El Salvador: It Is Not Viet Nam

By Strobe Talbott

For the past few weeks, Americans have been asking themselves some urgent and difficult questions about the ugly civil war in El Salvador. Will the latest guerrilla offensive succeed in disrupting and discrediting the elections scheduled for next month? Will the beleaguered civilian President, Jose Napoleon Duarte, be able to stave off the leftist challenge? Can he also rein in the right-wing military leaders with whom he shares what remains of central power--and therefore with whom he shares responsibility for atrocities committed by the security forces? And what can the U.S. do? Can it simultaneously foster land reform and counterinsurgency, especially when both campaigns are going so badly?

The crisis has also posed questions that more directly affect the American people: Is El Salvador a new Viet Nam? Is the U.S. about to repeat the mistakes that led it into the greatest single setback to its military power, political prestige and national self-confidence in this century? The news media have repeatedly been asking that of late. So have Senators and Congressmen in their interrogation of Government witnesses. So have academics and student leaders at teach-ins.

The natural tendency to draw cautionary comparisons with Viet Nam has already asserted itself to an unnatural, and certainly unhealthy, extent in the political debate about El Salvador. It has fostered prejudices over judgments and dogmas over lessons, both among conservatives (neo-and otherwise), who are well represented in the Administration, and among their opponents on the left.

The liberal exhortation "No more Viet Nams!" could be a prescription for appeasement, passivism and isolationism; the hardliners' rejoinder--"No more 'No more Viet Nams!' could translate into a recipe for macho bullying: "Let's go beat the stuffing out of somebody somewhere just to show that we're tough again." The danger of the first response is paralysis; the danger of the second is reflexive, un thinking action. Neither impulse makes for sound policy.

When U.S. fighters downed a pair of Libyan jets last August, two choruses sounded in counterpoint: "Hooray! We've finally put Viet Nam behind us!" and, from the other side of the stage, "Beware! The Gulf of Sidra may be another Gulf of Tonkin!" (thus the onstage, with clanking chains, the ghost of the 1964 naval skirmish off the coast of Viet Nam, which Lyndon Johnson used as a pretext to escalate American involvement there).

The Viet Nam syndrome has even clouded views of our adversaries' foreign entanglements. Some commentators, as well as some American Government officials, continue to toy hopefully with the idea that Afghanistan may turn out to be the Soviet Union's Viet Nam--never mind that Afghanistan is right on the Soviet border and that whatever else the leaders in Moscow have to worry about, they need not fear student marches on the Kremlin or peacenik political challengers in the next elections to the Supreme Soviet.

Still, it is inevitable, indeed understandable, that the Viet Nam analogy should arise in the context of the civil war in El Salvador. Precisely because the American debacle in Indochina was such a protracted, painful and preoccupying episode, it is sure to come to mind whenever the U.S. faces circumstances that are even superficially similar. Television coverage of El Salvador has provided some gnawingly familiar images: Marxist-led peasants vs. patrols of boy soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms and G.I.-style helmets, ambushes and massacres in the jungles, a trickle of American advisers into the embattled country, and, back in Washington, a Secretary of State telling a skeptical Congress that this is where the U.S. must draw the line against Communist adventurism.

But the parallels to Viet Nam are far outnumbered by the divergences. Viet Nam is 9,000 miles from the U.S.; El Salvador is a near neighbor. The military-civilian government in San Salvador is its own worst enemy, in the sense that it has alienated its own people and embarrassed what few friends it has left in the world. Still, the junta bears little resemblance to the assorted cliques and strongmen that the U.S. supported in Saigon.

Another difference between now and then: the Viet Cong had spent decades building up their cadres, fighting skills, command structure and supply lines; they also had North Viet Nam, with its huge regular army, first backing them up, then leading them in their conquest. The Salvadoran insurgency, by contrast, is limited to about 6,000 active fighters, many of whom are recent converts to the cause. The closest analogue to a North Viet Nam in Central America is Nicaragua, which is not really very close at all. The Sandinista regime there is still young and insecure. True, it is gravitating into the Soviet-Cuban orbit and building a formidable military machine, at least by Central American standards; but that buildup is partly in reaction to the Reagan Administration's implacable hostility. Much as the Sandinistas would like to see their Salvadoran comrades triumph, Nicaragua does not have a common border with El Salvador, and the extent to which the Sandinistas are shipping arms to the guerrillas is debatable. There is no equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and, far more important, of Ho Chi Minh himself.

In short, the Viet Nam analogy is really the Viet Nam fallacy. It is fallacious not just in the objective difference between the two situations, but in the way that indulgence of a false analogy can skew judgment. In general, foreign policy is better served by a conscious attempt to analyze each situation afresh, rather than by the wisdom of hindsight (which, of course, is really not wisdom at all). Soldiers, it has often been said, have the bad habit of waging the last war. Americans, in their current fretting over El Salvador, are similarly afflicted. Across the political spectrum, there is no one who wants to re-experience in Central America the defeat of Indochina. From that, the left is tempted to conclude: Better not to fight at all, anywhere, ever again. The right concludes the opposite: Fight somewhere, soon, only this time, by God, win!

The Administration's current policy, to prop up Duarte long enough to get some rudimentary democratic institutions and economic reforms in place, is in plenty of trouble on the ground in El Salvador; and it is couched in some of the more bellicose, almost hysterical idioms of Haigspeak back in Washington. But as long as the Administration seeks to curb the abuses of the regime and discourage the political ambitions of the military, providing American assistance against the guerrillas is a reasonable and responsible course. The humanitarian as well as geopolitical goal of the U.S. is to stop the escalation of violence in Central America, and that means exerting force against the insurgents through arms aid, as well as putting political pressure on our less savory clients to moderate their ways.

Should that policy fail, the Administration will face some excruciatingly difficult choices. If Duarte should lose out to one of his rightist rivals, does the U.S. withdraw its support and leave the repressive new regime to its own brutal but dwindling devices? More difficult still, if the guerrillas seem on the brink of military victory, does the U.S. send in combat troops? Friendly countries in the region and American allies around the world would almost unanimously oppose deeper, more direct American involvement; the Administration would also have to contend with massive political and popular resistance in this country, based as much as anything on distaste for the type of regime the U.S. would be trying to rescue. Besides, the rationale for the Administration's ends and means in El Salvador rests on the reassurances, repeated by Haig's deputy Thomas Enders only last week, that the U.S. seeks a political, not a military, solution. Sending in troops would undercut the already precarious credibility of that policy.

Those and other relevant considerations would be, and should be, enough to give the Administration plenty of reason to look for alternatives to military intervention. But the hard fact is the U.S. cannot pre-emptively and categorically rule out more direct use of force in El Salvador, which is what some of Haig's cross-examiners in the Senate seemed to want him to do. Any nation, but especially a superpower, must reserve the option of armed action in defense of its vital interests. To foreclose that option in a nasty little crisis close to home would raise new questions about American defense commitments all over the world. The other half of the dilemma is that if the U.S. does resort to force, it must do so--and be seen to do so--in order to defeat real enemies in the here and now, rather than to exorcise ghosts from half a decade ago and half a globe away.

To the extent that policymakers and spokesmen for both left and right can avoid historymongering, so much the better. There is a converse to Philosopher George Santayana's famous warning, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It is equally true that those who dwell obsessively on the past are prone to poor analysis, divisive debate, unconstructive criticism and bad decisions as they face the future. In short, they are doomed to ask the wrong questions, which can only yield the wrong answers. --By Strobe Talbott

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