Vietnam

I have finished the first couple chapters (~100 pages) of Karnow's Vietnam and can already heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in that conflict, our present military engagements, and the future of our foreign policy. I will not begin making much comment until I have gotten further into the book, but one thing has already been made abundantly clear: I know too little about Iraq.

So does just about everyone I hear commenting on the war there, and probably most of the people at the Pentagon (and maybe even Foggy Bottom). Karnow's history of the Vietnam conflict starts in the 14th-century, and I have no doubt even a basic understanding of the history of that country would require reading several books that do not get to the 20th-century at all.

The same must be true of Iraq, and the unbridled ignorance of the American people (myself included) and most of our leaders regarding the social, political, and religious motivations of the various factions in Iraq may doom us to failure there just as it (arguably) did in Vietnam.

Early in Karnow's account he frames the Vietnam experience with a clear dichotomy between those who think the war was winnable if the military had not been handicapped by politicians, and those who think it was simply an unwinnable war. This reminds me quite a bit of Kevin Drum's objections to Dan Drezner's argument that the Iraq war is (or at least was) winnable, but President Bush screwed it up. This seems like such a threshold question: is the war winnable? Yet even once this question is answered (a huge and perhaps impossible project that has divided analysts since the Persian Gulf War), so many questions remain. If it is not winnable now, was it ever? If it is winnable, are we winning? That these questions were never really resolved in more than a decade of combat in Vietnam gives me pause about expecting to know the answer about Iraq after 15 months.

It is abundant food for thought and I will have some more on this as I progress through Karnow's book (and the other Vietnam texts I've been acquiring). It has become quite obvious to me that it is that conflict, and no other, which has the most to tell us about Iraq.