Iran and Vietnam

America is less than a week into the latest phase of the war in Iran, and we’re already thinking about Vietnam. Namely how the Congress, which in 1964 had voted almost unanimously to authorize our entry into the war in Indochina, managed, in the thick of the fight, to force an end to our support for our ally. We abandoned South Vietnam to a half century of communist tyranny in Southeast Asia.Could that — or something like it — happen in respect of Iran? No doubt there are important differences between the two wars. We have not, say, yet sent ground troops to Iran, in contrast to Vietnam, where, at one point, we had more than half a million GIs. A total of more than 2 million American troops would serve in Vietnam before it was over. While we haven’t sent GIs to Iran as yet, neither has the president ruled it out.To have done so, of course, would send to our foes — and friends — a signal of weakness. History teaches that authorizations to use military force, in contrast with declarations of war, can contain the seeds of retreat. The Tonkin Gulf resolution for Vietnam, a de facto blank check, failed to commit the Congress to a full mobilization and a decisive victory. Resolutions authorizing force in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if open-ended, led to humiliating withdrawals.In the case of Iran, the Democrats are already beating the drums of defeat. Feature, say, Senator Tim Kaine, who has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He avers that “there was no imminent threat from Iran.” Americans, he claims, “don’t want to be dragged into another forever war under false pretenses.” The senator of Virginia backs a resolution limiting President Trump’s powers to lead the military in its battle of Iran. Vice President Harris agrees.Such defeatism, though, risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea is to crimp the commander-in-chief’s freedom of action to wage war as he deems fit. Senator Chris Murphy is parroting Vietnam-era class warfare rhetoric, warning that “it won’t be the billionaire kids of Donald Trump and his buddies that die.” Senator Mark Kelly speculates that success in Iran would be “challenging without putting people there on the ground.”This is the kind of thing we heard during the years of Vietnam. We withdrew the last of our combat GIs in 1973. The road to America’s defeat was opened in Congress with the ouster of President Nixon. Democrats in Congress blocked sending much-needed matériel to our Vietnamese allies. President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger strove to get Congress to stay in the fight. The Democrats refused. Free Vietnam was lost.One thing to remember is that, in the end, it wasn’t about our GIs. They were already home. In the end the Democrats were just willing to watch Vietnam fall to the communists. Where will the left be if things get even more perilous in Iran? This is the subtext for the looming debate on a war powers resolution, as Mr. Kaine raves about Mr. Trump’s “wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order.”This kind of talk isn’t constructive dissent. Just as the domestic dispute over Vietnam undermined American resolve and emboldened our enemies, the Democrats’ defeatism today plays into the hands of our foes. We’d be all for a serious war declaration, one that binds the president and Congress itself to stick with the fight. What the Democrats are seeking now is a war resolution that restrains the president. We saw how that ended — in 1975.

Iran and Vietnam

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