Vietnam Lessons That Really Apply in Iraq

In his Dec. 29 op-ed column, "Three Lessons From Vietnam," Dale Andrade made no allowance for the overall historical and political context of the wars in Vietnam or Iraq.

Three lessons of Vietnam that apply with greater salience to Iraq are these:

First, just as the war in Vietnam was not the result of a monolithic Soviet drive to establish an empire extending from Moscow to Beijing to New Delhi, the war in Iraq is not the result of any monolithic effort to establish a radical Islamic empire. The logic employed in the 1960s -- that we must fight in Vietnam so we don't have to fight in California -- is the same logic President Bush uses when he says we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them at home.

Second, falsehoods were used to justify both the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents, contrary to the assertions of then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, were not unprovoked acts of aggression by the North Vietnamese; Saddam Hussein, contrary to Vice President Cheney's assertion, had not reconstituted Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

Last and most fundamental, as with Vietnam, the war in Iraq is a political rather than a military battle. Victory will depend more on winning "hearts and minds," however difficult or unrealistic that may be, than on "search and destroy" or "pacification" missions, or whatever the term is for such operations today.

MATTHEW W. CLOUD

Washington

While discussing the successful use of territorial forces in Vietnam, Dale Andrade didn't mention that because those forces were locally recruited, they knew the neighborhood and hence had organic intelligence on the enemy.