Thomas E. Ricks on the Hard Lessons of Vietnam

Most officers in the American military understand the need to learn from past mistakes whether those mistakes were made by Americans or others. Some military historians point out that if the Japanese had spent more time taking out the fuel tanks sitting above Pearl Harbor instead of battle ships, the United States might have been forced to retreat, at least temporarily, to the west coast.

It's important to study mistakes made by the military but it's also important to study the mistakes made by civilians who oversee the military. Hitler understood the importance of oil but there were two times when Hitler didn't understand oil well enough. If Hitler had sent more men and equipment to General Rommel, the Germans might have kept going east past the Suez Canal and on into the Saudi oil fields. Later, in his attack on Russia, Hitler missed the point of gaining control of the oil fields of the Caucasus and instead spread his armies across too wide a front (one of the reasons Hitler failed, by the way, is that he stopped testing his ideas with the generals as well as insisting on war plans improvements as he did early in the war; instead, he became convinced he had all the answers and began to blunder; we are fortunate that Hitler's ego got the better of him).

Already a great deal is being learned from the mistakes in Iraq including: have a plan, have people trained in counterinsurgency and have people who know how to run a peacekeeping operation. Thomas E. Ricks has a book out called FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. In an article in The Washington Post Ricks notes the phobia about discussing and learning from Vietnam in some parts of the military but the problem seemed particularly acute among Bush's civilian leadership, including the de facto American viceroy, Paul Bremer:

In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

Right wing conservatives like Bush give the impression sometimes of being overly fond of the past. Bush freely expresses admiration for people like Theodore Roosevelt but he may not have any real understanding about Teddy Roosevelt's presidency; he just interprets his history any way he pleases—some would call that fantasizing. Whatever it is, we can hardly afford it.

Whatever the problem is with Bush, he shows little sign of American know-how. American know-how is not a birthright. It is something one earns by experience, by trial and error, by being honest about the facts, by thinking things through and by taking a pragmatic approach to the problems that face us.