When David Halberstam called the war in Iraq the “greatest foreign policy miscalculation of my lifetime” during a speech at Indiana University last month, he drew nervous twitters from an audience obviously unused to such blunt analysis.
But the prize-winning author and journalist, who was killed in a car crash this week, had a way of speaking the truth, no holds barred. He covered the war in Vietnam and later chronicled the U.S. misadventure in two books. More recently he used his expertise to compare the wars in Vietnam and Iraq and his most recent speeches reflected the realities on the ground and in Washington.
It is the kind of frankness sadly lacking in U.S. government and military leaders about the current war in Iraq. The Bush administration has gone out of its way to offer optimistic assessments of a war that Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid a few days ago called “lost.” It might not have been Reid’s most elegant moment, but it reminded us that Halberstam and others drew fire from the Johnson administration when they described the war in Vietnam as “unwinnable.” Thousands died before the inevitable U.S. withdrawal in 1975.
In the 1960s, while reporting from Saigon, Halberstam was prominent among a small knot of journalists who challenged the credibility of optimistic combat reports. It angered U.S. officials but was borne out as the war dragged on. After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq went sour, Halberstam saw parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. He concluded that in both cases, American leaders went to war either unaware of or ignoring the history and potency of nationalism. In both instances, U.S. leaders assumed that American military superiority would assure victory, failing to understand until much later that insurgencies could stand up to a conventional army.
At a journalism conference in Tennessee last year, Halberstam said government criticism of media reports from Iraq reminded him of the experience he had in Saigon. “The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around and they’ve used up their credibility.”
Halberstam’s book, “The Making of a Quagmire,” described how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam in the early 1960s. In Iraq, he heard the troubling echoes of Vietnam.
