force the withdrawal 

of American forces from South Vietnam,” noted Henry Kissinger 

in 1969. “Unfortunately, our military strength has no political 

corollary; we have been unable . . . to create a political structure that 

could survive military opposition from Hanoi after we withdraw.”98 

Concludes George C. Herring, the dean of American historians of 

the Vietnam War:

Originally created by the French, the Saigon regime could 

never overcome its origins as a puppet government. Political 

fragmentation, the lack of able and farsighted leaders, and a 

tired and corrupt elite which could not adjust to the revolution 

that swept Vietnam after 1945 afforded a perilously weak basis 
40

for nationhood. Given these harsh realities, the American effort 

to create a bastion of anticommunism south of the seventeenth 

parallel was probably doomed from the start.99

In Iraq, as in South Vietnam, political success will require creation 

of (1) a government regarded as legitimate by the great majority of 

the country’s inhabitants, and (2) security forces capable of protecting 

the new political order. South Vietnam had a government, albeit a 

corrupt one, and large security forces, albeit professionally mediocre 

ones. Politically and militarily, however, it faced an exceptionally 

powerful enemy. In Iraq, the United States is starting from scratch 

because no real national government and only fl edgling security 

forces exist. Moreover, any government the United States fosters 

in Iraq will be tainted in the eyes of many Iraqis by virtue of its 

American association, especially if the security situation continues 

to require a large and highly visible U.S. military presence. On the 

other hand, Sunni Arab alienation has failed to generate a political 

and military threat to state-building in Iraq remotely approaching 

that posed by the Communists in Vietnam. The main threat to 

state-building in Iraq lies not in the insurgency in central Iraq, but 

rather in the potential for the recent uprising of Shi’ite militants to 

reignite, expand, and include large elements of that community or 

the development of the kind of sectarian civil war that plunged 

Lebanon into near anarchy for almost 2 decades.

Prospects for creating a stable, prosperous, and democratic Iraq 

are problematic, and observers and decisionmakers should not be 

mislead by false analogies to American state-building success in 

Germany and Japan after World War II.100 Among other things, 

the United States entered Germany and Japan with overwhelming 

force, precluding any postwar resistance; and in Japan, the Emperor 

Hirohito himself legitimized General Douglas MacArthur’s military 

rule. The United States was also able to maintain an internationally 

supported military presence in Japan and Germany for years during 

which democratic institutions could be created and nurtured.

In Iraq, however, the United States does not have the luxury of 

time. Many Iraqis and virtually all of Iraq’s Arab neighbors view 

the American military presence with profound suspicion; even those 

Iraqis who fear U.S. withdrawal will spark a civil war nonetheless 

distrust American motives in the region. Fueling pervasive anti-
41

Americanism in Iraq are regional media, especially Iranian and 

Gulf Arab state-based television programs. Iraqi governmental 

institutions are thus being hastily erected under extreme political 

pressure and have to be adapted and restructured in response to 

the objections of various Iraqi sectarian leaders, most notably Shi’ite 

Grand Ayatollah ‘Ali Sistani.

That said, there is probably no feasible alternative to adherence to 

the June 30, 2004, deadline for transferring sovereignty to whatever 

Iraqi political entity fi nally is established to receive it. Many leading 

Iraqi politicians have defl ected criticism of their cooperation with 

the United States by claiming that such cooperation is the best way 

to encourage an early U.S. military departure and pave the way for 

self-government. A signifi cantly delayed departure--and certainly 

a perception of a permanent U.S. military presence in the making--

would threaten those politicians’ credibility. Additionally, the more 

the United States attempts to bolster an indigenous government 

by a large and prolonged military presence, the more it is likely 

to undermine that government’s legitimacy. Clear signs of a U.S. 

withdrawal will defuse nationalist concern and provide Iraqi 

governmental and especially security institutions some political 

breathing room.

The United States nonetheless is gambling regardless of what it 

does; if a prolonged military presence threatens to delegitimize the 

new Iraqi government, a premature and abrupt withdrawal could 

create a security vacuum encouraging disorder, even civil war.

Under even the best of circumstances, fashioning genuine 

democracy in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is problematic. Since 

its creation, Iraq has known nothing but authoritarian rule and, 

under Saddam Hussein, a vicious neo-Stalinist tyranny. Though 

Iraqi regimes, like other dictatorships, embraced such democratic 

trappings as elections, parliaments, independent courts, they did so 

fraudulently for purely propaganda purposes. Thus for a democratic 

Iraq to work, Iraqis must accept the American claim that heretofore 

fraudulent institutions have been transformed into legitimate ones 

that can be trusted to deliver genuine representative government 

while protecting the rights of minorities.

Iraqis also are going to have to develop the kind of political society 

whereby contending individuals and groups can be elected to power 

without provoking fears of an existential threat among the losers. If 
42

the losers believe that the winners, once in office, will maintain power 

by extra-legal means, they may seek to ensure the safety of their own 

communities via resistance to national institutions and enhancing

their own sources of power (such as militias). Democracy means 

different things to different communities in Iraq. To the majority 

Shi’ite Arabs, democracy is often viewed solely as a majority rule, 

winner-take-all system; anything less raises fear of a resurrected 

Sunni Arab tyranny and has incited the expressed concerns of Shi’ite 

leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani. It is not clear that the Shi’ite 

leadership understands or accepts the concept of minority rights, 

rule of law, and other democratic principles unrelated to majority 

rule.

In Iraq, there are also questions about the current post-Saddam 

institutions that were created to ease the transition to democracy.

The Iraq Governing Council (IGC) is a U.S.-appointed body 

containing a number of exiles who have little or no political 

standing inside Iraq and who, many Iraqis fear, can be manipulated 

by foreign interests. The IGC has also run afoul of the lower-level 

but more democratic councils selected with strong local support 

and legitimacy, portending future conflict between popular local 

councils and an unpopular national government. Additionally, the 

IGC and other Iraqi institutions have been called upon to function 

in a security environment dominated by the ever-present threat of 

assassination of themselves and their families.

Problems with the IGC, however, may soon be dwarfed 

by difficulties with a new government created under Iraq’s 

controversial “Transitional Administrative Law” (TAL) or 

“interim Constitution” and the still unresolved efforts to create 

conditions under which elections can be held in Iraq.

101 The TAL 

emerged only after fierce disagreement and continues to enjoy only 

the most conditional support by those Iraqis who tolerate it at all.102

Key issues addressed by the TAL but still subject to dispute include 

the structure of government, the role of Islam in public life, Kurdish 

autonomy, and the nature of federalism.

Under the TAL, executive power is to be concentrated in a threeperson executive council composed of a president and two deputy 

presidents. The president is widely expected to be a Shi’ite Arab, 

with a Sunni Arab and a Kurd serving as deputy presidents. All 

three executives must agree on any policy initiative before it is 
43

undertaken. The unanimity rule offers the minority Sunni and 

Kurdish communities some protection, but Shi’ite leaders are livid 

about a system of governance which they believe cheats them of 

their rightful (majoritarian) leadership of the country. Additionally, 

much to the anger of the Shi’ites, the TAL grants three predominantly 

Kurdish provinces the right to reject a future permanent Constitution. 

According to the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the most respected Shi’ite 

leader in the country, “This constitution that gives the presidency in 

Iraq to a three-member council, a Kurd, a Sunni Arab, and a Shi’ite 

Arab, enshrines sectarianism and ethnicity in the future political 

system in the country.”103 Sistani has warned UN offi cials that he 

will refrain from working with them should they do anything to 

bolster the legitimacy of the interim Constitution.104

Disagreements over election-related issues also have been serious. 

Initial U.S. plans for regional caucuses (involving indirect elections) 

to produce a transitional government were strongly opposed by the 

Shi’ite religious leadership, including Sistani, and consequently had 

to be cancelled. An alternative to caucuses has yet to be developed, 

but the Shi’tes have made it very clear that they will not accept any 

solution, including indirect elections and weighted voting, other 

than “one person, one vote.”

The Kurds, however, are unlikely to accept the Shi’ite demand 

for absolute majority rule because historically they were victimized 

by a strong central government in Baghdad and because they 

have enjoyed virtual political autonomy since the end of the Gulf 

War 1991. Accordingly, the Kurds favor a weak, even paralyzed, 

central government; they seek to preserve as much of their post1991 autonomy as they can, as well as to claim as much of Iraq’s 

oil resources and revenues as they can for their own region. The 

Kurds remain thoroughly alienated from the Iraqi state and have a 

powerful sense of nationhood.105 Many young Kurds no longer even 

learn Arabic in the schools in the Kurdish autonomous areas.

Sunni Arabs are likewise concerned about a new power sharing 

arrangement based on majority rule. In the aftermath of the U.S. deBa’athifi cation campaign, Sunnis are widely reported to feel a strong 

sense of uncertainty, fear, and persecution. Some assert that deBa’athifi cation aims to prepare the country for a Shi’ite leadership 

dependent on the United States.106 Many Sunnis are certain that 

the United States has given up on them and is conspiring with the 
44

Shi’ite Arabs to do them in politically, a view that manifestly fuels 

insurgent violence against U.S. forces.

Ironically, the development of democratic institutions in Iraq is 

likely to stimulate formation of political parties based on ethic and 

sectarian allegiances that would simply magnify the sharp divisions 

within Iraqi society. As experience in other developing countries 

shows, sectarian political parties seldom have a stake in political 

moderation because they appeal for support within the same 

ethnic group by articulating the demands of their community at the 

expense of seeking broad support on a transcommunal basis. In so 

doing, they often attempt to outbid each other in their assertiveness 

in claiming a larger share of political power for their own group. 

In such an environment, compromising leaders can be tarred as 

“sellouts” and the election of a radical party from one sectarian 

community can provoke the rise of radical leadership in other 

communities, thus sparking a cycle virtually guaranteed to produce 

violent intercommunal confrontation and the disintegration of any 

pretense of democracy.107

Even assuming success in the creation of a stable government 

commanding the loyalty or at least the passive acquiescence of most 

Iraqis, the new state will still need army and security forces capable 

protecting it from internal and external threats. It is certainly in the 

interest of the United States as well as any new Iraqi government 

to transfer military and police functions now being shouldered by 

the United States as quickly as feasible to indigenous institutions. 

As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has stated, referring 

to U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, “foreign forces are unnatural. 

They ought not to be in a country.”108 The “Iraqization” of security 

functions now being performed by U.S. forces and the concomitant 

withdrawal of those forces are likely to bolster the legitimacy of any 

new Iraq government, provided that the new forces can operate 

without extensive and visible support from U.S. troops remaining in 

the country after the turnover of sovereignty to Iraqis scheduled for 

June 30, 2004. The United States plans to organize, train, and equip 

over 200,000 Iraqi security personnel as part of this effort.109

But those forces must be effective. The CPA’s mid-May 2003 

decision, for reasons not well-explained, to disband the entire Iraqi 

regular army with but a month’s pay is now widely regarded as a 

mistake. According to one source:
45

The dismissal of [Iraqi offi cers] treated them as an extension of 

Saddam and the Ba’ath’s rule . . . rather than as patriots who had 

fought for their country. It also added several hundred thousand 

men to the labor pool when there were virtually no jobs, and it 

effectively told all offi cers of the rank of colonel and above that 

they had no future in a post-Saddam environment. At the same 

time, it implied to all Iraqis that the new Iraq Army might be 

so weak that Iraq would remain little more than a client of the 

United States and Britain in the face of the threat from Iran and 

possible future intervention by Turkey.110

The decision was not reversed, nor have selective recalls been 

implemented; instead, the New Iraqi Army (NIA) is being created 

from scratch. The New Iraqi Army is the third name given to the 

force. The fi rst was the “New Iraqi Corps,” but the acronym for this 

sounds like an Arab expletive. “Iraqi Defense Forces” was then tried 

but discarded because its acronym is identical to that of the Israeli 

Defense Forces.

Though the primary mission of the NIA is protection of Iraq from 

external attack, as opposed to providing internal security, this mission 

seems to have been set aside, at least temporarily, because of urgent 

counterinsurgency requirements in the so-called Sunni triangle area. 

Indeed, some NIA troops were placed in the most dangerous Sunni 

areas shortly after they completed their training.111

Early planning behind the NIA rested on the apparent assumption 

that Iraq could initially satisfy its security needs with a small, 40,000-

man army composed primarily of light infantry (compared to the 

350,000-man heavy-and-light army that Iraq had at the beginning of 

the war.)112 The NIA was to be created over a 3-year period, although 

this schedule was subsequently reduced to 2 years because of the 

ongoing lack of security in central Iraq. The new schedule calls for 

an NIA of 12,000 by July 2004 and the full 40,000 by mid-2005.113 A 

larger NIA is also being considered. However, the fi rst NIA battalion 

crumbled when up to one-half of its members deserted because of 

inadequate pay and risky combat assignments in the Sunni Triangle; 

some said they could make better money by cooperating with the 

insurgents in killing U.S. troops.114 Pay was subsequently raised and 

conditions were improved.

Two other major problems with the NIA have caused yet additional 
46

disincentives to join it: insurgent attacks on recruiting stations, and 

the NIA’s lack of all but small arms. The latter, especially given the 

insurgency’s near monopoly of the tactical initiative vis-à-vis the 

NIA, places the NIA at a considerable combat disadvantage.

Police units are another especially important element in the effort 

to create and maintain security because their primary mission is 

internal security. Not surprisingly, police force units have attracted 

repeated insurgent attacks, and there are reports that the police may 

have been infi ltrated by some insurgent elements.115 By April 2004, 

at least 350 Iraqi police offi cers had been killed in confrontations 

with insurgents.116 One estimate even suggested that the number 

was 632.117 Moreover, in a disturbing April 2004 development, a 

number of Iraqi police units abandoned their posts rather than resist 

poorly-trained militiamen loyal to Muqtada al Sadr.118 

In addition to the NIA and the police, new Iraqi security forces 

include the Iraqi Border Guard (IBG), Iraqi facility protection 

units, and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC). The ICDC is 

the most important of these three forces because its mission is 

counterinsurgency, which it is expected to perform without the 

presence of coalition forces. 

The ICDC, whose necessity, like the insurgency itself, was not 

anticipated before the war, was created in July 2003 in response to the 

insurgency and began operations in August.119 Efforts to organize, 

train, and equip the ICDC, originally designed as a temporary force 

(to be disbanded once the insurgency ended), lagged behind those of 

the NIA and police. As expected with any new Iraqi force, the ICDC 

has a mixed record and depends heavily on U.S. advice, training, and 

money, though it is considered an emerging success by CENTCOM 

and Defense Department offi cials.120

The Iraq Civil Defense Corps has some clear advantages within 

Iraqi society. Many of its members strongly and credibly claim they 

are fi ghting for the protection of their local community and are not 

supporters of either the coalition presence or the U.S.-supported 

Iraqi government.121 Moreover, in many areas, especially in small 

towns and rural places, Iraqis have joined the ICDC with the 

approval and support of the local tribal leadership, thus legitimizing 

their membership in the ICDC as well as their performance of its 

counter-insurgent mission. Finally, as a local defense force, the 

ICDC, whose units take only 3 weeks to train, has advantages in 

gathering intelligence.
47

How the Iraqi security forces stand in the eyes of the citizens 

they are charged with protecting is not clear, although anecdotal 

information suggests that they are dimly viewed by some clergy 

and many Sunni Arabs. It is in any event diffi cult to build new 

security forces accepted as legitimate in the absence of an actual 

Iraqi government regarded as such. And Iraqi security forces well 

may wonder what will happen to them when U.S. forces depart. In 

a worrisome potential precedent, some ICDC units deserted their 

posts during the Muqtada al Sadr uprising.122

The alternatives to U.S.-sponsored security institutions in Iraq 

are communal militias. If Iraqis come to lack confi dence in the NIA 

and ICDC, they will look to such militias for protection. Though 

the United States rightly regards Iraq’s “militia-ization” as a recipe 

for civil war, and has sought to demobilize existing militias and 

thwart the formation of new ones, armed Iraqi communities have 

little incentive to strip themselves of means of protection. Various 

groups are reportedly stockpiling and hiding weapons even as they 

publicly claim to be moving toward demobilization. Moreover, 

many political groups are seeking to place as many of their own 

members as possible in the new Iraqi security institutions. Should 

sectarian strife erupt, these institutions will likely dissolve into armed 

factions, and given Iraq’s strong sectarianism and as yet weak élan 

of the new Iraqi security institutions, loyalty to one’s community 

almost certainly will trump fi delity to those institutions.123

Domestic Political Sustainability.

The American war effort in Vietnam failed because it became 

unsustainable at home. Though the United States was militarily 

unbeatable in Vietnam, it lacked the political stakes in the war that 

the Communists had. In the end, the Vietnam War boiled down to 

a contest of political wills, and the Communists had the stronger. 

Secretary of State Dean Rusk acknowledged after the war that “I 

made two mistakes with respect to Vietnam. First, I overestimated 

the patience of the American people, and second, I underestimated 

the tenacity of the North Vietnamese.”124 General Vo Nguyen Giap, 

who led Communist forces against the French and later became 

North Vietnam’s minister of defense, told journalist Stanley Karnow 

in 1990 that 
48

We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American 

troops, but that wasn’t our aim. Our intention was to break 

the will of the American Government to continue the war. 

Westmoreland was wrong to expect that his superior fi repower 

would grind us down. If we had [attempted to pit our material 

inferiority directly against your superiority], we would have been 

defeated in 2 hours.125

The turning point was the Tet Offensive, a military defeat for the 

Communists but a political shock for the United States. Tet, for all 

to see, popped the balloon of offi cial optimism on the war. For the 

preceding half-year, Johnson administration spokesmen, in a White 

House orchestrated campaign, declared that the corner had been 

turned in Vietnam, that the Communists were in permanent retreat, 

and that the end of the war was in sight. The size and savagery 

of the Communist assault, which infl icted the highest weekly and 

monthly U.S. manpower loss rates of the war, belied these claims 

and suggested the prospect of an endless military stalemate, of more 

and more American bloodshed without convincing progress toward 

the declared U.S. objective of a Communist-free South Vietnam.126 

Large public and congressional majorities, as well as editorial 

opinion of such mainstream liberal newspapers as the Washington 

Post and New York Times, supported U.S. military intervention in 

the Vietnam War, and support for staying the course in Vietnam 

remained strong, notwithstanding rising casualties and a growing 

domestic anti-war movement, as long as the United States seemed, 

however slowly, to be winning the war in a reasonable amount 

of time.127 Underlying this support were high levels of trust in 

the competence and integrity of the U.S. Government, especially 

on matters of war and peace, a trust that diminished as the war 

continued, and opposition to the war within America’s opinionmaking elite increased. By March 1969, a year after the Tet Offensive 

and 4 years after the deployment of U.S. ground combat forces to 

Vietnam, U.S. battle deaths equaled those of the highly unpopular 

3-year Korean War, and nearly two out of three Americans polled 

said they would have opposed U.S. entry into the Vietnam War had 

they known what it would cost in American lives.128

Studies of the Vietnam and other American wars of the 20th century 

reveal that, contrary to the post-Vietnam War conventional wisdom 
49

that profound casualty aversion dominates all other considerations 

in determining war and peace decisions, most Americans are 

infl uenced by such pragmatic considerations as the perceived stakes 

at hand and benefi ts of intervention, chances of success, possible 

and actual costs, alterations in initial and subsequent expectations, 

and elite opinion.129 U.S. political and military leaders may have 

convinced themselves that the American public is intolerant of 

casualties;130 in fact, however, “support for U.S. military operations 

and the willingness to tolerate casualties are based upon a sensible 

weighing of benefi ts and costs that is infl uenced heavily by consensus 

(or its absence) among political leaders.”131 Writing on the matter of 

casualties 2 decades after the fall of Saigon but with the Vietnam 

War clearly in mind, Richard K. Betts observed: 

There is no clear evidence that Americans will not tolerate many 

body bags in the course of intervention where vital interests are 

not at stake. What is crucial for maintaining public support is not 

casualties per se, but casualties in an inconclusive war, casualties 

that the public sees as being suffered indefi nitely, for no clear, 

good, or achievable purpose.132

This was certainly the situation that confronted the Nixon 

administration when it took offi ce in 1969, and accounts in large 

measure for the administration’s decision to eliminate conscription 

and to launch a unilateral, incremental withdrawal of U.S. forces 

from that country absent any political concessions from the 

Communists.133 From April 1969 to December 1972, U.S. military 

personnel in Vietnam dropped from 543,000 to 24,000, with battle 

dead during the same years falling from 9,377 to 300.134 The 

strength of the domestic political imperative was evident in Nixon’s 

determination to proceed with a unilateral pullout even though he 

clearly understood that a shrinking U.S. force presence reduced his 

bargaining leverage with the Communists.

In Iraq by mid-April 2004, U.S. military dead (due to hostile action 

and accidents) totaled 685, with over 3,000 additional American 

troops wounded. Most of these casualties were incurred after 

President Bush declared the termination of major combat operations 

on May 1, 2003; that phase of the war cost the United States only 138 

dead and 550 wounded.135 After May 1, 2003, casualties fl uctuated 
50

from month to month, rising to 82 dead in November then dropping 

to 22 dead in February 2004, then rising again to 92 dead in just the 

fi rst half of April. Future losses are unpredictable. Much will depend 

on the general security situation in Iraq, U.S. military adaptability to 

changing enemy tactics, and the degree to which expanding Iraqi 

security forces can and will assume functions currently performed 

by U.S. military forces. The planned transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis 

on June 30, 2004, is intended to reduce U.S. loss rates, although this 

increasingly appears unlikely.

Additionally, American casualties incurred in Iraq may have less 

domestic political salience than those of the Vietnam War, which 

was waged largely by conscripts and draft-induced “volunteers.” 

Though the inequitable draft system enabled most college students 

to avoid military service, many opponents of the war, including 

collegiate protestors, were politicized by fear of and anger over 

conscription. Today, without conscription, fewer Americans feel 

their lives and futures are directly threatened by the confl ict in Iraq 

than was the case during the Vietnam War. The situation may make 

the confl ict more sustainable to the general public by removing an 

important personal element from the calculation of nonvolunteers 

and their families and friends, although it threatens to reduce the 

number of volunteers should the war become bloodier.

Yet even reduced casualties may not guarantee sustainability in 

Iraq. In the Vietnam War, casualties were not the only war cost that 

undermined public support. Other costs included increased taxes, 

infl ation, diminished investment in popular domestic programs, 

rising elite dissensus over the war, political turmoil at home, disdain 

for South Vietnam as a worthy ally, and a growing “credibility gap” 

between offi cial and unoffi cial portrayals of what was going on in 

Vietnam. However, as a 1985 Rand Corporation study pointed out, 

casualties “are the most visible and least tolerable cost imposed 

by direct U.S. combat involvement in sustained limited wars. 

Mounting casualties tend over time to undermine public support 

for limited wars, and in addition serve as a lightning rod for public 

dissatisfaction with other issues.”136 Robert Komer, who directed 

the pacifi cation program in Vietnam, told a Rand Corporation 

interviewer after the war that:
51

The most obvious and immediate cost is the cost of casualties. 

The death notices in the newspapers and so forth. Remember 

what it costs you in blood is much more politically visible than 

what it costs you in treasures . . . . Casualties become a problem 

because they are cumulative. You spend a lot of money, but then 

you have another appropriation the following fi scal and the year 

after that. But casualties mount up, and they have a psychological 

and political impact over time.137

Other studies support casualties as the primary barometer of 

American public support (or lack of support) for limited wars, which 

are often prolonged and waged in faraway places, with military 

restraint, and on behalf of abstract objectives.138 It is widely believed 

that democracies in general have great diffi culty prosecuting 

protracted wars for limited objectives. Such wars are, as was 

Vietnam, wars of choice rather than wars of necessity, which engage 

existential interests. Vietnam certainly deviated from the preferred 

American way of war. Americans have not been comfortable with 

limited wars because they tend to separate war and politics, believing 

that war is a substitute for, rather than an extension of, politics. 

Once the shooting begins, and regardless of political objective, so 

the thinking goes, the aim should be the enemy’s total military 

defeat. The “unconditional surrender” formula of Ulysses S. Grant 

and Franklin D. Roosevelt has been the ideal, not the compromise 

Korean War armistice or the hesitant gradualism that many still 

believe led to America’s defeat in Vietnam.139

The question of whether the Iraq War of 2003 was a war of necessity 

is one of several key factors bearing on the political sustainability of 

the ongoing U.S. effort to create a stable, prosperous, and democratic 

Iraq. Another key factor will be Americans’ judgments on the war’s 

ongoing costs as weighed against perceived gains. If the Iraq War 

comes to be seen as a war of choice rather than a war of necessity, then 

its costs may require compensation by some additional measure of 

national security gain, such as the as yet unrealized and increasingly 

unlikely recession of Arab radicalism and a wider acceptance of the 

United States in the Middle East.

In the absence of national security gains, Americans may feel 

comforted by such humanitarian gains as the overthrow of Saddam 

Hussein’s monstrous regime. But Americans could become very 

impatient should the rationale for a continuing and costly U.S. 
52

occupation of Iraq shift to a more direct focus on uplifting the Iraqi 

people, especially if the Iraq public appears ungrateful and turns 

hostile. 

To date, there is no evidence that U.S. casualty rates in Iraq, which 

are a fraction of those incurred in Vietnam, have generated suffi cient 

public sentiment to evacuate Iraq or even reduce U.S. objectives in 

that country. Nor, unlike the Vietnam War, has the Iraq War and 

its aftermath caused infl ation and prompted increased taxes; on 

the contrary, infl ation has been minimal and tax relief has been the 

order of the day. Nor has there been any disruptive antiwar turmoil 

in the streets (which during the Vietnam War was fueled in part by 

conscription) or effective congressional check on administration Iraq 

policy.

On the other hand, public and congressional tolerance for 

casualties may have dropped by virtue of failure to fi nd any 

WMD in Iraq or to uncover any convincing evidence of a prewar 

operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, to say nothing 

of Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, U.S. taxpayer costs 

in Iraq, together with tax cuts and other factors, are contributing to 

unprecedented annual federal defi cits and a cumulative national 

debt that could have perilous economic consequences in the long 

run.

Prewar portrayals of a “grave and gathering” threat posed by 

Saddam Hussein to the United States and its overseas interests 

convinced many that preventive war against Iraq was a necessity-

-and therefore worth considerable risk and loss. But the postwar 

defl ation of that portrayal suggests that Operation IRAQI FREEDOM 

was a war of choice and as such, like Vietnam, a war bounded by 

signifi cant limits on public tolerance of risk and loss. Reinforcing these 

limits are the unexpected diffi culties and costs the United States has 

encountered in Iraq since the President declared the termination of 

major combat operations in that country. Prewar assertions that U.S. 

forces would be universally welcomed as liberators inside Iraq, that 

U.S. occupation authorities would inherit functioning government 

infrastructure capable of providing essential government services 

pending the restoration of sovereignty, and that Iraq’s restored oil 

revenues would fi nance its economic reconstruction all foundered on 

the rocks of Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. forces and reconstruction 

targets, Iraq’s administrative disintegration, and the discovery that 
53

Iraq’s oil, power, and water infrastructure was crippled far beyond 

expectation.140

Yet the long-term effect on public opinion of these disparities 

between expectations and realities remains to be seen. The U.S. 

death toll in Iraq is low by the standards of past major wars, and 

most Americans in a presidential election year are preoccupied with 

other matters. A mid-December 2003 CNN/USA Today/Gallup 

poll revealed that 61 percent of Americans polled believed that the 

situation in Iraq was worth going to war for (v. a negative response 

of 35 percent), and that 53 percent believed Saddam was personally 

involved of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United 

States (v. 42 percent). Sixty-fi ve percent of those polled expressed 

approval of the way the United States was handling the situation in 

Iraq since the termination of major U.S. combat operations there (v. 

34 percent).141 These numbers suggest that most Americans at the 

end of 2003 still regarded the Iraq War as a war of necessity and so 

far worth the cost in blood and treasure.

Polls taken in the fi rst three months of 2004, however, registered 

a signifi cant decline in public support. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup 

poll taken January 29 to February 1 revealed that only 49 percent 

of those polled believed that it “was worth going to war in Iraq,” 

and that 43 percent believed that the “administration deliberately 

misled the American public about whether Iraq [had] weapons of 

mass destruction.” The same poll also found that only 46 percent 

approved of the way the administration “is handling the situation 

in Iraq.”142 This decline in public support was confi rmed in two 

subsequent March polls by the Washington Post-ABC News and the 

Wall Street Journal-NBC News.143 A Gallup Poll taken in early April 

revealed that only 50 percent of the American public believed that it 

was “worth going to war” in Iraq (47 percent said it was not worth 

going to war), and that 64 percent believed that things were “going 

moderately badly, or very badly” in Iraq (only 34 percent believed 

things were going “very well or moderately well.”)144

As of mid-April 2004, the scope and costs of the U.S. 

counterinsurgency war in Iraq appeared politically sustainable, 

until problems in the Shi’ite areas raised new questions about the 

possibility of a wider war. The Iraqi insurgency, at this point, 

nevertheless bears no comparison in terms of size, ideological appeal, 

and political base to the Communist challenge we faced in Vietnam. 
54

This could change, however, if the insurgency were to expand in a 

sustained and meaningful way to Iraq’s majority Shi’ites or if the 

Iraqi state were violently to disintegrate into its constituent sectarian 

parts. In either of these circumstances--a national liberation war 

against a detested occupier or Iraq’s “Lebanonization”--it would 

be extremely diffi cult for the United States to maintain its military 

position, to say nothing of its political objectives, in that country.

A major determinant of the course of events in Iraq will be 

Iraqi responses to the U.S. transfer of sovereignty to an as yet 

undetermined Iraqi political entity, scheduled for June 30. Will that 

entity command suffi cient legitimacy and security forces to lead 

Iraq into stable and popular governance, or will it prove too weak to 

survive the eruption of centrifugal political forces inside Iraq?

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Though policymakers instinctively turn to what they think history 

teaches about what to do, or not do, in a given foreign policy situation, 

reasoning by historical analogy is an inherently risky business. No two 

historical situations are identical, and policymakers’ knowledge of 

history is often poor. Policymakers are, in any event, predisposed to 

embrace analogies, however faulty, that support preferred policy.143

Thus proponents of the Iraq War embraced the Munich analogy (and 

the success of U.S. state-building in Japan and Germany), whereas 

opponents of war warned of another Vietnam. Operation IRAQI 

FREEDOM achieved the “Munich” objective of eliminating a regime 

that proponents believed posed a gathering threat to the United 

States. Yet satisfaction of that objective simply confronted the 

United States with the unexpectedly costly and diffi cult challenges 

of state-building in circumstances of ongoing insurgent violence that 

some were prepared to label a Vietnam-like quagmire.

2. The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and overthrow the Saddam Hussein 

regime cannot be repealed. As in Vietnam in 1965, U.S. power and 

prestige have been massively committed in Iraq, and it is incumbent 

upon the United States try its best to leave behind in Iraq a “better 

peace” than it found there, even if that means reconsidering some 

ambitious U.S. objectives in Iraq. What if, for example, the United 

States is forced to choose between stability and democracy in that 
55

volatile country? Many experts believe that genuine democracy lies 

beyond the power and patience of the United States to create in Iraq. 

If so, both Americans and Iraqis might have to settle for some form 

of benign quasi-authoritarian rule along the lines of Kemal Ataturk’s 

Turkey, Anwar Sadat’s Egypt, and King Hussein’s Jordan, perhaps 

as a prolonged transition to more representative governance. 

However, under no circumstances--other than the descent of Iraq 

into uncontrollable civil war--should the United States abandon Iraq 

as it did South Vietnam in 1975. Indeed, abandonment would seem 

a near-guarantee of civil war, which could be a worse state of affairs 

for the average Iraqi than even the Stalinist tyranny of Saddam 

Hussein.146

3. Policymakers must recognize that the differences between Iraq 

and Vietnam greatly outweigh the similarities, especially in the military 

dimensions of the two confl icts. That said, it would be a mistake 

to underestimate Iraqi insurgents as the United States did the 

Vietnamese Communists in Indochina. After all, the very appearance 

of an insurgency after the termination of major U.S. combat 

operations surprised many. Moreover, though the nature, size, and 

appeal of the Iraqi insurgency bears no comparison to its Vietnamese 

Communist counterpart (except in so far as both insurgencies are 

expressions of irregular warfare), the Iraqi insurgency has so far and 

with increasing skill attacked targets that are key to Iraq’s successful 

reconstruction. Dismissing the insurgents as “terrorists” and “deadenders” overlooks the potentially dangerous downstream political 

consequences of establishing a large American force presence in 

an Arab heartland and attempting to transform Iraq into a proWestern democracy. It was not expected that the minority Sunni 

Arab community would welcome a post-Saddam Iraq in which it 

no longer enjoyed a monopoly of power; but neither was it expected 

that U.S. postwar policies in Iraq would alienate many Shi’ites--

some of them to the point of armed resistance, raising the prospect 

of a two-front insurgency.

4. Policymakers must also recognize and understand the two most 

instructive dimensions of the Vietnam analogy for the current situation in 

Iraq: the challenges of state-building, and the need to maintain suffi cient 

domestic political support. On these two matters, the lessons of 

Vietnam need to be studied. State-building in Iraq could fail for the 

same principal reason it failed in South Vietnam: inability to create a 
56

political order commanding popular legitimacy. Nor should openended domestic political support be taken for granted. The late 

President Richard Nixon once remarked: “When a president sends 

American troops off to war, a hidden timer starts to run. He has a 

fi nite period of time to win the war before the people grow weary 

of it.”147 As of this writing, the U.S. forces have just entered their 

second year in Iraq. If one were to follow the Vietnam War analogy, 

U.S. forces are in the spring of 1966--still 2 years away from the Tet 

Offensive, and almost 7 years away from the fi nal U.S. military 

withdrawal from the confl ict. However, the decisionmakers of 1965 

could take for granted more sustainable levels of public support 

precisely because they did not, in contrast to the decisionmakers 

of 2003, have the cautionary experience of the Vietnam War behind 

them.

5. Policymakers also should not take for granted the absence of hostile 

external state intervention in Iraq. The absence of a North Vietnam 

analog in Iraq could change, depending on the course of events. 

For example, Iran, which has strong state and theocratic interests in 

Iraq that have so far been well-served by the U.S. destruction of the 

Saddam Hussein regime and the subsequent disorder in Iraq that 

has tied down U.S. ground forces that might otherwise have been 

available to threaten regime change in Teheran, is well-positioned 

to sponsor accelerated chaos in Iraq.148 Iran has no interest in the 

resurrection of a powerful Iraq, and certainly not a democratic, 

pro-Western Iraq, and it has enough Revolutionary Guards and 

intelligence operatives to “get tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites on 

the streets to protest the U.S. occupation.”149

AFTERWORD

In closing this analysis, it is important to recognize perhaps the 

most important difference between the Vietnam War and the current 

confl ict in Iraq: the former is a fi nished event, whereas the latter is 

an event in progress. We know what happened to Vietnam and U.S. 

policy there in the 1960s and 1970s; in contrast, the ultimate fate of 

Iraq and U.S. policy objectives in that country remains to be seen. 

Accordingly, some judgments on the differences and similarities 

between Iraq and Vietnam are necessarily tentative and could 
57

change as events unfold. This analysis is a snapshot of the apparent 

differences and similarities between Iraq and Vietnam taken in the 

spring of 2004.

ENDNOTES

1. Commentary on the Iraq War and its aftermath bulges with favorable and 

unfavorable references to the Vietnam War analogy. See, for example, Robert 

L. Bartley, “Iraq: Another Vietnam?” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2003; 

Elizabeth Becker, “In the Ranks, Similarities Between Vietnam and Iraq,” New 

York Times, November 2, 2003; Max Boot, “Forget Vietnam—History Defl ates 

Guerrilla Mystique,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2003; Robert J. Caldwell, “Iraq is 

No Vietnam,” San Diego Union-Tribune, November 9, 2003; Hank Cole, “Iraq War 

Bears Resemblance to U.S. Efforts in Vietnam,” Colorado Springs Gazette, December 

9, 2003; “Facts Fail to Support Iraq-Vietnam Comparisons,” USA Today, November 

7, 2003; Howard Fineman, “Echoes of Vietnam Grow Louder,” Newsweek, October 

29, 2003; David Gelernter, “Don’t Quit as We Did in Vietnam,” Los Angeles Times, 

November 9, 2003; David Gergen, “The Fierce Urgency of Iraq,” U.S. News and World 

Report, October 13, 2003; Bradley Graham, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam Quagmire? 

No and Yes,” Washington Post, October 5, 2003; Richard Haloran, “Vietnam 

Syndrome Resurfaces in Iraq,” Honolulu Advertiser Honolulu Advertiser, February 15, 2004; Victor Davis , February 15, 2004; Victor Davis 

Hanson, “Then and Now,” National Review, December 8, 2003; Seymour M. Hersh, 

“Moving Targets,” New Yorker New Yorker, December 15, 2003; John Hughes, “Why Iraq is , December 15, 2003; John Hughes, “Why Iraq is 

Not Like Vietnam,” Christian Science Monitor Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 2003; Michael Ignatieff, , August 27, 2003; Michael Ignatieff, 

“The American Empire (Get Used to It),” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 

2003; Robert G. Kaiser, “Iraq Isn’t Vietnam, But They Rhyme,” Washington Post, 

December 28, 2003; James Kitfi eld, “No, It’s Not Vietnam,” National Journal, 

November 22, 2003; Stanley Karnow, “Do Not Compare Iraq with Vietnam,” 

Boston Globe, April 20, 2003; Richard Leiby, “Iraq Vs. Vietnam: The Scorecard,” 

Washington Post, March 21, 2004; Gordon Livingston, “Iraq’s Chilling Echoes 

of Vietnam,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2003; Sandra Mackey, The 

Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 

396; John Maggs, “Too Much Like Vietnam,” National Journal, November 22, 2003; 

Michael Mandelbaum, “Iraq Doesn’t Fit Vietnam Picture,” Long Island Newsday, 

October 31, 2003; Dave Moniz, “Monthly Costs of Iraq, Afghan Wars Approach 

that of Vietnam,” USA Today, September 8, 2003; Dave Moniz, “Some Veterans 

of Vietnam See Iraq Parallel in Lack of Candor,” USA Today, November 7, 2003; 

Walter Pincus, “A Quagmire? More Like a Presidential Fixation,” Washington Post, 

August 31, 2003; James P. Pinkerton, “Bush’s War Strategy Looks Like a Steal of 

Nixon,” Long Island Newsday, November 18, 2003; Thomas E. Ricks, “For Vietnam 

Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory,” Washington Post, December 

23, 2003; Thomas E. Ricks, “Marines to offer New Tactics in Iraq,” Washington Post, 

January 7, 2004; Sally Satel, “Returning from Iraq, Still Fighting Vietnam,” New 

York Times, March 5, 2004; Evan Thomas, Rod Nordlinger, and Christian Caryl, 
58

“Operation Hearts and Minds,” Newsweek, December 29, 2003-January 5, 2004; 

Mike Turner, “The Only Way Out is Forward,” Newsweek, September 12, 2003; 

Craig R. Whitney, “Tunnel Vision: Watching Iraq, and Seeing Vietnam,” New York 

Times, November 9, 2003; George C. Wilson, “Beware a Phoenix Rising from Iraq’s 

Ashes,” National Journal, December 20, 2003; and George C. Wilson, “Iraq in Not 

Vietnam,” National Journal, April 12, 2003.

2. Harry G. Summers, Jr., Vietnam War Almanac, New York: Facts on File 

Publications, 1985, p. 113.

3. See John W, Garver, “The Chinese Threat and the Vietnam War,” Parameters, 

Spring 1992, pp. 73-85.

4. Stephen Biddle, et al., “Iraq and the Future of Warfare,” Testimony Before the 

House Armed Services Committee in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: An Outside 

Perspective, Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. House of 

Representatives, One Hundred Eighth Congress, First Session, October 2003.

5. Quoted in Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in 

Vietnam, New York: W. W. Norton, 1982, p. 92.

6. The 35-year struggle for an independent, unifi ed, and Communist Vietnam 

began with the 1946-54 French-Indochinese War and ended with the fall of South 

Vietnam in 1975. In 1955 the United States displaced the French in South Vietnam 

and 10 years later began major combat operations in Indochina which were 

terminated in 1973. 

7. Shelby Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, Washington, DC: U.S. News Books, 

1981, p. 333; David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War, New York: 

Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 286, 287, 288.

8. Spencer C. Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, 

and Military History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 453; Victory in 

Vietnam: The Offi cial History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975, Merle L. 

Pribbenow, trans., Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002, p. 431.

9. See Victory in Vietnam, op. cit., p. 211; James W. McCoy , p. 211; James W. McCoy, Secrets of the Viet Cong, , Secrets of the Viet Cong,

New York: Hippocrene Books, 1992, pp. 360-361; James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: 

Intelligence Failure and War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 247-251; 

Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975, Novato, CA: Presidio 

Press, 1988, p. 475; and Tucker, op. cit., p. 396. 

10. “Live Video Teleconference with General Abizaid,” U.S. Department of 

Defense News Transcript, November 13, 2003, www.dod.mil.transcripts. 
59

11. Phillip S. Meilinger, Air Power: Myths and Facts, Maxwell AFB, AL; Air 

University Press, December 2003, p. 78.

12. Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Crosswinds: The Air Force’s Setup in Vietnam, College 

Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1993, p. xv; Mark Clodfelter, The Limits 

of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam, New York: Free Press, 1989, 

p. 8.

13. Anderson, op. cit., p. 201.

14. Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam, Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1998, p. 119. For greater detail on helicopter and fi xed-wing 

aircraft operations and losses, see Tucker, op. cit., pp. 165-169; Raphael Littaeur 

and Norman Uphoff, eds., The Air War in Indochina, Revised ed., Boston: Beacon 

Press, 1972.

15. Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons, 

Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2002, p. 318.

16. “U.S. Helicopter Down in Iraq,” BBC News Online, January 23, 2004; David 

A Fulghum, “SAMS Threaten,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, February 2, 

2004, p. 43.

17. Fulghum, op. cit., p. 43.

18. Figures calculated from data appearing in Summers, op. cit., p. 113; 

Anderson, op. cit., p. 290. Dead include nonbattle deaths from accidents and other 

causes.

19. Figures include battle and nonbattle deaths, and for all but the Iraq War are 

calculated from casualty data appearing in Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed 

Confl icts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500-2000, Second ed., 

Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2002, pp. 481, 584, 659, and 735. 

The daily dead number for the Gulf War includes nonbattle deaths (151) incurred 

during Operation DESERT SHIELD.

20. Cordesman, op. cit., p. 238.

21. Reuters, “U.S. Toll in Iraq at 645,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2004, internet 

and Associated Press, “A Look at U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq,” New York Times 

on the Web, March 22, 2004; and Tom quitieri, “Rumsford Says Recent Losses Not 

Forseen,” USA Today, April 16, 2004.

22. Americans, including the U.S. military, have a tendency to explain the 

success or failure of American arms on the basis of what the United States did or 

did not do. This narcissism often undervalues what the enemy did or did not do.
60

23. See Andrew Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of 

Asymmetric Confl ict,” World Politics, Vol. 27, 1975, pp. 176-220.

24. Fighting power consists of “the moral, intellectual, and organizational 

dimensions” of military power as manifested is such things as “discipline and 

cohesion, morale and initiative, courage and toughness, the willingness to fi ght 

and the readiness, if necessary, to die.” Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: 

German and American Military Performance, 1939-1945, Westport, CT: Greenwood 

Press, 1982, p. 3.

25. Tucker, op. cit., p. 64.

26. See Record, op. cit., pp. 36-37; John E. Mueller, “The Search for the ‘Breaking 

Point’ in Vietnam: The Statistics of a Deadly Quarrel,” International Studies 

Quarterly, December 1980, pp. 507-511.

27. Record, op. cit., p. 37.

28. Richard K. Betts, “Interests, Burdens, and Persistence: Asymmetries Between 

Washington and Hanoi,” International Studies Quarterly, December 1980, p. 523.

29. Anthony Shadid and Sewell Chan, “Protests Unleashed by Cleric Mark a 

New Front in War,” Washington Post, April 5, 2004; Karl Vick and Saad Sarhan, 

“Eight U.S. Troops Killed in Shi’ite Uprising,” Washington Post, April 5, 2004; 

Jeffrey Gettleman, “A Young Radical’s Anti-US Wrath is Unleashed,” New 

York Times, April 5, 2004; Rod Nordland, Melinda Liu, and Scott Johnson, “The 

Dark Road Ahead,” Newsweek, April 12, 2004, http://ebird.afi s.osd.mil/ebfi les/

20040405272720.html.

30. Dana Priest, “The CIA’s Anonymous Number 2,” Washington Post, January 

9, 2004.

31. Yochi J. Dreazen, “Iraq Bombings Underscore Security Challenge,” Wall 

Street Journal, February 12, 2004.

32. Jim Krane, “U.S. Has Murky Picture of Iraqi Resistance,” Associated Press 

on line, February 15, 2004; “Insurgents Threaten to Take Over Cities When Troops 

Leave,” USA Today, February 5, 2004.

33. “Battling for Iraq’s Future,” Middle East International, January 9, 2004, p. 4; 

Danna Harman, “Baathists Need Not Apply,” Christian Science Monitor, May 28, , May 28, 

2003.

34. Joshua Hammer, “Holding the Line,” Newsweek, February 16, 2004, p. 33; 

Jackie Calmes, “Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Few But Lethal,” Wall Street Journal, 

February 12, 2004.
61

35. Jim Muir, “’Al Qaeda’ Infl uence Grows in Iraq,” BBC News, July 24, 2003.

36. “U.S. Warns of More Iraqi Attacks,” BBC News, August 10, 2003.

37. Edward Wong, “Up to 80 Killed at Bomb Blast at 2 Iraqi Sites,” New York 

Times, February 11, 2004.

38. Coauthor (W. Andrew Terrill) interviews with U.S. Army offi cers returning 

from Iraq.

39. Record, op. cit., pp. 81-82.

40. Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 

1950 to the Present, New York: Free Press, 1977, p. 252.

41. Clodfelter, op. cit., p. 776.

42. H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 

pp. 143-144.

43. See Jeffrey Record, “How America’s Own Military Performance in Vietnam 

Aided and Abetted the ‘North’s’ Victory”; Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., Why the North 

Won the Vietnam War, New York: Palgrave, 2003, pp. 121-123. 

44. William W. Momyer, Air Power in Three Wars, Washington, DC: Offi ce of 

History, U.S. Air Force, 1978, p. 95.

45. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years, Boston: Little, Brown, and 

Company, 1979, p. 1112.

46. David Hackworth and Julie Sherman, About Face, The Odyssey of an American 

Warrior, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, p. 534.

47. Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year of the War, New York: Free , New York: Free 

Press, 1993, p. 79.

48. Shelby Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in 

Vietnam, 1965-1973, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985, p. 23; Ronald H. Spector, 

op. cit., p. 43; James R. Ebert, A Life in a Year: The American Infantryman in Vietnam, 

1965-1972, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993, p. 1; Thomas C. Thayer, War Without 

Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985, p. 

94.

49. Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam,

Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984, p. 69.
62

50. Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in a March 11, 2003, speech to the 

Veterans of Foreign Wars, declared: “The people of Iraq understand what this 

crisis is about . . . Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their 

hoped-for liberator.” Less than a week later, Vice President Richard Cheney told 

NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the 

standpoint of the American people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as 

liberators.” Both quoted in Susan Page, “Prewar Predictions Coming Back to Bite,” 

USA Today, April 1, 2003. After the war, Wolfowitz conceded that “It was diffi cult 

to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who 

have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fi ghting . . . what has been sometimes 

called a guerrilla war.” Quoted in Matt Kelley, “Pentagon’s Wolfowitz Admits 

U.S. Erred in Iraq,” Associated Press, July 24, 2003.

51. Daniel Williams, “U.S. Team Hunts Lethal Low-Tech Insurgency,” 

Washington Post, February 5, 2004.

52. Alissa J. Rubin, “Strikes at ‘Collaborators’ Sow Fear But Not Flight,” Los 

Angeles Times, February 12, 2004.

53. Blaufarb, op. cit., pp. 221-242.

54. Richard A. Hunt, Pacifi cation: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and 

Minds, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995, p. 204.

55. Tucker, op. cit., p. 315.

56. Blaufarb, op. cit., p. 263; Hunt, op. cit., pp. 253-255.

57. Ibid., pp. 266-267; Tucker, op. cit., p. 219.

58. Hunt, op. cit., pp. 247-251; Blaufarb, op. cit., pp. 270-271.

59. Hunt., op. cit., pp. 217-220.

60. Ibid., pp. 267-268.

61. Jeff Wilkenson, “U.S. Raids ‘A Work in Progress’,” Miami Herald, November 

24, 2003.

62. “U.S. Forces Pound Iraqi Insurgents,” BBC News Online, November 18, 

2003.

63. Barbara Plett, “Fighting for Hearts of Iraq Sunnis,” BBC News, March 16, 

2004. Internet.
63

64. Stanton, op. cit., p. 333; Tucker, op. cit., pp. 214-215.

65. Stanley Robert Larsen and James Lawton Collins, Jr., Allied Participation in 

Vietnam, Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1975, pp. 124-145.

66. Tucker, op. cit., pp. 459-460.

67. Ibid., pp. 458-459, 462-463.

68. Anderson, op. cit., p. 290.

69. Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance, Boulder, 

CO: Westview Press, 1987, 1987, pp. 199-123. Also see Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet 

Union and the Vietnam War, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996, pp. 58-64.

70. Chen Jian, “China’s Involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964-1969,” The China 

Quarterly, June 1995, pp. 378-380. During 1964-69, a total of 320,000 Chinese troops 

served in North Vietnam; the deployment peaked in 1967 at 170,000. Also see 

Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975, Chapel Hill, NC: University of 

North Carolina Press, 2000.

71. Cordesman, op. cit., pp. 37-40.

72. Paul Richter, “Bush Urges Resolve on Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 

2004.

73. Numbers are current as of November 2003. See “Foreign Forces in Iraq,” 

Middle East International, November 21, 2003, p. 8; Vernon Loeb, “20,000 Allied 

Troops to Aid U.S. Effort to Stabilize Iraq,” Washington Post, June 19, 2003.

74. Ibid., and “Poland Pledges to Keep Troops in Iraq,” London Financial Times, 

March 17, 2004.

75. “Australia May Keep Troops in Sovereign Iraq,” Jordan Times, March 24, 

2004.

76. Freddy Cuevas, “Troops from Honduras to Leave Iraq on Time,” Miami 

Herald, March 17, 2004.

77. See Arirang TV Report, “Launching Ceremony of Korean Troops to be 

Dispatched to Iraq Will Be Held on February 23,” as cited by Foreign Broadcast 

Information Service (hereafter FBIS), February 15, 2004; Ryu Jin, “Korean Troops 

to Head for Iraq April 7,” Korean Times, March 9, 2004; “U.S. Allies Reconsider Iraq 

Mission,” BBC News Online, March 19, 2004.
64

78. “Kyodo: Japan, Britain Agree on Greater UN Iraq Involvement,” Tokyo 

Kyodo World Service, February 13, 2004, as cited by FBIS, February 13, 2004; 

“Sending Japan Troops to Iraq Historic Mistake,” Jordan Times, February 13, 204; 

David Polling, “Death of Japanese Troops in Iraq ‘Would Spur Reform’,” London 

Financial Times, March 3, 2004.

79. David R. Sands, “U.S. Allies Pressured to Justify War Support,” Washington 

Times, February 17, 2004.

80. See Ang Cheng Guan, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists’ 

Perspective, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp. 150-165; Van Tien Dung, Our 

Great Spring Victory: An Account of the Liberation of South Vietnam, John Spragens, 

Jr., trans., New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977, pp. 6-25.

81. The departure of U.S. combat forces left about 550,000 South Vietnamese 

regulars and 525,000 territorials to face a PAVN estimated at 500,000-600,000 

troops, about 220,000 of which were in South Vietnam. Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice 

and Support: The Final Years, The U.S. Army in Vietnam, Washington, DC: Center of 

Military History, U.S. Army, 1988, p. 495.

82. See Record, op. cit., pp. 122-140.

83. Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy, New York: Horizon 

Press, 1977, p. 148.

84. Vao Van Vien, The Final Collapse, Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of 

Military History, 1983, p. 155.

85. See, for example, Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men--Four Who Dared: The 

Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995, p. 328.

86. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States 

Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. 4, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, pp. 398-399.

87. Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers: American Generals Refl ect on Vietnam, 

New York: Da Capo Press, 1977, p. 97.

88. Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, and Brian M. Jenkins, The Fall of South 

Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders, Santa Monica, CA: 

Rand Corporation, 1978, p. 31.

89. Stuart A. Herrington, Peace With Honor? An American Reports on Vietnam, 

1973-1975, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1983, p. 40.

90. See Clarke, op. cit., pp. 341-359. 
65

91. Anthony James Joes, The War for South Vietnam, 1954-1975, Rev. Ed., 

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, pp. 150-151.

92. Eric M. Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The War in Hau Nghia Province, 

Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 1991, p. 81.

93. See Clarke, op. cit., pp. 42-42, 112, 114-116, 216, 314, 331, 345-346, 348, 363, 

385-388, 408.

94. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, New York: Oxford University Press, 

1978, p. 218.

95. William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Second ed., 

Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 1996, pp. 350, 359.

96. Timothy J. Lomperis, The War Everyone Lost--and Won: America’s Intervention 

in Viet Nam’s Twin Struggles, Rev. Ed., Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly 

Press, 1993, p. 160.

97. Ibid., p. 160.

98. Henry A. Kissinger, “The Vietnam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 47, 

1969, p. 230.

99. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 

1950-1975, Third ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 298.

100. See Jeffrey Record, Dark Victory, America’s Second War with Iraq, Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003, pp. 87-91.

101. “Text: Iraqi Interim Constitution,” BBC News, March 8, 2004, internet.

102. Dexter Filkins, “Iraqis Receive U.S. Approval of Constitution,” New York 

Times, March 2, 2004.

103. Quoted in Matthew Clark, “Sistani Says Iraq Constitution a ‘Dead End’,” 

Christian Science Monitor, March 23, 2004.

104. Anthony Shadid and Colum Lynch, “Shi’ite Cleric Threatens to Shun U.N. 

Envoys in Iraq,” Washington Post, March 23, 2004.

105. Michael M. Gunter, “The Kurdish Question in Perspective, World Affairs, 

Vol. 166, No. 4, Spring 2004, pp. 201-204.

106. Barbara Plett, “”Fighting for Hearts of Iraqi Sunnis,” BBC News, March 16, 

2004, internet.
66

107. See Andreas Wimmer, “Democracy and Ethno-Religious Confl ict in Iraq,” 

Survival, Winter 2003-04, pp. 11-134.

108. Quoted in Reuters, December 6, 2003.

109. International Crisis Group, Iraq: Building a New Security Structure, 

Baghdad/Brussels, IGC Middle East Report No. 20, December 2003, pp. 1-22; 

T. Christian Miler, “Coalition to Reopen Bidding for Iraqi Military Contract, Los 

Angeles Times, February 28, 2004, internet.

110. Cordesman, op. cit., 554. Also see Record, Dark Victory, op. cit., pp. 141-

142.

111. International Crisis Group, “Iraq: Building a New Security Structure,” ICG 

Middle East Report, No. 20, p. 15.

112. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “U.S. to Form New Iraqi Army,” Washington Post, 

April 13, 2003; Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S.-British Project: To Build a Postwar Iraqi 

Armed Force of 40,000 Soldiers in Three Years,” New York Times, June 24, 3003.

113. “U.S. to Begin Recruiting for New Army,” Washington Post, November 5, 

2003.

114. Christine Spolar, “Iraqi Soldiers Deserting New Army,” Chicago Tribune, 

December 9, 2003.

115. Rowan Scarborough, “Colonel in Iraq Refuses to Resign,” Washington 

Times, October 31, 2003.

116. Associated Press, “U.S. Military Expects Attacks on Iraqi Policemen to 

Escalate,” Baltimore Sun, March 26, 2004.

117. Rod Nordland, Melinda Liu, and Scott Johnson, “The Dark Road Ahead,” 

Newsweek, April 12, 2004, p. 30.

118. Christine Hauser, “Ready or Not Help from New Iraqi Forces is Vital U.S. 

Military Says,” New York Times, April 12, 2004, internet.

119. Major General Martin Dempsey, “Coalition Provisional Authority 

Briefi ng on Ongoing Operations of Task Force 1st Armored Division and Iraqi 

Civil Defense Corps in Baghdad,” U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, 

February 2, 2004, internet.

120. Theola Labbe, “Iraq’s New Military Taking Shape,” Washington Post, 

September 16, 2003; Bradley Graham, “Touring Iraq, Rumsfeld Gets Upbeat 

Assessment,” Washington Post, December 7, 2003; “Rumsfeld Lauds Performance 
67

of Iraqi Security Forces,” U.S. Department of State Bureau of International 

Information Programs, October 21, 2003, internet.

121. Greg Jaffe, “Iraqis Struggle with Tough Job: Fighting Insurgents,” Wall 

Street Journal, February 24, 2004.

122. Michael R. Gordon, “Iraq Insurgency Spreads, U.S. Finds More Foes and 

Fewer Friends,” New York Times, April 9, 2004, internet.

123. See W. Andrew Terrill, Nationalism Sectarianism, and the Future of PostSaddam Iraq, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, July 

2003.

124. Dean Rusk, with Richard Rusk and Daniel S. Papp, As I Saw It, New York: 

W. W. Norton, 1990, p. 497.

125. Stanley Karnow, “Giap Remembers,” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 

1990, p. 36.

126. See Record, op. cit., pp. 54-56; Joes, op. cit., pp. 101-104; Duiker, op. cit., pp. 

295-297; Lomperis, op. cit., pp. 76-80; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the 

United States, and the Modern Historical Experience, New York: W. W. Norton, 1985, 

pp. 334-337.

127. See John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion, New York: John 

Wiley and Sons, 1973, pp. 52-58; Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The 

Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations, Santa 

Monica, CA; Rand Corporation, 1996, pp. 59-66.

128. Larson, op. cit., pp. 27-29.

129. See Mueller, op. cit.; Larson, op. cit.; Lorell and Kelley, op. cit., and Benjamin 

C. Schwarz, Casualties, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Intervention: Implications 

for U.S. Regional Strategies, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1994. Also see 

discussion in Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American 

Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 2003, pp. 95-148; Richard A. Lacquement, Jr., “The Casualty Aversion 

Myth,” Naval War College Review, Winter 2004, pp. 38-57; John A. Gentry, “Military 

Force in an Age of National Cowardice,” Washington Quarterly, Autumn 1998, pp. 

179-191; Jeffrey Record, “Force Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and 

(?) Solutions,” Aerospace Power Journal, Summer 2000, pp. 4-11.

130. See Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, “Casualty Aversion: How Many 

Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer,” Washington Post, November 7, 

1999.
68

131. Larson, op. cit., p. 15.

132. Richard K. Betts, “What Will It Take to Deter the United States?” Parameters, 

Winter 1995-96, p. 76.

133. Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, Lawrence, KS: University Press of 

Kansas, 1998, pp. 72-74.

134. Anderson, op. cit., pp. 286, 290.

135. CNN.com, “Special Report, War in Iraq: U.S. and Coalition Casualties,” 

Internet.

136. Lorrell and Kelley, op. cit., p. 6.

137. Quoted in Ibid., p. 80.

138. See Mueller, op. cit., Jeffrey S. Milstein, Dynamics of the Vietnam War: A 

Quantitative Analysis and Predictive Computer Simulation, Columbus, OH: Ohio 

State University Press, 1974; Samuel Kernell, “Explaining Presidential Popularity; 

How Ad Hoc Theorizing, Misplaced Emphasis, and Insuffi cient Care in Measuring 

One’s Variables Refuted Common Sense and Led Conventional Wisdom Down 

the Path of Anomalies,” American Political Science Review, June 1978, pp. 503-519.

139. For a recent exposition of this view by a prominent historian and 

neoconservative commentator, see Victor Davis Hanson, “The Utility of War,” 

Quarterly Journal of Military History, Winter 2003, pp. 1-15. Also See Russell 

Weigley, The American Way of War, op. cit.

140. See Record, Dark Victory, op. cit., pp. 199-123; Purdum, op. cit., pp. 231-233.

141. Frank Newport, “Approval for Handling of War in Iraq Jumps, Little 

Change in Basic Support for U.S. Involvement in War,” The Gallup Poll Tuesday 

Briefi ng, December 19, 2003, pp. 25-27.

142. “American Public Opinion About the Situation in Iraq,” February 3, 2004, 

http://www.gallup.com/poll/focus/sr030610.asp. 

143. Richard Morin and Dana Milbank, “Support for Bush Falls on Economy 

and Iraq,” Washington Post, March 9, 2004; John Harwood, “Economic Fears May 

Threaten Bush’s Job,” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2004.

144. “American Public Opinion About Iraq,” The Gallup Organization, April 

13, 2004, http://www.gallup.com/pool/focus/sr030610.asp.
69

145. See Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and 

Presidential Uses of from Korea to Kosovo, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 

2002.

146. See Anthony Cordesman, “The Facts We Must Face,” Washington Post, 

April 4, 2004.

147. Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams, New York: Avon Books, 1985, p. 88.

148. See David Ignatius, “What Iran Wants in Iraq,” Washington Post, February 

27, 2004.

149. Ibid.