How Not to Vietnamize Iraq

By Judith Coburn, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 5, 2006.

Through a scrim of red, dry-season dust, the sign appeared like an apparition hanging low over the no-man's land of the South Vietnamese-Lao border: "Warning! No US Personnel Beyond This Point." Its big, white expanse was already festooned with grunt graffiti, both American and Vietnamese. It was February, 1971, the afternoon before the invasion of Laos, and the sign but the latest bizarre development in the Pentagon's campaign to "Vietnamize" the war in Vietnam. The journalists who had hoofed it all the way to the border found the sign so grimly funny that we lined up for a group photo in front of it.

It all started in late 1969, when President Richard Nixon announced the first withdrawal of American soldiers from South Vietnam and their replacement by South Vietnamese troops. The new policy was dubbed "Vietnamization" by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and hailed as the beginning of the end of America's war in that land. But the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi wasn't fooled for a minute. The communists believed Vietnamization was only intended to de-Americanize the war, not to end it.

Hanoi was right -- more right than anybody at the time could have imagined. In the five-plus years of war that followed, more than 20,000 American soldiers would still die; Nixon would actually widen the war by invasions of both Cambodia and Laos; and brutal American bombing campaigns would kill over a million more Indochinese. In fact, more Indochinese and Americans would be killed or wounded during the Vietnamization years than in the war before 1970.

While comparisons to Vietnam and terms from that era like "quagmire," "hearts and minds," and "body counts" swamped the media the moment the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, "Vietnamization" didn't make it into the mix until that November. Then, the White House, which initially shied off anything linked to Vietnam, launched a media campaign to roll out what they were calling "Iraqification," perhaps as an answer to critics who doubted the "mission" had actually been "accomplished" and feared that there was no "light at the end of the [Iraqi] tunnel." But the term was quickly dropped. Perhaps it resurrected too many baby-boomer memories of Vietnamese clinging to the skids of choppers fleeing the fruits of Vietnamization.

It seems, however, that there is no way of keeping failed Washington policies in their graves, once the dead of night strikes. I was amazed, when, in 2005, in Foreign Affairs magazine, Melvin Laird resurrected a claim that his "Vietnamization" policy had actually worked and plugged for "Iraqification" of the war there. Soon after, journalist Seymour Hersh, famed for his reportage on the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre (and the Iraq-era Abu Ghraib abuses), reported in the New Yorker that the Vietnamization policy of the Nixon era was indeed being reclothed and returned to us -- with similarly planned American drawdowns of ground troops and a ramping up of American air power -- and I wondered if we could be suffering a moment of mass post-traumatic stress syndrome.

When General George William Casey, Jr. -- whose father, a major general, died in Vietnam in July 1970 -- announced in June 2006 that the Pentagon might soon begin the first American troop withdrawals from Iraq, I couldn't help wondering where the Iraqi version of that sign might eventually go up. In the desert? On the Iranian or the Syrian border? (The "withdrawals" were, however, rescinded before even being put into effect in the face of an all-out civil war in Baghdad.)

However it feels to anyone else, it's distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.

While brooding about Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A.J. Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970], well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in ruins, and we're talking about Vietnamization as though the Vietnamese weren't already bearing the brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G. Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War, Patriots. "It was one of those words that gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was really insulting."

A point well taken as Iraqification is heralded in the land.

The Sound of Vietnamization

One night back in 1971 on the Lao border, not far from that big, white sign, I was to witness Vietnamization in action in its starkest terms. Two photographers, another reporter, and I were camped out with South Vietnamese Army troops who were to lead the next morning's invasion of Laos. (As it happened, the Vietnam War lacked a speech-writerly slogan like President Bush's, "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," but the policy was the same.) What I heard then was three sharp cracks, the sound -- we figured later -- of cluster bombs hitting the ground no more than twenty feet from us, mistakenly dropped by an American Navy bomber. A hurricane clatter of shrapnel fanned out toward us. It felt like sharing the same foxhole with a machine gun drawn dead on you. As the universe exploded in flames, our brains were blasted blank.

Judith Coburn covered the war in Indochina from 1970-73 for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Village Voice, and Pacifica Radio. She is working on a memoir about Vietnam and the 1960s.

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