Rolling Blunder

Anyone remember a CNN correspondent named Wolf Blitzer reporting from the Pentagon in January 1991 that military officials were claiming credit for wiping out almost all of the 700-plane Iraqi air force? Robert Wiener, a CNN producer involved in covering Desert Storm, reminds us about the report in his book Live from Baghdad: "Wolf said all of Iraq's fixed Scud and ballistic missile sites were put out of commission and Baghdad's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons arsenal had been 'wiped out.'" Blitzer also pointed out that the Republican Guard had been "decimated."

A little while later -- eight years or so -- reporters shoveled out the straight dope from military briefings describing new strikes against Iraq. American and British officials boasted of destroying nine Iraqi missile factories, putting them out of commission -- according to US General Henry Shelton -- for "at least a year." And hitting barracks, ministry offices, armed-forces command sites, air defense systems, and just all kinds of other big stuff.

Something is off, though, when you open your plain-and-sober issue of The Economist and find yourself reading sentences that drip with sarcasm, not that there's anything wrong with that. "One serving UNSCOM inspector questioned the usefulness of the bombing," the 2 January issue of the magazine reports. "He might also have asked why, if America and Britain knew where to find Mr. Hussein's secret weapons, they had not let the inspectors know."

Listen closely to all of this and you begin to recognize the song playing in the background. For all the talk that US commander William Westmoreland was fighting World War II again in Vietnam, the general looks downright smooth in comparison to our current batch of political and military leaders -- who are, it's becoming clear, fighting the Vietnam War again as World War II again in Iraq.

Mercifully true to the era, it's the low-casualty version so far, yet the parallels to those high-casualty wars are everywhere, including how we pour ever-greater resources into the effort to salvage what we lost and screwed up yesterday. And how we end up baffled when tactics that would defeat an enemy who was just like us don't work at all on the enemy we're actually trying to fight.

When Special Fourth Class James T. Davis of Livingston, Tennessee, was killed in an ambush on 22 December 1961, he became the first American to die in the Vietnam War. Two Marine corporals caught in an artillery attack on 29 April 1975 were officially the last.

In the 14 years between the beginning of our involvement in the conflict and the arguably inevitable denouement, US forces were never far from getting that darn Charlie fella all wrapped up in a box. Sample the headline from Washington Daily News, 16 November 1967: "The Enemy Is Running Out of Men." Contributing to the clear picture of the war, in a headline a few days later, The New York Times added, "Westmoreland Is Sure of Victory." A couple of months later, the nearly-defeated, mostly depleted enemy launched the Tet Offensive: coordinated attacks on 40 of South Vietnam's 44 province capitals, almost 100 of its district seats, and four of the five autonomous cities. The Times made up for its occasional cheerleading. Thanks to the 1971 publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, we've learned some interesting things about the official view that you can bomb an enemy into submission.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote to Lyndon Johnson in October 1966, "Attack sorties in North Vietnam have risen from about 4,000 per month at the end of last year to 6,000 per month in the first quarter of this year and 12,000 per month at present.... In North Vietnam, almost 84,000 attack sorties have been flown (about 25 percent against fixed targets), 45 percent during the past seven months."

That's a lot of bombs. And the effects of the bombing -- the United States dropped more bombs during the Vietnam conflict than were dropped in all of World War II, an estimated 2 million tons falling inside the borders of Laos and Cambodia alone -- was hardly vaporized the day we finally stopped.

People in that part of the world will have warm reminders of our good works during the Vietnam conflict for decades to come. The New York Times Magazine ran some kind of fascinating photographs, back in its 28 June issue last year, of the neat things folks are doing these days with all the leftover bombs and bomb fragments in Southeast Asia. "It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the bombs never exploded," read one caption, "until awakened by a farmer's foot or a playful child. At left, a casing of a defused bomb was split in half and turned into portable vegetable gardens." They appeared to contain green onions.

Echoing the current reality of political leaders better at depicting the postures of war than actually fighting it, the bombing wasn't just intended to cause physical damage; we were also supposed to be sending a message to the enemy. And they were supposed to be able to decipher it when it arrived. The point of the bombing campaign, a military analyst wrote in August 1966, was "increasing progressively the pressure" on the North Vietnamese government "to the point where the regime would decide that it was too costly to continue."

Silly foreigners that the North Vietnamese were, they fell down on their part of the job -- they didn't get the message. But there was another message that someone didn't get. The same defense analysis included this amusing little paragraph, a nice epitaph for an awful idea that deserved to die, as it in fact did: Initial plans and assessments for the ROLLING THUNDER program tended to overestimate the persuasive and disruptive effects of the US air strikes and, correspondingly, to underestimate the tenacity and recuperative abilities of the North Vietnamese. This tendency, in turn, appears to reflect a general failure to appreciate the fact, well-documented in the historical and social scientific literature, that a direct, frontal attack on a society tends to strengthen the social fabric of the nation, to increase popular support of the existing government, to improve the determination of both the leadership and the populace to fight back, to induce a variety of protective measures that reduce the society's vulnerability to future attack, and to develop an increased capacity for quick repair and restoration of essential functions.

Whoops. So, in this context, what would be the effect of 325 cruise-missile strikes and a few nights' worth of bombing runs on an enemy that has already withstood -- with enough success to still pose a supposed major threat to the rest of the world -- a seven-year embargo, years of arms inspections, and an enormous defeat in a head-to-head war with a military coalition led by a superpower?

Of course, we're not just trying to bomb and starve Iraq directly into stability; we're really hoping to bomb and starve Iraq into an explosion of internal political violence, which will replace Saddam Hussein with somebody cool and mellow, thereby producing stability. As the Los Angeles Times reported on 5 January, Senate leaders are blocking the Clinton administration from implementing planned covert operations in Iraq, because they aren't aggressive enough. Senate leaders sent a letter to the nominal President Clinton, urging him to end the "foot-dragging" and start providing more direct military support to Iraqi dissidents living in exile -- start, in other words, directly supporting a coup attempt.

This sort of thing worked well in Southeast Asia, of course, where New Jersey resident Ngo Dinh Diem was selected to run South Vietnam in 1954. The New York Times Magazine just ran a funny obituary, in the 3 January issue, on Lucien Conein, the US intelligence operative who carried US$40,000 in cash to the South Vietnamese generals who ordered Diem assassinated in 1963 -- just in case they needed some help getting the job done and our assurance that we didn't mind at all, considering the way the Diem presidency turned out. (The Times suggests that other ex-spooks recognize Conein's death as "the end of their era." Fuck, we certainly hope so.)

Arrogance ties all of this behavior together, and the arrogant view of Iraq isn't much different than the arrogant view of Vietnam that led to 58,022 American deaths. Iraq keeps shooting at our planes, even now, but -- silly little people! -- they can't seem to hit very much. And we, of course, continue to have far more firepower. Hell, it's almost like using helicopter gunships and napalm-loaded B-52s against an enemy comprised almost entirely of poorly equipped ground infantry.

"Saddam is famous for doing whatever it takes to stay in power," Newsweek reports in its 11 January issue. "Now that the United States has made his removal from office a national objective, he knows he is fighting for his life. 'The worst thing you can do is to wound him, let him know you meant to kill him, and then let him survive,' says an Iraqi Shiite leader in London."

And so Iraqi officials representing Saddam Hussein have been meeting with a guy by the name of Osama bin Laden, Newsweek reports, discussing the possibility of attacking American targets in the Muslim world, using Iraqi weapons. Which makes a certain amount of sense; for weaker forces, after all, terrorist tactics -- hit suddenly, vanish quickly -- can do a remarkable amount of damage to a stronger enemy. Now, where have we heard that before?

Maybe the first of the suicide bombers will cross our transom in black pajamas, so we can finally understand the game we've been playing. Again.