Friday, March 02, 2007

To get a better perspective on the escalation of the Vietnam war, I've been reading a remarkable volume from the Library of America, titled, "Reporting Vietnam, Part One: American Journalism, 1959-1969." As its title suggests, this book is a collection of short, journalistic pieces originally published during the Vietnam war.

For the most part, the differences between the conflicts in Iraq and Vietnam have struck me more forcefully than the parallels. But in one profoundly troubling respect, the journalism of the past reads very much like the news reports of today.

First, the differences: The greatest disparity between the two wars is that of scale. The articles from the early years of the Vietnam war, which describe the operations of small American units against the Vietcong guerrillas, read like recent pieces about U.S. troops on patrol in Iraq -- apart from the differences in terrain and climate. The articles from the later years of the conflict, however, describe a different war entirely.

The articles from 1967 and later portray a full-scale war being waged by nation-states, with military engagements between large, well-organized military units on both sides, sometimes resulting in American defeats accompanied by breathtakingly high American casualties.

The numbers confirm the imbalance in scale between Iraq and Vietnam. President Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war culminated in the commitment of more than 500,000 American troops to Vietnam. Although annual U.S. expenditures on the Vietnam war at its height were comparable in real terms to what is being spent annually on the U.S. military commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan today, that expenditure represented a much larger share of the American economy in 1968 than it does today (more than 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product then, less than 1 percent now).

The other significant contrast relates to the way in which the Vietnam war was fought. Many of the contributions to the "Reporting Vietnam" volume come from dovish journalists (Jonathan Schell, for example), and it is, perhaps, to be expected that such writers would portray American soldiers and American leaders as deliberately inflicting wholesale destruction on civilian persons and their property.

But even in the contributions from less overtly partisan writers, such as Neil Sheehan, a similar picture emerges of a war fought with the almost indiscriminate use of overwhelming firepower.

Undoubtedly, U.S. forces in Iraq still harm too many civilians and destroy too many homes -- any civilian harmed is one too many. But our armed forces have clearly learned a lot about counterinsurgency warfare since Vietnam, and they now take evident pride in bearing considerable risks to avoid endangering civilians. In Iraq, it is not we but our enemies who are systematically bombing civilian neighborhoods to spread terror and despair.

Even the terrorist tactics of the Vietcong differed from those now used by the Sunni insurgents and radical Shiite militias of Iraq. Don Moser's essay on "The Vietcong Cadre of Terror," from the Jan. 8, 1968, issue of Life magazine, describes the careful deliberations of a Vietcong agent in Saigon who planned and executed deadly attacks against Americans in Saigon. Unlike al-Qaida, the Vietcong did not launch suicide attacks, and they did not kill civilians indiscriminately; their targeted killing of leading regime supporters resembles, if anything, Shiite militia killings of Sunni men in Baghdad.

For all the differences between the two conflicts, however, the Vietnam- era journalism echoes the news from Iraq in one troubling respect: concern about the capacity and will of our allies to fight and die in support of their American-backed regime. David Halberstam reported early in the Vietnam war about the frustration of certain American officers at the lack of martial spirit in their South Vietnamese counterparts.

Other journalists of the time also criticized the South Vietnamese forces for the same failings now noted in the Iraqi army: too many soldiers enlisting only for the money, refusing to serve away from their home provinces and deserting to avoid actual combat.

As long as this commonality persists -- and our government is working hard to change it -- it may be enough to make the two wars similar in the most decisive respect: their outcomes.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.