Vietnam in the Middle East

fighting with one hand tied behind our back?

[The diverse set of October 7 reflections at the Free Press site shows how the Hamas attack has inflamed passions on all sides. A lot of it has to do with the sharp contrast between the oppressor-oppressed framing and the civilization-barbarism framing, which I described in The Three Languages of Politics.

I have for a long time been unsympathetic to the oppressor-oppressed framing. But my conservatism is strongly tempered by a libertarian skepticism of the ability of government to engineer outcomes. Try to understand that this is the perspective that drove me to write what follows.]

When I first heard about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen a week ago resulting in 6 Houthi deaths, my first thought was: 6? Did the bombs totally miss? Shouldn’t that number be 6000, at least?

I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War. Officials in our military sometimes gave anonymous leaks to news reporters, complaining about having to fight with one hand tied behind our back. The complaints centered around restrictions on bombing. President Johnson and his advisers carefully circumscribed targets, out of concern about provoking China or causing excessive civilian suffering in North Vietnam.

The result was a policy of gradual escalation. “Slicing the salami,” as David Halberstam put in his searing critique The Best and the Brightest. Much of the thinking was short-term and tactical, with policies forged by compromise within the bureaucracy, rather than reflecting a single clear vision.

My current thoughts are dominated by a fear of repeating that. But note that I am not here to relitigate Vietnam. For the record, I continue to believe that even if we had the ability to achieve whatever we wanted militarily, success at nation-building was always going to be elusive. So I think that the best decision based on a single clear vision would have been to pull out much earlier rather than escalate.

In the Middle East, I think that our policy is for Israel to fight with one hand tied behind its back. Am I correct in that assessment, and if so, are we being helpful? If there were no U.S. aid to Israel, and hence no U.S. leverage over Israel, then I assume that Israel would have to fight much more ruthlessly in Gaza in order to avoid losing. How that would work out, and what it might mean for the United States is way outside my competence to assess.

In fact, this whole topic is outside my area of competence. I have never set foot anywhere in the region, except for Israel and Gaza. I have never set foot in the State Department or the Pentagon or in a graduate course on international relations.

You can read the rest of this essay out of curiosity, but do not expect an informed opinion. The only reason I’m writing it is that I am one of those people who is haunted by the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and through Halberstam I think I understand something about the organizational dynamics that were operating at the time and which I fear are operating today. In fact, I am hardly the first person to notice that Halberstam’s description of the bureaucratic decision-making process on Vietnam has more to teach managers than just about any course you can take in business school.

My concern with regard to the Red Sea is that the United States is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. What also reminds me of Vietnam is the way that American officials are bragging about “sending a signal.” That was the essence of the approach we took in Vietnam. The thinking was that once we sent a signal, the Communists would see that we were serious, so they would back down. Instead, the Communists figured out that sending signals was the only thing we were truly serious about; we were never going to try to deliver a decisive blow. So the Communists did not back down.

Violence endemic to the region

My premise concerning the Arab Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iran is the following:

Religious/political violence is endemic to the region.

I am not saying that the region is filled with violent individuals. For all I know, the typical individual there is more peace-loving than the typical individual in the West. But it does not matter if 99 percent of a population is peaceful. In the absence of strong, firmly-established institutions to keep order, a determined violent minority will shape everyone’s experience.

If this premise is correct, then there is no “solution to the Palestinian problem” that will end political-religious violence in the region. There is no “democracy initiative” that will end political-religious violence in the region. What is required is state capacity to preserve order.

As far as I can tell, no expert in the foreign policy community would say that I am correct about this “endemic violence” premise. Not out loud, anyway. I expect a lot of readers to unsubscribe because I said it. Sorry, not sorry. That is my opinion.

But based on my premise, I believe that we can expect one of three conditions to prevail in any of these countries.

1. A repressive regime that is willing to leave the West alone.

2. A civil war that is too busy with internal violence to attack the West, but which spews out a lot of refugees.

3. A repressive regime that is not willing to leave the West alone.

So (1) is the best we can hope for. Israel’s leaders once thought that with Hamas they could have (1). On October 7, they realized that they were dealing with (3).

President Obama became starry-eyed about the “Arab Spring.” His Administration decided that leaving Libya and Syria in the (1) camp was not good enough. Obama wound up facilitating a transition there to (2).

With Iran and its proxies, we have (3). I do not think we have much to lose by bombing the Houthis into oblivion, giving Israel the green light to take out Hezbollah, and even decapitating the Iranian regime while we are at it. We probably would end up with (2), which I think for us is an improvement over (3).

Not an improvement for the people who get bombed, obviously. And if you think that this makes such a policy immoral, you have a very defensible position. If you think that America does not have the stomach to do it, you are probably right.

I don’t think that Americans care enough about the Middle East for the United States to be able to participate in a long conflict there. But I could see our foreign policy bureaucracy, in its timidity and need for a compromise consensus, dragging out the conflict, the same way they did in Vietnam.

If we do not have the motivation to fight in the region, then eventually we are going to cut and run. And if that is where we are headed, it might as well be sooner rather than later.

Go big or go home. That’s my $.02

Note that whether you agree or disagree with this essay, keep your comments thoughtful. I do not want to see insults or flame wars or snide takes. I am not going to be as lenient with comment moderation as I usually am.

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One Hundred Days of War