We're Fighting Not to Lose

By contrast, Bush never had to worry that escalation would bring an all-out global war; the United States is the world's sole superpower. Nonetheless, until last week, he never chose to increase the combat commitment significantly; the "surge" announced last week is but the latest experiment with a temporary increase in forces. At the beginning this was probably because he did not believe more troops were needed to win. As the venture went bad, the volunteer army was stretched too thin to provide an option for massive escalation. But now it is clear that Bush does not believe he can possibly win with anything close to the number of forces currently committed. The president certainly perceives the risks of losing, and at this moment of truth, he is repeating Johnson's decision pattern -- doing the minimum necessary not to lose.

Whatever the similarities in the way Washington dealt with Vietnam and Iraq, there were few similarities between the two wars themselves. Vietnam was both a nationalist war against outside powers -- first the French, then the Americans -- and a civil war. In Iraq, the lines of conflict are messier. The main contest is the sectarian battle between Arab Shiites and Arab Sunnis. The Kurds, so far, are mostly bystanders, while the Americans struggle to back a weak yet balky government they hope can remain a secular alternative.

Combat in Vietnam was a combination of insurgency and conventional warfare, and the conventional element played to U.S. strengths. By contrast, Washington's massive firepower advantages are nullified in Iraq because the fighting remains at the level of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Iraq is harder for our military than Vietnam was, yet we eventually had 540,000 troops in Vietnam compared with barely a quarter of that number in Iraq. The current U.S. footprint in Iraq is much smaller -- only about one-tenth the density of U.S. and allied forces per square mile in South Vietnam at the height of U.S. involvement, and with an Iraqi population 50 percent larger than South Vietnam's. Consequently, the security situation was never as bad in Vietnam as it is in Iraq today. In Vietnam, Americans could travel most places day and night, while in Iraq it is dangerous to leave the Green Zone. Even Bush's planned 21,500-troop increase will not make a lasting difference if the host government does not become far more effective. As in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive of 1968, the enemy can lie low until we stand down.

In both countries, U.S. forces worked hard at training national armies. This job was probably done better in Vietnam, and the United States certainly provided South Vietnamese troops with relatively better equipment than they have given Iraqis so far. South Vietnamese forces were more reliable, more effective and far more numerous than current Iraqi forces are.

In both cases, however, the governments we were trying to help proved inadequate. Unlike their opponents, neither Saigon nor Baghdad gained the legitimacy to inspire their troops. At bottom, this was always the fundamental problem in both wars. Americans hoped that time would help, but leaders such as South Vietnam's Nguyen Van Thieu and Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki were never up to the job.

Americans have not stopped arguing about Vietnam -- about whether the war could have been won if fought differently, or was an impossible task from the outset, or about who was to blame. Hawks claim that the United States could have won in Vietnam if the military had been allowed to fight without restraint. Supporters of the war in Iraq say that the United States could have prevented the resistance if it had been better prepared for occupation after the fall of Baghdad. Doves in both cases say that the objectives were never worth any appreciable price in blood and treasure.

After Vietnam, recriminations over failure became a never-healed wound in American politics. Now Iraq is deepening that wound. With some luck, Washington may yet escape Baghdad more cleanly than it did in the swarms of helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975. But even if the United States is that fortunate, the story of the parallel paths to disaster should be chiseled in stone -- if only to avoid yet another tragedy in a distant land, a few decades down the road.

Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, directed the Pentagon Papers Project. Richard K. Betts is director of Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.