For Americans of a certain age, the near-collapse of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army and the possibility of an ISIS takeover of Baghdad has disturbing similarities to the rout of the South Vietnamese Army and the fall of Saigon in 1975. In both cases, the United States had fought a long and costly counterinsurgency campaign. In the case of Vietnam, the United States poured billions into the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN); in Iraq, roughly the same thing has happened. ARVN was defeated by a well-coordinated conventional invasion from the North after the United States had cut off support, but here the similarities begin to fall apart. The Iraqi Army is not yet defeated, although news reports are depressing: troops are abandoning their posts, large amounts of donated U.S. equipment are being destroyed or captured, and the invading “army” is a lightly armed but wholly dedicated movement of religious extremists instead of a combined-arms modern force. The question of whether the Iraqis will reverse their defeats will be settled in the coming weeks. If ISIS succeeds, there will be one final chilling similarity; there will be a wave of violence – executions, imprisonments and so forth – that will take place largely out of the public eye, and while Americans tune into their favorite reality shows, bodies will be filling ditches in Iraq.
What did we learn from the fall of Saigon that can be applied here? There are three big lessons.
The first is that the fall of the Maliki government, if it happens, will be seen worldwide as a U.S. defeat, despite the absence of American forces and despite the diplomatic logjams that caused the United States to withdraw fully by 2011. Beyond the environs of Washington, it won’t matter which administration negotiated what treaty, or that the Maliki government was determined to see a full U.S. pullout. That is all chaff. An Iraqi defeat will be, by extension, a U.S. defeat as well. And that defeat will have global repercussions, coming as it will now that the U.S. has already announced an Afghan pullout date. As we learned after Vietnam, losing a war is no small matter; the Cambodian genocide followed the fall of Saigon, and an emboldened Soviet Union, sensing American weakness, sent Warsaw Pact troops into the Western Hemisphere and ultimately invaded Afghanistan. If the Maliki government (which has done much to cause its own present problems) falls, there will be strategic repercussions for the United States that we have not yet anticipated.
Second, there’s not much the United States can do at this point. Some aid – which, in the case of South Vietnam, the U.S. denied the Thieu government in its last throes – is likely forthcoming. But the facts on the ground are such that if the Iraqis themselves won’t defend their country, then no one else can. The same is true anywhere the United States has tried to stand up local armies. Political will has to start with the locals. There have been some successes in building foreign armies, some little-remarked, such as the armies of Colombia, El Salvador and in the counterbalancing forces in the former Yugoslavia, and some far better known – the reconstitution of the Bundeswehr after WWII and the South Korean armed forces – that have become bulwarks of U.S. defense strategy. When the history of the U.S. intervention in Iraq is written, doctrine-writers might ponder why it took so long before high-quality equipment (airframes in particular) and training was available to the Iraqis, and whether that would have made a difference in the face of Maliki’s mismanagement and sectarian cronyism. But that will all be retrospective. At the present, we can only provide marginal aid and wait.
Finally, in both Vietnam and Iraq the advise-and-assist mission was given only lip service at critical times, and valuable time was lost prising priorities for people and materiel from the conventional U.S. effort. American defense policies will be better served by the admission that retraining and standing up local security forces must become the first priority urgently, even as the smoke settles from initial interventions. The training and equipment must be first-class, as must be the trainers. Standing up the army that will remain to fight America’s battles is not a sideshow, it is the main objective. The political side that accompanies the rebuilding of a nation’s armed forces must proceed in parallel and, to the extent possible, guide the installation of local leaders that can assist the United States as well as their own country. Our hands-off approach to Iraqi politics, even when our friends in Iraq, pockets full of American promises, looked for support and U.S. soldiers were dying to achieve U.S. objectives, was naïve. If 80% of counterinsurgency is political, our approach to host nation politics cannot be laissez-faire.
Americans and their political leaders are insulated by great distances from the trials of conflict, and particularly from the agonies of defeat. But losing wars has consequences that are not immediately apparent – in the way our friends perceive the United States, in the encouragement that a U.S. loss gives to our enemies, and in our own national confidence.
Colonel (USA ret) Bob Killebrew writes and consults on national defense issues as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to his retirement from active duty he served for thirty years in a variety of Special Forces, infantry and staff duties.
Photo credit: manhhai
Dragon 
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Great piece. I entered the Army in the mid-70’s and recalled that epic photograph of the helicopter on the US Embassy rooftop. I’m glad you wrote this article. Perfect example of why knowing and understanding history is important and that S&T and R&D can’t solve all of the problems.
I seem to recall from later interviews with the photographer that the building was actually a CIA safe house on the same block as the embassy.
Yup! An iconic moment for sure.
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/the-fall-of-saigon/
Thank you – didn’t know it was a safe-house. Unless the Iraqi Government resolve stiffens soon and their Soldiers begin to fight, we’ll have the Patton “crap through a goose” concept going into effect.
Thr Bundeswehr is a bad example here, as Germany already had an extremely good army more than a 100 years before WW2
Vietnam had nothing to do with the decision to Invade Afghanistan, there has been a bit of research on the Soviet decision making process leading up to the invasion, America’s experience in Vietnam had nothing to do with it…my guess is on this point the author has no clue what he is talking about…then to bring up Cambodia…perhaps he could have cherry picked more incidents after Vietnam to be a direct result
I think the overall Soviet experience in Afghanistan was similar to ours in Vietnam. It wasn’t long before the war became extremely unpopular among the home-folks because they did not see the value to being there. Eventually the Soviets became war-weary and coupled with actual public demonstrations against being there, I’m not surprised the Soviets crossed the bridge out of Afghanistan in the some manner that we took the last helicopter out of Saigon.
I think the piece overall is good but I agree with this point and will add that I’m puzzled generally by the narrative that perceived US strength plays such a strong role in Russian (now) and Soviet (then) decision making in conflicts like the ones being referred to here.
It seems not to square with essentially continuous Soviet/Russian adventurism since WW2.
Funny story that we took the Nam self immortalion and applied from one religion to another if a monk could become a suicide bomber or a Muslim could commit self immortalion. That is what kicked off the whole Arab Spring. You can brain wash a guy in about 48 hours these days use to take weeks with the correct drugs and ipod message. A hello of the grave from MAVSOG to our Iranian friends. And perhaps something for a rainy day if need be. Most in the US wanted Allawi, Iran want someone else, I was the only one that wanted al-Maliki. So I don’t think Iraq is like Vietnam.
The comparison is not good. The American withdrew from South Vietnam in 1973. The South Vietnamese Armed Forces kept fighting nearly two years more before defeat, in 1975.
Funny I had the same desire to draw parallels with Vietnam. My parallels are in the political arena.
Back then, we made the mistake of viewing the N Vietnamese as communist chess pieces in a global front and not recognizing their nationalist and anti-colonial drive to be free of foreign occupation. Where once ppl feared the communism bogeyman like some sort of existential threat to America, now the bogeyman threat to American life is terrorism. Luckily, it appears analysts are being much more perceptive about the motivations of the Sunni groups. Many analysts have resisted labeling the Sunni groups with the broad brush of the terrorist bogeyman label. If not for these more perceptive views being widely disseminated, I have no doubt the interventionists would be pushing the terrorism bogeyman upon us full throttle. Part of our failure with Kennan’s containment doctrine was imposing an artificial prism through which to view world affairs and failing to allow our analysis of Vietnam be guided by a bottoms up analysis of the root causes of the war. We can only hope that the same mistake is not being repeated in Iraq.
The other obvious lesson of Vietnam in Iraq is that the war willingness of the people is a part of a nation’s warmaking powers. Exhausted from over a decade at war, the American public has no appetite for new adventurism. We shouldn’t have gone to war in Vietnam w/o a clear national interest that could sustain the support of the American public. In Iraq, we have no clear national interest that can be readily conveyed to the public to sustain a serious prolonged intervention. It follows that the case for intervention in Iraq is weaker than it was in Vietnam.
The historical analogies between Vietnam and Iraq would suggest some very sloppy thinking indeed.
First and foremost, the most distinguishing characteristic of the war in Iraq is the sectarian nature of the conflict. Vietnam was a political/nationalist struggle or as the historian David Marr stated, “Ho Chi Minh poured new wine into old bottles” In other word Ho and North Vietnam were able to take on the trapppings of nationalism while downplaying communist ideology, especially during the war against France
The invasion of Iraq was justified by Sadam Hussein having control over nuclear weapons. one could go on and on i.e., Afghanistan, Syria,etc. It seems any time the U.S. is involved in an armed conflict the Vietnam War is trotted out. The lack of imagination does get tiresome.
Saddam didn’t have control of nuclear weapons.
The comparisons with Vietnam seem pretty good to me. No two historical instances are identical but there are troubling parallels.
Both represent a failure of US strategy on a grand scale.