During the 2005–6 debate over whether to withdraw from Iraq, Nixon’s former defense secretary concocted another false lesson of history: “During Richard Nixon’s first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South’s ability to defend itself. The result was a success—until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975.”1
Despite what Melvin Laird wrote in 2005 for Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Congress never did cut off aid to South Vietnam. Even Nixon and Sorley acknowledged that it appropriated $700 million in aid to Saigon for fiscal year 1975.2 This was less than half of the $1.47 billion that Nixon had requested, but it wasn’t nothing.
Telling such a big whopper in such a public forum might seem like a good way to get caught, but Laird didn’t. On January 17, 2007, he repeated the falsehood in an even more prominent forum: the Washington Post op-ed page:
The brewing fight in Congress over continued funding of the war in Iraq will not be the country’s first. It is an ominous reminder of 1975, when Congress cut off funding for the Vietnam War three years after our combat troops had left. With the assistance we promised South Vietnam in the 1972 Paris Accords—U.S. equipment, replacement parts and ammunition—it had won every major battle since we left. But Congress lost the will to keep our promise and killed the appropriation. The result was a bloodbath.
There was a bloodbath, but it didn’t result from an imaginary congressional aid cutoff, or even from the genuine cuts Congress made in Nixon’s aid request. It resulted from Nixon’s “decent interval” exit strategy.
Laird demonstrated the power of political myth to warp policy debates. In Foreign Affairs, he urged policy makers to adopt an “Iraqization” program of training and equipping Baghdad’s army.3 He portrayed Vietnamization as a victorious strategy to be used as a model. In the Post, he urged the new, Democratic Congress not to do what many of its members had been elected to do: bring American troops home from Iraq. (Laird characterized withdrawing the troops as cutting off funding for the war, which is misleading. As we have seen, long after American troops came home from Vietnam, America continued to fund the war waged by South Vietnam’s military. Withdrawing and cutting off funds are two different things.)
Armed with Nixon’s Dolchstoßlegende, Laird and his allies won their policy battles in Washington. Sadly but predictably, their policies once again failed to win a war. In 2007, President Bush vetoed troop withdrawal legislation and instead launched “the surge,” a sharp, temporary increase in American troops in Iraq. In 2008, he negotiated an agreement with the Iraqi government to allow American troops to remain another three years past the end of his presidency. These five additional years of war—five years of American training and equipping the Iraqi army—did not stop four divisions of the Iraqi army from dropping their weapons, tearing off their uniforms, and fleeing before the irregular insurgents of the Islamic State in June of 2014.4 As in Vietnam, the American-trained forces in Iraq greatly outnumbered the foes from whom they fled. They were well-equipped, but they let their equipment fall into the hands of their attackers.5 “They are crumbling,” said James Dubik, the lieutenant general in charge of training the Iraqis during the surge.6
The crucial difference between training people to fight and winning their loyalty to our side of a fight revealed itself in Iraq, just as it had decades earlier in Vietnam. It was one more lesson of Vietnam obscured by Nixonian myth.