Trapped by Hubris, Again

Yet in his speech to the nation Wednesday night announcing changes in Iraq policy, the president embraced many of Hadley's proposals. He has extracted promises from Maliki to crack down on Shiite militias and has pushed the prime minister to broaden his cabinet. Bush also took Hadley's advice to increase the number of U.S. troops operating in Baghdad, and to broaden the program that embeds Americans with Iraqi units.

Last week, Bush seemed to threaten Maliki as well: "If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people," the president said. The United States has always been good at telling other nations what they have to do, and what will happen if they don't do it.

When things began to go wrong in Vietnam, we helped stage a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the United States had helped to install as president of South Vietnam. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had once called him Asia's "miracle man." Diem was dumped in 1963. Eight changes in leadership, all involving Washington in one way or another, ended with Nguyen Van Thieu's ascent to the presidency in 1967; Thieu then held on for eight years before being ousted nine days before North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon. We never did find "the right guy" for Vietnam, to borrow Bush's recent description of Maliki, and there is scant evidence that the man who botched the execution of Saddam Hussein is really the right guy for Iraq, either.

We accomplished a great deal during the 14 years we were actively engaged in South Vietnam. We created an infrastructure for the country, built roads and schools and hospitals, trained hundreds of thousands of troops, figured out how to "pacify" the countryside. As long as U.S. military power was available to neutralize the fighting force of North Vietnam -- whose communist leaders were determined to expel the Americans and reunify their country -- South Vietnam could survive, even prosper.

But we could not create a government or an economy in South Vietnam that could survive without our generous help. When I was leaving Vietnam in August 1970, I wrote in these pages about how we had made the Vietnamese utterly dependent on us. At the time, the Nixon administration's policy was "Vietnamization" -- turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. But the South Vietnamese had not shown that they could cope without us. "Even if the policy succeeds," I wrote, "the United States may well be unable to redeem the lives, money and self esteem it invested in the war in Vietnam."

The Vietnamese communists had key advantages that the U.S. side couldn't match: a better army, more determined and more competent leaders, and a political legitimacy that they had earned by expelling the French colonizers. And they were fighting for a unified Vietnam.

Iraq is different. The "enemy" there is not a single group of Iraqis, but nearly all Iraqis, because Iraqis do not share a common definition of their state or a common agenda for its future. This disarray has been compounded by the presence of Islamic fanatics from countries that have seized the opportunity to go to Iraq to try to kill Americans. Polls and reporting by Post correspondents suggest that, overwhelmingly, Iraqis of all factions want U.S. forces to leave.

In the face of chaos, the United States has no reliable ally -- no legitimate political authority that crosses sectarian lines and attracts the loyalty of large numbers of Iraqis. Which Iraqis will risk their lives to promote Washington's idea of Iraq? The army and police defend sectarian, not national, interests, even when they are fighting the same people U.S. troops are fighting.

The Iraqis who would presumably have been most supportive of a modernizing and democratic Iraq -- the secular intelligentsia that thrived in Iraq until the Persian Gulf War -- is now dramatically depleted. Hundreds of thousands of these Iraqis have already fled to other countries, including many doctors, lawyers, academics and other trained professionals. The war has created a vacuum in the upper reaches of Iraqi society.

What's the lesson to be learned? Modesty. Before initiating a war of choice -- and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify -- define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success.

Bush's latest initiatives -- like all his earlier ones -- will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Americans are outsiders, occupiers, foreigners in every sense of the word. Only Iraqis have a chance of finding a political resolution for their divisions. So now we await the fate of this latest gamble like a high roller in Las Vegas watching a roulette ball in a spinning wheel. We have about as much control over the situation as the gambler has of that ball. The outcome is out of our hands, and it would be foolish to bet that we will like the way the conflict ends.

robertgkaiser@yahoo.com

Robert G. Kaiser, an associate editor of The Post, covered the Vietnam War in 1969 and 1970.