LESSONS FROM THE LOST WAR

By Bruce W. Nelan

FOR 20 YEARS AMERICANS have been trying to learn the lessons of Vietnam while disagreeing on what they are. Given that endless debate, it was inevitable that Robert McNamara would conclude his controversial new book, In Retrospect, with a chapter on the lessons of the war. "I don't think the country has yet learned the lessons," he said in an interview with Time last week. "If it had, I wouldn't have written the book." McNamara points to the dangers of underestimating nationalism, of faulty evaluations, of asking the military to achieve more than weapons can deliver. The nation worries through that sort of list every time it sends its troops abroad, to Grenada or Panama or Somalia, fearing that the intervention may turn into "another Vietnam." But wars do not repeat themselves; each arises from a unique set of circumstances. The forces that led the U.S. to fight in Vietnam at all, and in the manner that it did, have changed forever. Another Vietnam is as likely as another Bunker Hill.

The war was not even about Vietnam. It was a protracted battle of the cold war, fought to block the extension of communist power in Asia. The U.S. commitment to South Vietnam was sealed in 1954 when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles went to Geneva for the nine-delegation conference on Indochina. He was determined to keep the French from turning their holdings over to Ho Chi Minh. After the conference decided to partition Vietnam for two years pending elections, the U.S. and South Vietnam went to work to make the partition permanent.

The remarkable thing now about the American involvement in Vietnam is that it was not remarkable then. It reflected a mainstream consensus that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then other dominoes like Thailand, Malaysia, even Indonesia could be next. Dulles' successors believed that they were following the lessons of World War II when they committed American troops to fight in Vietnam. If Hitler had been challenged early, they were convinced, the carnage of World War II might have been avoided. Now, by challenging Chinese and Soviet aggression in Vietnam, they hoped to head off World War III.

Because Vietnam was a hot war in the midst of a cold war, it was afflicted with contradictions. On the one hand, America's leaders assumed they had to fight; but at the same time, the U.S. had to fight within tight, self-set limits, fearful that using too much force would prompt China to intervene.

The lessons of Korea, where the U.S. had last fought a limited war to keep a country divided, were also very topical in Washington during the 1960s. "We had tried this approach before," wrote Dean Rusk, who was Secretary of State for most of the Vietnam years, "and it had worked; indeed we had to make it work to avoid slipping into general war." Recalls McGeorge Bundy, who served as National Security Adviser to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: "The image of our success in Korea was much in our minds. I used to say to myself, 'We haven't lost as many as in Korea.' Then we went past that number."

Vietnam was important enough to the U.S. for Johnson to commit more than 500,000 troops. Nevertheless, he was unwilling to risk invading the North, blockading its coasts, threatening the existence of its government or even bombing close to its border with China. American commanders were ordered to keep the war on the ground in the South, and Washington was reduced to hoping its soldiers could kill North Vietnamese troops faster than Hanoi could move them onto the Southern battlefield.

According to that scenario, the U.S. would attempt to arrange a stalemate similar to the one it gained in Korea in 1953. "We had a plan of sorts," says Bundy. "Grind up the other guy's army until he would presumably not take it anymore, and then we would get a political settlement." Rusk wrote in his memoirs, "I thought North Vietnam would reach a point when it would be unwilling to continue making those terrible sacrifices" and negotiate a settlement.

That point never arrived, as the U.S. was on the strategic defensive for the entire war. The North Vietnamese army and its Viet Cong surrogates were on the offensive. It didn't always look that way because U.S. forces roved far and wide on vast search-and-destroy missions to root out communist bases. But those were tactical efforts; the Americans were not allowed to march north to face the enemy at its source. The North kept the initiative, choosing when to attack and when to lie low and rebuild its strength. Although 1.1 million of its soldiers were killed in the war of attrition, the North continued to sacrifice them until the U.S. negotiated its own withdrawal in 1973.

Today's world confronts the U.S. with nothing remotely like Vietnam. There is no global struggle with communism to drag America into every brush-fire conflict from Yemen to Angola. U.S. Presidents have the freedom to pick their wars and fight them as they choose, without worrying about setting off a thermonuclear war. The U.S. could go into Somalia and Haiti knowing it would never involve 500,000 troops for years, because the final outcome in those countries is not vital to America's national interests--we do not believe we are in a long twilight struggle with Somali warlords. The U.S. can also decide to pull its forces out on a fixed schedule without worrying about losing credibility or toppling dominoes.

Of course the U.S. can still blunder. It might get into a struggle--in Bosnia, say--that it could not win in a reasonable time or at an acceptable price. Even so, the imperatives of the cold war have been replaced by an entirely different limiting factor: the difficulty of finding America's vital interests at stake in other people's conflicts. During the cold war the question was posed as, Is there any reason we can't intervene? Now it is, Why should we?

After 241 American troops on a pointless mission in Beirut were killed by a suicide bomber in 1983, the Reagan Administration struggled to draw lessons from the disaster. The next year, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger offered a checklist for evaluating the future uses of military forces abroad. Such actions should be necessary to protect vital national interests, he advised, and permit the use of powerful force to achieve a decisive victory. The objective must be clear and attainable by military means, and it must be supported by Congress and the people.

Such conditions for intervention constitute a Platonic ideal. To the extent Weinberger's list is followed, it is a rigid rule book that would keep American troops out of almost everywhere. If it is applied loosely, however, it is simply a set of common-sense precautions any President would take if he could. Even Vietnam does not measure up badly on that scale. For years the war was popular, the U.S. had a clear goal in defending the South, it was convinced intervention was in the national interest and, with a ratio of about 20 North Vietnamese killed for each American, decisive victory at first seemed possible.

George Bush brushed aside the Weinberger rules when he sent the Army first after General Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama and later to Somalia to safeguard relief shipments. Bill Clinton felt free to ignore the rules in Haiti, which is what a President gets paid for deciding when the nation's vital interests are at stake and trying to rally the support he needs. "Military force," says Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Adviser to George Bush, "ought to be an instrument of U.S. foreign policy and interests. That means you use it sometimes when you don't have popular support or when you have very limited goals." Says Seth Tillman, who was a staff member of Senator J. William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s: "The lesson of Vietnam is to forget about Vietnam. Be very discriminating about your interests and the feasibility of protecting them."

When McNamara confesses in his book, "We were wrong, terribly wrong," he means mostly that he and his colleagues misjudged the nature of the cold war and the role Vietnam played in it. In a 1991 interview with Time, McNamara recalled, "We thought there was considerable evidence China intended to extend its hegemony across Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond." But he added, "I'm not at all sure now." While many Americans agree with him that the domino theory was probably founded on an illusion, not everyone is convinced. Rusk was not, and neither is Walt Rostow, who was special assistant to L.B.J. "This was a war about the balance of power in all of Southeast Asia," says Rostow. "We lost the battle in Vietnam, but we won the war in Southeast Asia."

This is a crucial question. Did the Vietnam War, tragedy though it was, provide the time and security from the communist threat for Asia to develop its present independence and booming free-market prosperity? The argument on that is still ongoing. If the question is ever resolved, it will be done by historians, not by today's politicians and citizens. And the answer will come with a proviso: it will offer no guide to the future.

--Reported by Bonnie Angelo/ New York and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by BONNIE ANGELO/NEW YORK AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON