Lessons of the Past: Comparing the War on Terror to the Vietnam Conflict

I am sure most of my readers are old enough to have at least learned about, if not lived through, the Vietnam Conflict. Some of you may have even participated in the protests of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, but all of you have either read the statistics from the history books or saw firsthand the reports from the field. I am going to take some time in this edition of my commentary to show the similarities between Vietnam and the current “War” on Terror and how current US policies will never produce a decisive victory over terrorist organizations.

First I will take a moment to briefly talk about casualty statistics in Vietnam. In the entire conflict, there were approximately 58,202 total deaths in all of the US forces sent to Vietnam. While any number of deaths is unacceptable, the truly amazing fact is that the Vietnamese forces from the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Vietcong combined numbered 1,100,000, or a factor of four enemy deaths to one US death.

So how, you may ask, did we lose the Vietnam Conflict?

The answer is simple. When you are fighting an enemy that is determined to win and has nothing to lose, you cannot defeat them through use of force alone. Herein lies the current problem with the “War“ on Terror.

Fast forward approximately 30 years to the present and lets examine what turns an innocent child growing up in the Middle East into someone willing to kill themselves for an ideal.

Most of the blame can actually be traced back to the spread of worldwide media and entertainment. As the children are growing up, they watch shows on television from the United States showing well fed people, beautiful women, nice cars, nice houses, etc. As any child, they begin to long for these things. As they get older, they realize that life is not like the television and they may never achieve the success they once dreamed of having. As they become more disillusioned and desperate, they become more easily persuaded by promises of an afterlife that will give them everything they ever desired while they were younger if they give their lives in the name of Allah. This creates the same type of enemy that US forces encountered in Vietnam, an enemy with nothing to lose and everything to gain. It is an enemy that is completely invulnerable to military force. They simply do not care, much like the NVA and Vietcong were willing to risk everything to win! Now you may wonder is our current policy effective in combating this?

The current US policy on the “War” on Terror has been one of strict military strategy coupled with no use of diplomacy.

This policy, against an enemy that does not fear death, is completely ineffectual. The only solution to the problem is to couple an aggressive infrastructure program and diplomatic policy with the use of force. Show the people that with time, they can have the life they grew up watching on TV, but it is not an overnight process. By improving on the lives of the citizens from countries that breed terrorism, we take away the only recruitment tool that the terrorist leaders have, the promise of a better afterlife. By giving the people of these countries the promise of a better future, and actually helping them achieve it, we take a powerful tool that is used by terrorist. The only way to achieve this goal, however, is to work more openly with other countries, and stop the “our way or no way” mentality of the current administration!