In our collective memory of the war in Vietnam, certain phrases have come to symbolize the self-delusion and the savagery of that traumatic episode in American history. The light at the end of the tunnel. Bomb them back into the Stone Age<\/em>. That second line is generally attributed to the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, four-star Gen. Curtis LeMay. In fact, he denied ever saying it. It was actually the humorist Art Buchwald who coined the phrase to satirize LeMay\u2019s philosophy of wreaking total destruction on the enemy.<\/p>\n But in his prime-time address to the nation on April 1st<\/sup><\/span> on the state of the war in Iran, Donald Trump went much further than LeMay ever did \u2013 or didn\u2019t \u2013 and this time using the platform of the presidency. After assuring us for the nth time that the end of the war, the light at the end of the tunnel was in view, he vowed that, \u201cOver the next two to three weeks, we\u2019re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages (sic), where they belong.\u201d<\/p>\n The specter of \u201canother Vietnam\u201d has hovered over all of America\u2019s foreign wars in the half-century since the end of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The phrase was thrown around a lot during the wars in Central America in the early 1980s, but it was never accurate because the United States chose not to insert significant numbers of ground troops. It never really applied to the smaller invasions in Grenada and Panama later in the decade, and it was equally irrelevant to the first Gulf War in 1990, when the \u201cPowell doctrine\u201d dictated overwhelming force, realistic objectives, and a clear exit strategy. The Vietnam analogy was arguably more justified in George W. Bush\u2019s war in Iraq, in the sense that it dragged on interminably and messily, with heavy American and allied losses, but even there the hostile regime was rapidly driven from power by the initial \u201cshock and awe\u201d phase of the invasion. Afghanistan may be the clearest analogue, since the 20-year-long misadventure there had neither realistic political objectives nor a clear exit strategy, and the eventual ugly withdrawal that ceded power back to the Taliban contained powerful echoes of the chaotic collapse of Saigon.<\/p>\n So for the most part, \u201canother Vietnam\u201d has been a facile and overblown clich\u00e9 \u2013 until now. This isn\u2019t to say that we will go down that same decade-long road in Iran; every war is different. Yet the first month of Operation Epic Fury is unnervingly reminiscent of where things stood by the end of the first month of the war in Vietnam, now that an expeditionary force of thousands of Marines and paratroopers of the 82nd<\/sup><\/span> Airborne stand ready to put boots on the ground in the Persian Gulf, with reports indicating that the Pentagon is making plans for the dispatch of an additional 10,000 troops.<\/p>\n The fear that this will lead to the introduction of ground troops increased exponentially when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George within 24 hours of Trump\u2019s speech, replacing him with Hegseth\u2019s senior military assistant, Gen. Christopher LaNeve. Before taking up that post, George had been the highly respected chief of staff of Joint Forces Command and before that commander of the 82nd<\/sup><\/span> Airborne. The timing of George\u2019s peremptory removal \u2013 the latest in Hegseth\u2019s ongoing purge of some 20 flag officers \u2013 strongly suggests that it was triggered by his opposition to whatever the administration plans to do next in Iran.<\/p>\n The immediate trigger for the war in Vietnam was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, passed with near-unanimous congressional approval, in response to a purported threat to U.S. naval forces in the South China Sea that proved to be almost entirely spurious. This time, of course, there was no such consultation with Congress and no equivalent resolution. In a Senate hearing on March 18th<\/sup><\/span>, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard even declined to say whether U.S. intelligence agencies had found any evidence that Iran\u2019s nuclear program posed an imminent threat to the United States. That wasn\u2019t their job, she said, adding that it was entirely up to President Trump, who of course had already claimed that the program had been \u201cobliterated\u201d by the 12-day bombardment of Iran\u2019s nuclear sites just nine months ago. (It might be noted in passing that Gabbard felt no such inhibitions about delivering the conclusions of the intelligence agencies on the threat to Taiwan \u2013 that \u201cChina likely prefers to set the conditions for an eventual peaceful reunification with Taiwan, short of conflict.\u201d She had also said in her written statement that Iran had \u201cmade no effort to\u2026 rebuild their enrichment capability\u201d since last June\u2019s bombing campaign.)<\/span><\/p>\n The Tonkin Gulf Resolution set the stage for Operation Rolling Thunder, a punitive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, launched in March 1965, that eventually metastasized into ten years of sustained aerial bombardment of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on tiny Quang Tri alone, on the edge of the demilitarized zone \u2013 a province smaller than the state of Connecticut \u2013 than fell on Germany in the whole of World War Two. It was a textbook illustration of what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would call \u201cmaximum lethality,\u201d and the month-long bombardment of Iran has been a pinprick by comparison.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no denying the awesome power and destructiveness of that bombing campaign, or the courage, discipline, and skill of the pilots and aircrew who conducted it, and all of those things are equally true of the current campaign in Iran. Rolling Thunder wiped out railway lines, highways, bridges, factories, storage depots, anti-aircraft sites, and port facilities. It obliterated \u2013 to use one of Trump\u2019s favorite words \u2013 the coastal city of Vinh, which served as the logistical hub for seaborne deliveries of military equipment from China and the Soviet Union through the port of Hai Phong destined for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the vital north-to-south supply line along the Vietnam-Laos border. The technological sophistication of the bombing campaign, like today\u2019s, was breathtaking, coordinated by a command center in Thailand, Operation Igloo White, that housed the world\u2019s most advanced IBM computer systems. Patrolling aircraft laden with advanced electronic gizmos transmitted real-time data to these computers, and airstrikes were called in as soon as targets were identified, with as little as two minutes \u201cfrom the beep to the bomb.\u201d The trail was strewn with state-of-the-art air-dropped sensors that could detect the rumble of a truck or the scent of human urine. Clandestine infiltration operations were even remotely directed by the first experimental use of the touch screen. But in the end, while it devastated North Vietnam\u2019s physical infrastructure and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese combatants and civilians, the decade of bombing did nothing to break Vietnam\u2019s will or prevent its eventual victory. The campaign only stiffened the will to resist. Air power alone has never settled a war.<\/p>\n Once Rolling Thunder began, the next step, echoed by today\u2019s deployment of a Marine expeditionary force to the Persian Gulf, was to dispatch 3,500 Marines to Da Nang, complemented by the Navy\u2019s Seventh Fleet. Their purpose was to create a beachhead and a protective shield for the nearby US airbase, which served as the hub of the bombing campaign as well as the full rollout of Operation Ranch Hand, which would dump some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides on Vietnam\u2019s forests and farm lands.<\/p>\n Once those first Marines were installed in Da Nang, their presence became an object lesson in mission creep. When they inevitably came under attack, reinforcements followed, steadily expanding their area of operations, widening the defensive perimeter against mortar and rocket attacks and raids by enemy sappers, building out a string of secondary bases and port facilities, and moving on to offensive operations that reached all the way to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and mountainous border with Laos, fifty miles away. Within three years, the initial force of 3,500 American troops had morphed into almost 550,000.<\/p>\n There was overwhelming public backing for that early stage of the war in Vietnam. Even at the end of 1965, with almost 2,000 American dead, a Gallup poll showed public support running at 64 percent. Not until the summer of 1968, after the Tet Offensive, and with more than 30,000 American fatalities, did public support dip below 40 percent \u2013 the same, in other words, as the proportion that supported the war in Iran on day one.<\/p>\n Since then the numbers have continued to decline. By mid-March, only 37 percent of respondents in a Washington Post<\/em> poll thought that the level of U.S. casualties was acceptable \u2013 and at that point the death toll stood at just seven. Now that the Marines and the 82nd<\/sup><\/span> Airborne are in position, an Economist<\/em>\/YouGov poll conducted between March 27th<\/sup><\/span> and 30th<\/sup><\/span> shows just 14 percent in favor of the introduction of ground troops, with 62 percent opposed, and even fewer support the use of \u201clarge numbers\u201d of troops. Even among Trump\u2019s hard-core self-identified MAGA base, support for boots on the ground is at only 41 percent.<\/p>\n At this early stage of the war, the exact purpose of the Marine and Airborne deployment remains undefined. It may be designed simply to keep all future military options open, or as a performative show of muscle to back up whatever talks may or may not be underway between Iran and a motley crew of U.S. negotiators \u2013 real estate mogul and golfing buddy Steve Witkoff, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance \u2013 none of whom has any expert knowledge of Iran, its history, or its politics. Earlier talks with Witkoff and Kushner had shown some promise of a peaceful resolution of the nuclear problem, but they hadn\u2019t actually bothered to take an American nuclear expert with them, had no grasp of the technical issues involved, and so reported to Trump that they saw no point in further negotiations \u2013 which prompted his decision to launch the war.<\/p>\n Whatever the initial point of their deployment, if the ground forces now arrayed against Iran are actually to use their specialized combat skills, it will most likely be for an operation akin to the creation of that first beachhead in Da Nang. This would entail the seizure of one or more of Iran\u2019s militarized islands in the Persian Gulf, most notably its main oil export terminal on Kharg Island \u2013 \u201cForbidden Island,\u201d as the Iranians call it \u2013 where petroleum is brought by undersea pipelines from three giant offshore oilfields, accounting for 90 percent of Iran\u2019s oil exports. The island is a little way up the Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which 20 percent of the world\u2019s oil supplies pass, as well as huge shipments of fertilizer and helium, essential inputs for global agriculture and microchip production.<\/p>\n \u201cTake Kharg Island, this war is over,\u201d declared Senator Lindsay Graham, the most hawkish of the Trump whisperers. \u201cWe could take it very easily.\u201d And Trump agreed. However, he allowed, \u201cIt would also mean we had to be there for a while.\u201d But at what cost? Because taking Kharg Island would present much greater military and logistical challenges than the first landings in Vietnam. Inevitably American troops would come under attack and could easily sustain hundreds of fatalities. It\u2019s worth recalling that even seizing the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 against only token resistance resulted in 19 American dead.<\/p>\n Iran has not been sitting idly by all this time, of course. It has reportedly sowed the island with anti-personnel and anti-armor mines and beefed up multiple other layers of defenses along the rugged mountainous shoreline of the Gulf, which is less than 20 miles away at its closest point, with a labyrinth of cliffs, caves, inlets, and rocky outcrops that offer countless hard-to-detect places of concealment for boats, drones, artillery, and missiles \u2013 including the small, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles known as MANPADs. \u201cThey have a thousand miles of coastline, thousands of small boats,\u201d says retired Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson, who was deputy chief of staff of the Multinational Task Force in Iraq. \u201cThere are just so many things they could do to make our lives miserable there, number one, and number two, to kill Americans.\u201d The key point, he adds, is that \u201cYou don\u2019t know what you don\u2019t know. You don\u2019t know how bad it is until you\u2019re on the ground. And when that happens, it\u2019s too late.\u201d Which was, in a nutshell, how the Vietnam quagmire took shape.<\/p>\n While experienced mainstream military leaders like Anderson worry about likely casualties, the most influential military figures in MAGA circles go much further. Opposition to the war from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Megyn Kelly has been well publicized. But more damning are the fears of pre-eminent MAGA military insiders like Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, and a major Republican Party donor. Speaking in late March at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas, Prince conjured a nightmarish vision of what would happen if Trump sent in ground troops. \u201cMy real concern,\u201d he said, \u201cis that if they try to put boots on the ground and force the Strait of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks. And I don\u2019t think people are really prepared for that.\u201d<\/p>\n Success in war is about much more than firepower. It demands a clear understanding of the enemy\u2019s history, ideology, culture, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses \u2013 little of which, other than its military and technological inferiority, appears to have been taken into account in launching the current assault on Iran. For most Americans, and apparently for the current crop of policymakers, modern Iranian history begins in 1979, with the Islamic revolution and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. But for the Iranian regime, and for serious students of geopolitical history, it goes back at least to 1953, when the CIA and Britain\u2019s MI6 joined forces to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh for the sin of nationalizing Iran\u2019s oil industry. Arguably it goes back even earlier, to 1908, when the Anglo Persian Oil Company, the predecessor of today\u2019s BP, gained majority control of Iranian oil reserves. (One of the latest Iranian attacks on a foreign target, on Tuesday, was a BP facility in Iraqi Kurdistan \u2013 surely no accident; the Iranians have long memories.)<\/p>\n Similarly in Vietnam, national memory did not start with Marine landings in Da Nang. It goes back more than a millennium, celebrating repeated wars of resistance to invasion from China, its powerful northern neighbor. It encompasses almost a hundred years of brutal French colonial occupation, punctuated by a Japanese occupation during World War Two, until the French were driven out in 1954 by the masterful tactics of Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu. After repeated friendly overtures to President Harry Truman by Ho Chi Minh, all of which went unanswered, the Americans threw their full support behind the French, their loyal and long-suffering allies in the Second World War, granting them exemption from the postwar process of global decolonization. The Vietnamese remembered that too, and spent decades, like the Iranians, honing their strategies of resistance. Iran has been doing likewise for 47 years now, since the triumph of the Islamic Revolution.<\/p>\n Wartime success also rests heavily on understanding the difference between tactical and strategic intelligence, the first being no substitute for the second. The Israelis in particular have intelligence capabilities that were inconceivable in the Vietnam era, apparently allowing them to track the minutest movement or momentary communication by Iran\u2019s political and military leadership and target them systematically for assassination. But it\u2019s a huge leap from that to the assumption, which Israel in particular seems to have made, that this would lead to the collapse of the regime. The result seems to have been just the opposite: the ascent of a more radical clerical and military leadership, embittered and vengeful (not least as a result of the deaths of several members of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khameini\u2019s immediate family), locked in what it sees as an existential battle, with a nuclear deterrent being the only way ultimately to guarantee its survival.<\/p>\n Again, this process of radicalization while under attack has a direct parallel in Vietnam. America never lost its fixation on Ho Chi Minh as the incarnation of Vietnamese leadership, and Gen. Giap as its military mastermind. But in fact, by the early 1960s, the real power in Hanoi had shifted toward the more doctrinaire Stalinist Le Duan, who foresaw the likelihood of an American invasion and prepared accordingly, in close alliance not with Giap but with a more hardline general, Nguyen Chi Thanh. It was Thanh, not Giap, who was the true architect of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Perhaps the most stunning illustration of the U.S. failure to understand the political dynamics of its adversary is that the massively detailed index to the 446-page memoir of General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, contains not a single reference to Le Duan, and the text itself has just a glancing two-sentence reference to Gen. Thanh.<\/p>\n Plans for war, as the clich\u00e9 has it, never survive first contact with the enemy, who always has agency. Both in Vietnam and Iran, the revolutionary leadership knew that it would always be massively outgunned. But both had strategic advantages that favored asymmetric warfare, with tactics based on patience, attrition of the enemy\u2019s forces and its political will, and a willingness to absorb heavy casualties. The Vietnamese were masters of this. The most important card they held was control of the port of Hai Phong, where a steady stream of supplies \u2013 trucks, anti-aircraft weapons, and small arms \u2013 arrived from China and the Soviet Union, bound for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While American generals chafed to bombard and blockade Hai Phong, they were always held back by the politicians\u2019 fear of provoking direct conflict with the two great Communist powers. Iran now holds a card of comparable value, if different character, in its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz and thereby of much of the global economy \u2013 not to mention the Achilles\u2019 heel of all American governments, the price of gasoline.<\/p>\n Above all, though, the outcome of war is determined by the quirks of geography, be it the tree lines at Gettysburg, the open fields of Flanders, or the barren, rocky wastes of Afghanistan. In Vietnam, it was the forbidding, densely forested mountains that sheltered the Ho Chi Minh Trail. \u201cTo seize and control the mountains is to solve the whole problem of Vietnam,\u201d Giap said. \u201cWe will entice the Americans close to the border [with Laos] and bleed them without mercy.\u201d Which is exactly what happened.<\/p>\n Every battlefield has its own distinctive features, of course. There are no rainforests in Iran. But the country is five times larger than Vietnam. Its population is 93 million, six times the size of North Vietnam\u2019s in 1965. It is a vast land of mountains, high desert plateaus, and a long, rocky coastline that protects Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz. An attack on shipping by a single drone, which can be produced for a few thousand dollars with a 3-D printer hidden undetected in a garage or basement, is enough to paralyze ship traffic, and the same is true of the fear of mines, whether or not they actually exist.<\/p>\n Assuming that Kharg Island, or perhaps some other smaller island in the strait, is the likeliest target of the Marine expeditionary forces, their amphibious landing craft would have to thread the same path through potential minefields, run the gauntlet of the same low-tech coastal defenses, heading westward through the strait, that commercial vessels have to contend with as they head east. And once they had seized Kharg Island, the Marines would be sitting ducks for attack, just like their predecessors in Da Nang. Military experts estimate that casualties could easily run into the hundreds, for which even the most fervent of Trump supporters have approximately zero appetite.<\/p>\n And none of this even deals with the greatest challenge of all, the nuclear threat posed by Iran, which Trump now blithely dismisses as irrelevant, even though it was the primary justification for the war. This presents the problem of retrieving Iran\u2019s buried stockpile of some 440 kilograms (970 pounds) of 60 percent enriched uranium. Once this is further enriched to 90 percent purity, it\u2019s enough to manufacture 10 or 12 nuclear bombs (and 60 percent enrichment, Gen. Anderson notes, actually takes you 99 percent of the way to that target). Most of this stockpile is presumed to be entombed in deep tunnels beneath the Zagros Mountains near Isfahan, although according to the International Atomic Energy Agency some of it is at Natanz and perhaps also at Fordow, the other two nuclear sites bombed last year. There\u2019s also a stock of less highly enriched uranium lurking somewhere in the wings \u2013 some of it to five percent, some to 20 percent, but all of it potentially upgradable through a small clandestine enrichment program.<\/p>\n Military experts use sober language to describe a raid on Isfahan: it would be \u201cextremely challenging.\u201d It would involve sending in a highly specialized Special Forces unit trained in identifying and handling nuclear material; creating a defensible airstrip for heavy-lift cargo planes with excavating equipment and engineers to penetrate the rubble and reach the tunnels; sustaining air and satellite support; creating a defensible perimeter for the operation (and presumably a medevac facility for the wounded); warding off inevitable attacks by local forces; locating the heavy steel canisters that house the uranium, which are like large scuba tanks; being sure you get all of them, since missing even 10 percent of the uranium would still leave enough for one bomb; making sure they\u2019re not dropped, damaged, or banged together; lugging them away under fire and airlifting them out of the country before finally decontaminating everything and everyone they\u2019ve touched. To the lay observer, \u201cextremely challenging\u201d sounds like a serious understatement.<\/p>\n Taking Isfahan would dwarf any of the prime strategic targets that the U.S. identified during the war in Vietnam, none of which it ever succeeded in capturing or destroying. Years of aerial attacks, and eventually a ground invasion of Cambodia supported by artillery and massive bombing by giant B-52s \u2013 the newest generation of which are now running bombing raids on Iran out of the RAF\u2019s Fairford airbase in England \u2013 all failed to destroy the command center of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the remote village of La Hap in Laos, or COSVN in Cambodia \u2013 the Central Office for South Vietnam \u2013 which U.S. planners saw as a kind of Pentagon-in-the-Jungle.<\/p>\n The United States took decades to recover from the trauma of Vietnam. It is still smarting from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But failure in Iran could be even more consequential to the world order. There has been no regime change, no matter how much Trump may finesse the meaning of the term to cover Iran\u2019s newest batch of clerical and military leaders. The nuclear threat remains unresolved, and may, in the hands of these new, undefeated, and vengeful leaders, grow potentially more serious than before. Even if the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, that would do no more than restore the status quo ante \u2013 and not even that, since the Gulf states\u2019 oil and gas facilities so far damaged by Iranian attacks will take months or years to repair.<\/p>\n If there has been a single beneficiary from the conflict so far, it\u2019s probably Russia, which has reaped an unexpected windfall through the radical depletion of stocks of exorbitantly expensive Patriot, THAAD, and other aerial interceptors, limiting Ukraine\u2019s ability to defend itself against ballistic and cruise missiles.<\/p>\n It took eight years for sophisticated negotiators, led by Henry Kissinger, to extricate the United States from Vietnam. The architects of that war came to be known as \u201cthe Best and the Brightest.\u201d Sadly, that is not a phrase that immediately springs to mind in describing the planners of what the president now likes to call our current \u201clittle journey\u201d into Iran.<\/p>\n\n George Black, a frequent contributor to the <\/em>Washington Spectator, is the author of <\/em>The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam (Knopf, 2023).<\/em><\/p>\n\n Source<\/a><\/p>\r\nThe Limits of Air Power<\/h5>\n
Boots on the Ground<\/h5>\n
\u201cYou Don\u2019t Know What You Don\u2019t Know\u201d<\/h5>\n
Enemies Have a Long Memory<\/h5>\n
Fighting in Hostile Terrain<\/h5>\n
Source link washingtonspectator.org<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In our collective memory of the war in Vietnam, certain phrases have come to symbolize the self-delusion and the savagery of that traumatic episode in American history. The light at the end of the tunnel. Bomb them back into the Stone Age. That second line is generally attributed to the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, four-star Gen. Curtis LeMay.…","protected":false},"author":372,"featured_media":75,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/372"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}