Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power

The Bush White House believed that the world would support his decision to strike Iraq because U.S. interests matched global security needs. Rejecting the lessons of Vietnam, the president and his top advisers saw no limits to American power as an instrument of global transformation. They also believed that the United States would be welcomed as a liberator in Iraq, and that once victory was secured there, the rest of the Middle East would follow suit because the move toward democracy was the goal of all peoples.

Iraq, then, is not an aberration. Rather, it is part of a pattern of beliefs in U.S. foreign policy grounded in the principle that American ideals are universal and that U.S. power should support and expand those ideals around the globe. What separates Iraq from past American conflicts, however, is the Bush administration’s revolutionary goal of democracy promotion through unilateral, preemptive military action. Few presidents have engaged in a war of choice to promote democracy because the linking of power and ideals—democracy, freedom, liberty, capitalism—has not always produced the best results. Larger wars for ideas could be long on rhetoric and short on prudent judgment.¹ Still, the Bush White House argued that it could overcome years of realist compromises with tyranny by following the neoconservative agenda. A more muscular foreign policy would include promoting democracy in the Middle East, by force if necessary. The confidence in the power of the United States to expand American ideals required the Bush administration to reject any lessons that Vietnam had to offer. Instead of viewing the war in Vietnam as an example of the limits of American power, the Bush White House believed Vietnam was a warning that policymakers had to have the right dedication to victory. Therefore, confidence about the mission in Iraq was a fundamental tenet of Bush’s foreign policy.

Despite the Bush administration’s more incendiary foreign-policy objectives, Congress treated war resolutions on Iraq and Vietnam similarly. In both wars, Congress granted the president unusual authority to wage war in its name. And within months of the start of the wars, the original justification had been discredited. In each case, this discrediting of the justification did not lead to a careful policy review. Instead, as the history of both conflicts shows, U.S. policymakers in the White House rejected carefully calibrated debates about U.S. security interests in favor of idealistic appeals for war. If Vietnam and Iraq can teach us anything about the way the United States goes to war, it is that Congress should insist on a full and frank debate before giving the president broad authority to wage war. Congress should better learn how to discipline power and harness fear. The presidency has grown increasingly imperious over the last several decades, and it is now time for Congress to take its rightful place in the foreign-policy process or risk more misadventures.

The domino theory and a sense of messianic mission drew the United States to war in Vietnam. The conflict was not a quagmire in the 1950s but rather a noble mission in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration to save Southeast Asia from communism. U.S. leaders were so confident about the righteousness of their cause that on several occasions they failed to ask serious questions about the limits of U.S. power or the legitimacy of the domino theory. Support for the Eisenhower position in Vietnam was universal; Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress stood behind the domino theory. Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking before the American Friends of Vietnam in 1956, warned that Indochina “represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam.”³

So confident was the United States in its moral and military position that it rejected any political settlement of the growing crisis in Vietnam. By 1954, the French government had grown weary of its war against Ho Chi Minh’s communists for political control of Vietnam. The French had first come to Indochina in the 1850s, seeking an Asian jewel for their imperial crown. After one hundred years of colonial rule, Paris signed an armistice with the Vietnamese communists at a conference in Geneva that promised a French withdrawal and unifying national elections in Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration rejected the Geneva Accords, however, believing the United States could fare better than the French against the communists because it was not burdened by a colonial past and because providence was on its side.⁴ Accordingly, the United States presided over the birth of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, as a counterrevolutionary alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s communists. Dulles and Eisenhower therefore linked the American mission in Vietnam with American ideals. Anticommunism and the promotion of democracy along liberal lines were both a justification for war and the cornerstone of U.S. ideology.

In 1961 the new Kennedy administration engaged in a formal policy review of its options in Vietnam. Kennedy had been a longtime supporter of the domino theory and was clearly worried about communist advances in newly emerging postcolonial nations in Africa and Asia. The president and his advisers ultimately rejected the domino theory, however, believing there were situational differences in geography that could overcome politics.⁵ In other words, Kennedy was less concerned about falling dominos because he no longer believed that they were attached. If one nation fell to communism, it did not automatically mean that neighboring countries would fall. What replaced the domino theory in Kennedy’s mind, however, was his new thinking on U.S. credibility, what writer Jonathan Schell appropriately called the “psychological domino theory.”⁶ Kennedy believed the war in Vietnam was no longer about stopping dominos from falling but rather about showing enemies and allies that the United States lived up to its commitment “to pay any price and bear any burden” . . . to ensure “the survival and success of liberty.”⁷ Support of South Vietnam, not rolling back communism, became the new goal.

Perhaps Kennedy’s two national security secretaries were most forceful in advocating the new policy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk often used protocols of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as sufficient reason for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. According to Rusk, provisions in the 1954 SEATO agreement demanded that the United States come to the defense of any of the signatories. ⁸ Since South Vietnam had signed this agreement, the United States was obligated by treaty to defend it from communist attacks. Rusk further reasoned that if the United States did not aid South Vietnam, U.S. allies across the globe would come to doubt the U.S. commitment to its treaty obligations. Rusk was particularly worried that U.S. allies in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) might wonder if Washington would stand behind that agreement should the Soviets invade another country in Europe. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara argued that if the United States did not intervene in Vietnam, both sides of the Iron Curtain would sense “a major crisis of nerve.”⁹ In a report to the president, McNamara concluded that “the loss of South Vietnam would . . . undermine the credibility of American commitments elsewhere.”¹⁰ By 1961, according to historian Fred Logevall, the doctrine of credibility had “supplanted the domino theory in American thinking on Vietnam.”¹¹

At the time, most foreign affairs decisions were seen through the prism of the cold war and the limitations it presented. The primary national security issue of the era was preventing a catastrophic war that might well escalate into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The Kennedy administration balanced the need to confront Soviet meddling in newly emerging postcolonial nations with the need to avoid a nuclear exchange with the communist camp through what it called “limited-war theory.”

The product of American academics Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, and Herman Kahn, limited-war theory gave the president a way to keep wars local and thereby avoid a nuclear showdown.¹³ At the heart of this new doctrine was the belief that the president should have the option to respond to Soviet aggression at a low level of violence or through diplomacy. The president could move up the rungs of a ladder of escalation, until such time as the enemy chose to cease and desist its activities rather than face the consequences of further escalation.¹⁴ With enough applied military pressure, according to the theory, the president could communicate with the enemy that it would pay a high price if aggression continued. In the case of Vietnam, the goal was to convince Hanoi that continuing to support the revolution in the south would come at too high a price. Each military escalation, therefore, was a signal to Hanoi to cease and desist. Of course, Hanoi rejected Washington’s signals, matching each military escalation with its own.¹⁵

U.S. fears were not limited to Moscow’s cold war power or influence. China was a legitimate threat to American troops in Vietnam. McNamara was convinced during the war that invading North Vietnam with U.S. ground forces carried with it unacceptable risks.¹⁶ He correctly concluded that China would act in its own self-interest and would consider any attack across the seventeenth parallel that divided North Vietnam from South Vietnam an attack against its own borders.¹⁷ General Bruce Palmer, General William Westmoreland’s deputy in Vietnam, agreed. He argued in his book The Twenty-Five Year War that “one cannot quarrel with the decision not to invade North Vietnam because it was too close to China.”¹⁸ U.S. officials now know that North Vietnam asked for and received security commitments from Beijing from 1960 onward.¹⁹ They also know China’s Seventh Air Force was moved permanently to the Vietnamese border in case of a ground attack across the seventeenth parallel.²⁰ Four other air divisions were also moved closer to the border, and Beijing built two airstrips near Lang Son in anticipation of an American invasion. ²¹ By 1968, over two hundred thousand Chinese troops were serving within North Vietnam’s borders.²²

Kennedy changed not only the rationale for war but also its strategic doctrine. In rejecting the domino theory in favor of the theory of credibility in the struggle against international communism, the president was willing to give up North Vietnam to protect South Vietnam. He was also willing to limit the U.S. military commitment to Vietnam to avoid a larger war that might entice China and the Soviet Union to join the conflict. The second-order issue—protecting South Vietnam from a communist takeover through the application of limited U.S. military pressure—proved more difficult to accomplish than anyone in the Kennedy administration had originally thought. The South Vietnamese government of president Ngo Dinh Diem was corrupt, inefficient, and not very democratic. Diem did little to reach out to those who were in the minority view on some issues.²³ He persecuted Buddhists, believing that they were sympathetic to the communist cause, he rejected land reform programs supported by the United States, and he closed down newspapers that were critical of his rule.²⁴

After Diem’s assassination, events in Saigon spun out of control. Various political groups wrestled for power in the capital, and the communists made significant advances in the countryside. In fact, the Communist Party hoped to take advantage of the chaos in Saigon. At its December 1963 plenum, party leaders agreed to “escalate the level of armed struggle in the South.”²⁸ According to party leaders, “Armed struggle would be the direct and deciding factor in the annihilation of the armed forces of the enemy.”²⁹ Le Duan, the party’s secretary general and a longtime advocate of a more forceful military policy in South Vietnam, applauded the decision.

As Hanoi turned up the heat, the Kennedy administration considered its options. One option was to withdraw. Convinced South Vietnam would eventually “throw our asses out,” and needing to score some political points without a huge military cost, Kennedy had considered a limited withdrawal as early as 1962.³⁰ By April 1963, some administration officials suggested that withdrawing a thousand U.S. advisers “out of the blue” would reassure the American public the war was going well and would undercut the communists’ “best propaganda line,” that the United States was running the war for South Vietnam.³¹ Kennedy had McNamara draw up the plans for the limited withdrawal to begin in December 1963. Many believed the president was starting to phase out U.S. operations in Vietnam, and that after the 1964 presidential election he would withdraw all U.S. advisers. McNamara went on record stating he was convinced Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. forces had he been reelected.³² No one will ever know. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Of course, Kennedy had another option, which was to intervene more forcefully. With just over sixteen thousand U.S. advisers in Vietnam, it was clear that more could be done to prop up the Saigon government and to aid the South Vietnamese armed forces. From the earliest days of the administration, some of Kennedy’s key advisers had advocated a more militant line.³³ By the summer of 1963 many were calling for the president to introduce U.S. ground troops to take over the war from the South Vietnamese forces and to save Saigon from total defeat.³⁴ Others suggested that a strong air campaign over North Vietnam would take some pressure off South Vietnam.³⁵ It now seems clear Kennedy refused to ask the hard questions about American intervention in Vietnam, content instead to continue to steer a middle course that promised neither withdrawal nor greater involvement.

When Lyndon B. Johnson entered the Oval Office, he, too, could have expanded the war or withdrawn. In typical Johnson fashion, he chose neither course. Always wanting to keep his options open, Johnson usually took the path that limited his policy choices. The president and his national security advisers decided to continue Kennedy’s commitment to the defense of South Vietnam and to keep America’s role in the war limited. On March 17, 1964, Johnson outlined his decision in what is now known as National Security Memorandum No. 288.³⁶ Expanding on Kennedy’s redefinition of the war’s aims, Johnson argued that nothing short of U.S. credibility was at stake in Vietnam. The administration would continue to support South Vietnam in its hour of need, the president concluded, because the United States was the only power that could do so. In the face of danger, the United States never backed down. Rusk perhaps put it best when he argued that the “integrity of the U.S. commitment is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world. If that commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war.”³⁷ America’s war aims in Vietnam during the Johnson years were still focused on containment and credibility.

Thus, U.S. goals in the Kennedy and Johnson years were counterrevolutionary. First, the United States wanted to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, and then, after rejecting the domino theory, U.S. policymakers wanted to stop the communists from taking over South Vietnam. As the war dragged on, the chief goal became convincing enemies and allies that the United States honored its treaty commitments. Credibility was as important as the specific military mission. Containment, preservation, and credibility were the hallmarks of America’s war aims in Vietnam. Only in building up South Vietnam as a viable alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s communists did the United States move from the defensive to the offensive.