Vietnam as Metaphor

          When I was an undergraduate, I wrote and defended a thesis on the way the Vietnam War has been remembered in the United States. I covered a lot of material – memoirs, films, political rhetoric, commemorations, memorials, and subsequent wars – from the immediate post Saigon period to 2012. I am proud of my effort, but in retrospect there were a few important omissions – among them, the way the term “Vietnam” has become used as a byword for military dysfunction and overextension.
         I did cover this a little bit – I wrote about how President Jimmy Carter wanted Afghanistan to be the “Soviet’s Vietnam”, how President Bush promised that the Gulf War would not become “another Vietnam”, and comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. But I want to take a moment to explore how other war’s have been labeled as other countries Vietnams – for instance, how Gamal Abdel Nasser’s war against Yemen has been labelled “Egypt’s Vietnam”. In this phrasing, Vietnam is a conflict, not a country; it’s shorthand for a long, divisive war where the aggressor, a much larger country than the victim, was overconfident of victory, and lost in a way that resulted in soul searching and a reappraisal of their strategic goals.
         Take the Egypt example. Between 1953 – 1962, Nasser overthrew King Farouk I, nationalized the Suez Canal and humiliated the British, and turned Iraq, Syria, and Jordan into client states. By the early 1960s, he was the undisputed leader of the Arab world – and in Yemen, a country divided between a Republican North and a Royalist South, Nasser sought to extend this influence. But, as the Vietnam comparison suggests, he quickly committed Egypt to a difficult conflict, escalating from 3,000 troops in 1964 to 130,000 by 1967. Despite the surge in troops, the Royalists were able to hold strategic positions in the mountains. When the bulk of Nasser’s military was destroyed by Israel in the Six Days War in June of that year, it became clear that Egypt would lose.
       This comparison works in that both wars were happening around the same time. In the beginning of 1964, our presence in Vietnam was limited mostly to advisors – but there was an influx of troops after 1965, peaking in 1969. We stayed a bit longer, but the result was the same – thousands of people were killed, millions of dollars were spent, and the more powerful country had to settle for an unfavorable peace deal. But upon closer inspection the comparison falls apart – both Egyptians and Yemenis are Arabs – whereas the Americans and Vietnamese come from very different cultural traditions. America quickly rebounded, whereas Egypt would continue to decline, losing another war against Israel in 1973. Vietnam’s spectre may haunt international conflicts, but there are limits to the utility of the comparisons.
      Israel, despite defeating Egypt in two short wars during this time period, was soon stuck in what has been referred to as their “Vietnam” – yet another long, protracted conflict with no sight of achievable victory. In 1982, with the goal of evicting Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Israel invaded Lebanon. Booting the PLO proved easy, but the Lebanon they invaded was in the middle of a Civil War, and Israel was now sucked into that conflict. There were two moments that marked this “Vietnam” out as a disaster. Under the Israeli occupation, a Christian militia coordinated with Israeli forces to massacre thousands of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra neighbourhood and the Shatila refugee camp. The next year, the United States sent the Marines to help act as peacekeepers, and in October an Islamic Jihad truck bomb blew up their barracks, killing 241 Americans. In the end, Israel ended up occupying Lebanon until 2000.
       Despite the frequent comparisons, there are several problems with calling this “Israel’s Vietnam”. Most significantly, Israel and Lebanon share a border – whereas Vietnam is thousands of miles from the US, one can take a six-hour cab ride from Beirut to Jerusalem. Israel also believed that in dislodging the PLO, they were shoring up domestic defenses in the occupied territories of Palestine; the United States had no personal security stake in the future of Vietnam. And, in the end, America has formed a bond with Vietnam – whereas Israel has since reinvaded Lebanon and could do so again later this year.
         There are several other examples – Portugal, South Africa, Ethiopia, and several other states have all had “Vietnams” – but there is only one more analogy that I want to explore, and that is Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979 – sometimes known as Vietnam’s Vietnam. Despite both being nominally communist states, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was a millenarian fever dream that believed two million of their soldiers would be able to destroy fifty million Vietnamese – the goal was not war, but genocide. The Vietnamese quickly responded with a war of regime change. The Khmer Rouge, defeated, went into hiding near the Thai border, and for the next ten years a long, difficult, protracted war followed – one that was eventually settled by UN peace keepers.
         Of all of these examples, this is the one that was most informed by the actual war in Vietnam. It started four years after the previous war had ended, and despite the Khmer Rouge being the architects of a genocidal nightmare, the United States backed them over the Vietnamese it had been fighting so recently. Unlike the Vietnam war, however, Vietnam eventual won their “Vietnam” – the Khmer Rouge fragmented, its leaders were arrested, and a few are still serving life sentences for genocide. And like the case of Yemen and Lebanon, this was a much more localised conflict, and therefore operating under a very different context.
        So the descriptor “Vietnam” is really only telling us that a conflict is long, difficult, and somewhat controversial. It does not tell us about the ideological or geographical relationship between the two countries, who ended up winning, or what the long-term effect of the conflict was. Perhaps we should, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, remember that Vietnam is not just a war, but also a country – and find a better shorthand comparison.