Bush's Vietnam syndrome: the president draws a wrong lesson.

PRESIDENT BUSH is infected with a Vietnam syndrome. He just doesn't know it.

"I guess if you're 60 years old, you tend to be a product of the Vietnam era," Bush told me and other journalists in the Oval Office recently, when asked if we need more troops in Iraq. "I remember the tactical decisions being made out of the White House during that period of time. I thought it was a mistake then and I think it's a mistake now. And, therefore, a president must have confidence and faith in the people who are actually there determining whether or not our strategy, our tactics are going to achieve the objective."

I asked Bush what if his man on the ground in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, is wrong about troop levels. "Then I picked the wrong general," he said. "And if he's wrong, I'm wrong."

Bush thinks he's avoiding a mistake of the Vietnam War, but he has only internalized a damaging, erroneous conservative belief about the conflict. Conservatives traditionally hold that it was the civilian leadership that lost the Vietnam War by restraining the military, which would have won the war but for civilian meddling.

This belief leads to a perversion of civil-military relations--to wit, Bush's astonishing view that the commander-in-chief should have no opinion on one of the most important policy questions in the Iraq War. Troop levels help determine what strategy we can pursue. And Bush's view also misunderstands what went wrong in Vietnam.

During the Kennedy administration, civilian leadership had a better understanding of the budding war in Vietnam than the military did. Lyndon Johnson's infamous restraints on the military weren't all necessarily that unreasonable, and in key respects he allowed the military to have its way. Finally, the military itself had no idea how to win the war.

The true lesson of Vietnam is that the civilian leadership should exercise close supervision of the military and ensure that, when fighting an insurgency, it utilizes all those tools--such as intensive small-unit patrolling, intelligence gathering, and training of indigenous forces--that don't come naturally to a U.S. Army that is most comfortable when simply closing with and smashing a conventional enemy.

As Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. recounts in his classic book on the military's failures in the war, The Army and Vietnam, it was a civilian, President John F. Kennedy, who was prescient about the coming era of guerrilla warfare. He pushed the Army to learn counterinsurgency warfare, but it fundamentally ignored him. It undertook a lot of activity related to counterinsurgency, but most of it was superficial and intended only to create the impression of responding to Kennedy's proddings.

The civilian who bears the brunt of conservatives' ire is, of course, LBJ. He once bragged that "they can't bomb an outhouse without my approval," and imposed political constraints on the use of force. But in a limited war, such constraints are inevitable. The question is whether they make sense or not. The strategy of "diplomatic signaling" through an air campaign of "gradual escalation" was indeed a disaster. As Max Boot points out in his book The Savage Wars of Peace, the exquisitely calibrated Rolling Thunder air campaign dropped on average 800 tons of bombs a day on North Vietnam for more than three years with almost nothing to show for it.

But LBJ's obstacles shouldn't be exaggerated. According to Eliot A. Cohen in Supreme Command, "Johnson ended up approving most of the targets submitted by the Joint Chief of Staff." (Of course, the chiefs may have tailored the targets they submitted to the political constraints.) And some of LBJ's limits were for sound reasons. A ground invasion of the North might well have triggered a Chinese response. In general, the fear of provoking the Chinese by too wide-ranging a bombing campaign in the North might have been exaggerated, but it was reasonable enough given the recent, unhappy experience of drawing the Chinese into the Korean War.

In any case, at least early on, the Viet Cong were not over-dependent on support from the North, so hitting the North was in no way a magic bullet. A CIA study estimated that in 1965 the Viet Cong were dependent on only twelve tons a day of supplies from external sources--"an amount," Boot writes, "that, in U.S. terms, could be carried in on a tractor-trailer rig or 15 pickup trucks." Even a complete occupation of the North might not have been enough to win the war, Boot argues, since the French had done it and still lost.

It wasn't civilian "meddling" by LBJ, McNamara, et al. in and of itself, then, that was the problem. As Cohen puts it, "The argument thus becomes less a question of how they exercised civilian control than one of how well--or poorly--they thought about strategy."

If the air war was an agonizingly gradual affair, the buildup on the ground wasn't. When Gen. William C. Westmoreland wanted 200,000 troops in 1965, LBJ quickly ponied them up. Cohen writes, "What is most striking is McNamara's and Johnson's willingness to write large checks on American military manpower through 1968, extending up to, but not including, a full mobilization of the reserves."

The problem was that the military's ideas about how to wage the war were no better than the civilian leaders'. The military was particularly clueless about counterinsurgency, which typically requires careful discrimination in applying firepower, light infantry undertaking intensive patrolling, and political action to undermine the basis of the insurgents' support in the population. With the exception of the Marines, the military wanted nothing to do with that: It was always more bombing and more troops. The military dreamed of replicating World War II with a strategy of bombing industrial sites in the North and of bleeding the Viet Cong into submission in the South.

Prior to our massive intervention, the South Vietnamese had been running large-scale search-and-destroy missions for years that were easily avoided by the VC, but the American military assumed that, if it took over, it could succeed in implementing the same flawed strategy on the basis of its superior firepower and technical prowess. Whenever it was clear that the strategy was failing, the Army's answer was always more of the same.

Westmoreland wanted to attrit the Communists, but the Communists wanted to attrit us, and had a much better understanding of whose will would be broken (the Tet Offensive bled the Viet Cong dry, but had the intended political effect in Washington). Instead of pacifying the population centers in the coastal areas, Westmoreland chased the Communists in the sparsely populated Highlands. The Communists, meanwhile, were happy to have us concentrate on the Highlands instead of having us take away their base among the population. "Westmoreland's strategy meshed perfectly with [North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen] Giap's," Boot writes.

So the military did a perfectly fine job of losing Vietnam all on its own. In fact, this was mostly what it was left to do. "Westmoreland himself," Cohen writes, "operated under remarkably little civilian oversight." His fundamental assumptions were never probed by his civilian superiors.

Conservatives still believe, partly under the influence of historian Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., author of On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, that the U.S. lost in Vietnam because the military wasn't given the freedom to pursue a conventional war. In a paper for the Cato Institute, Jeffrey Record, who teaches at the Air War College, writes of Summers, "He argued--in complete contradiction to the historical record--that the Army failed in Vietnam because it was not sufficiently conventional in fighting the war." Eventually, the South did succumb to a conventional invasion from the North, but that was only because the U.S. had stopped supporting it, its political will broken by the insurgency in the South.

Too late, Gen. Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland's replacement, emphasized pacification of populated areas and other classic counterinsurgency tactics. Together with more bombing in the North, they met with some success. "By 1970," Boot writes, "more than 90% of the South's population was under Saigon's control." But Abrams still encountered mulish resistance from an Army loath to give up its over-reliance on firepower.

Even in defeat, the Army wasn't going to change its doctrine. It just decided never to fight insurgencies again. That has played a role in our difficulties in Iraq, as the Army was insufficiently prepared for the counterinsurgency it has had to wage. If we lose there--partly because we were slow to adopt with any consistency sound counterinsurgency tactics, partly because we didn't have the troop levels to support them once we did--it will likely prompt the Army, and many conservatives, to try to write off counterinsurgency for another generation.

This would be ill-advised for two reasons. One, insurgencies are defeatable. Max Boot notes that post-World War II guerrilla fighters have been defeated in Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Turkey, El Salvador, Kenya, Guatemala, and Mexico, among other places. Two, if we lose in Iraq, it will put an even greater premium on insurgency warfare, as our enemies will realize it's the surest way to frustrate us. So we will have to either scale back our geopolitical ambitions or learn how to fight insurgents after all.

President Bush believes he is learning from Vietnam, but in misunderstanding that war--and absenting himself from decisions of the utmost consequence--he may be playing his role in a repeat of it.