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Vietnam and Iraq: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
On the panel were Theodore Sorenson, left, an adviser to President Kennedy; Jack Valenti, from the LBJ White House; and former secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger and Alexander M. Haig Jr.
(By Lisa Poole -- Associated Press)
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"We didn't lose Vietnam," said Haig, sitting next to Kissinger. "We quit Vietnam."
And there were flashes of the strong emotions that Vietnam still brings up. One audience member's question, submitted anonymously and read by the moderator, NBC news anchor Brian Williams, told the panelists, "You policymakers ripped the heart and soul out of . . . American families."
Another question asked Kissinger, who remains a lightning rod because of the Nixon administration's secret bombing of Cambodia, if he felt he had anything to apologize for.
"This is not the occasion for this sort of a question," Kissinger said. Later, though, Kissinger detailed the rationale behind the bombings, and told the audience, "I have no regrets" about his time in government.
For all the debates about Vietnam, there was one thing that most every speaker agreed on. "The sorry odor of the same aromas that we found in Vietnam" can be detected in Iraq today, Valenti said.
Sometimes, there were echoes of Iraq in references to Vietnam. Young said President Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, rejected intelligence reports that contradicted his belief that Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh was no more than a pawn of the Soviet Union.
"Acheson told them to keep looking, in a model of the use of intelligence with which we've become familiar," Young said in an oblique reference to criticisms that President Bush manipulated intelligence before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Other speakers took on the issue directly.
"I think [Vietnam] sent a cautionary signal . . . that we should be more cautious in military adventurism," former president Jimmy Carter said in a videotaped interview played Saturday. "These lessons that were learned I think have been forgotten or ignored in the present Iraq war."
At times, the conference seemed to demonstrate a serious shift in at least some sectors of public thinking. Where just a few years ago it was debated whether Iraq could be called a "quagmire" such as Vietnam, here the question seemed to be: Could it be worse?
"There is not an adequate sense of nationhood," Kissinger said, contrasting Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions with what he called a more homogeneous population in Vietnam.
All told, the speakers spent two days sketching bitter parallels between the two fights -- comparing the Cold War "Domino Theory" of communist expansion with the Bush administration's ambitions to spread democracy in the Middle East, and comparing the Iraqi insurgents to the Viet Cong.
Eventually, some of the panelists were asked: So what should the country do now about Iraq?
"I'm not smart enough to figure out how to get out of Iraq," Valenti said, "any more than I was smart enough to figure out how to get out of Vietnam."
Kissinger, the man whose administration eventually did withdraw U.S. troops, had no solutions either.
"I know the problem," he said, "better than the answer."
