Westmoreland wanted to attrit the Communists, but the Communists wanted to attrit us, and they had a much better understanding of whose will would be broken. So the military did a perfectly fine job of losing Vietnam all on its own. "Westmoreland himself,"historian Eliot Cohen writes, "operated under remarkably little civilian oversight."
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," historian Max Boot writes, "more than 90 percent of the South's population was under Saigon's control." But, by then, the U.S. was ready to quit the war.
In Iraq, Bush has been deferring to generals of widely varying quality. Some deserved deference, others didn't. The question of troop levels might seem a mere tactical issue, but it has vast strategic implications -- without enough troops, it is impossible to provide the security to the population that is one of the foundations of a sound counterinsurgency strategy. As it became clear that the military strategy in Iraq wasn't working, Bush stuck with it, partly on grounds that he didn't want to gainsay his generals, when he should have been firing them.
Now that he might order a surge, Bush will have to backtrack on his conviction that generals are best left alone. As he does, he should go back and understand the source of his mistake -- a misinterpretation of Vietnam.