Comparing the Iran and Vietnam Wars

The other day I asked my students in U.S. foreign policy to think about the relevance of the Vietnam War in relation to the ongoing war in Iran. More specifically, I wanted them to identify the similarities and differences between the two wars.

What is immediately striking is how domestic politics played such a seminal role in both conflicts. While American public opinion was generally in favour of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in the early years, things started to turn very sour after U.S. soldiers started arriving stateside in flag-draped coffins and body bags. As for Iran, just about every single poll and TV newscast since the first few weeks of the war have illustrated an overwhelming public repudiation of President Trump’s military adventurism.

The electoral implications were also quite apparent for the two wars. The U.S.-Iran War is clearly having a positive effect on the Democratic Party’s electability, as it looks set to capture both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, reading the political tea leaves from the Vietnam fallout, opted not to contest the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

Equally interesting, the U.S. press had a crucial, and mostly negative, impact on both the Vietnam and Iran conflicts. Who could forget Gen. William Westmoreland — the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (1964-1968) — maintaining that it was the media’s fault the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. While I take issue with his thesis, I do believe the news coverage and visuals of the first televised war served to raise serious concerns about why the U.S. was at war in Southeast Asia.

Another important similarity between the two wars was the absence of any demonstrative moral or strategic objectives. If anything, the Vietnam War became a moral quagmire for the U.S. Clearly, the overarching strategy of U.S. presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon was to simply not “lose Vietnam” to the communists — which inevitably led to a war of attrition and eventual failure.

In the case of Iran, the Trump administration’s war aims have never really been clear. They have ranged from eliminating the Islamic republic’s nuclear and ballistic missile capacity to terminating the country’s active support for aligned militias in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Nor was there any discussion of fostering democratic pluralism in Iran once “regime change” was achieved.

Both wars also involved serious breaches of various war conventions — with the attendant deaths of countless civilians and massacres of differing scale. Vietnam had the March 1968 My Lai massacre (and hundreds of other war crimes), where 504 Vietnamese women, children and elderly were murdered in gruesome ways, severely tainting the U.S war efforts in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In Iran, thousands of Iranian non-combatants have died from an unrelenting, large-scale and destructive U.S. bombing campaign. Crucially, a U.S. missile strike at the beginning of the war in February killed roughly 120 children at a primary school for girls in Minab, Iran.

Even though the two wars are vastly different in terms of intent, scope and criminality, the overall end result is the same – namely, the tragic loss of innocent lives through military violence.

As for differences, Vietnam was mainly caught up in the Cold War dynamic of East-West relations. So that war had little to do with economic considerations around oil, corporate America or strategic natural resources. Approximately 2.5 million Americans did at least one tour of duty in Vietnam (with some 58,000 not returning home alive).

The U.S.-Iran War has largely been an air operation, supplemented by naval assets and cruise missile strikes. There is no chance Trump will ever deploy “boots on the ground” as long as the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” (i.e., sending troops largely guarantees electoral catastrophe) is alive and well. There is also the centrality of economic impacts in terms of oil and fertilizer shortages and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As for common lessons unlearned, both Vietnam and Iran clearly demonstrate how a U.S. White House makes life-altering war decisions without fully understanding the history and culture of those targeted countries, their past relationships with the U.S., and the nationalistic sentiments of the people whom it is bombing.

More important, one should not forget the key role that U.S. governmental arrogance and hubris plays in clouding the judgment of presidents, advisers and aides and military leaders who contemplate going to war.

U.S. presidents generally don’t learn from the grave mistakes of their predecessors. Indeed, they tend to invariably forget the cardinal political rule — it is easy to get into a shooting war, but it is exceedingly difficult to extricate oneself from it.

Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.