Vietnam and Iraq: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

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They were talking about a guerrilla war in Asia. Or, fairly often, more than one. "You cannot win against an insurgency that springs from the population," said Jack Valenti, former special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. "There's never been an insurgency that doesn't prevail against a mighty power." "How much reform can you do," former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger wondered later, "simultaneously with fighting a war?" The banner on their dais read "Vietnam and the Presidency" -- ostensibly, the subject of a high-powered conference that brought historians and former policymakers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library for two days ending Saturday. But, as the speakers talked about anti-American insurgents and faulty U.S. intelligence and the search for an honorable way out in Southeast Asia, nearly all found bitter parallels to the current conflict in Iraq.

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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.

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"I think 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?


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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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101101.html