New York Times

April 21, 1999

By ROBERT S. MCNAMARA

WASHINGTON — Will the war in Kosovo become another Vietnam? After barely a month of bombing Yugoslavia, it is far too soon to make such analogies. Nevertheless, there is a widespread fear that the two sides will be caught in a cycle of escalation, as occurred in Vietnam. As awful as Kosovo is now, the odds of a long-term tragedy will be far greater if we don’t apply the lessons the Vietnam conflict taught us. 

In fact, my great concern is that we and our adversaries may have already made mistakes that might have been avoided had we learned from experience. Studying the lessons of Vietnam may allow us to end this war earlier; ignoring them may result in catastrophe. 

Over the past four years, a number of us from the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and some of America’s top scholars, have been involved in an unprecedented series of dialogues with North Vietnamese officials. Our task: to identify missed opportunities, if any existed, to avoid the war altogether or to terminate it before it became a tragedy that claimed the lives of more than 3.5 million Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans. 

Our dialogues revealed many dimensions of mutual misunderstanding, some of which may resemble the current tragedy in the Balkans. Indeed, there are some alarming parallels, as well as some important distinctions. For example, in Vietnam each side miscalculated by repeatedly underestimating the costs and risks its adversary was willing to accept. The failure of the United States to anticipate the almost incredible losses absorbed by Vietnamese Communists, both north and south, is well known. 

But we learned in our dialogues that the North Vietnamese were prepared to absorb far greater punishment than was ever delivered by the American bombing. Likewise, the Hanoi Government, in a series of disastrous miscalculations made from 1961 to 1965, repeatedly underestimated America’s willingness to prosecute the war in the South on the ground, and in the North via the bombing. 

In Vietnam neither side understood the bottom line of the other with regard to how South Vietnam should be governed, by whom and for how long. Each side, American and Vietnamese, discovered during the course of our dialogues that its former adversary was much more open to negotiations — to a neutral, coalition government in Saigon — than was believed at the time. 

The point is this: These mutual misjudgments were not preordained by some process of escalation that, as is implied by many who see the Balkans through the prism of Vietnam, was beyond human control. Both the Americans and Vietnamese in the dialogues, who for the first time had access to one another’s real intentions at the time, concluded that many opportunities existed along the way for leaders to do what they should have done — lead! — rather than ignore the Vietnam crisis in slow motion. There is at least one lesson from Vietnam that can be applied immediately. A Pentagon Papers-like project should already be under way within the United States Government so that historians will have the adequate raw material to identify the missed opportunities on the road to the Balkans War. 

It is not always easy to constructively draw lessons from history. Indeed, many in the Balkans have used history and the lessons they draw from it to justify the carnage we have seen over the past several years. 

We may be drawing the wrong lessons from Vietnam, too, if we believe that we should avoid ground troops at all costs or avoid applying military force in support of political or diplomatic ends. All the more reason to reconsider Vietnam and begin our consideration of what has happened in the Balkans. 

This century has been the bloodiest in history. Over 160 million human beings have been killed in various conflicts, and that number rises each day. It is a dark history, but unless we look at it and seek to learn from it, it will only get darker. 

My views are in no way meant to be critical, but I am not at all sure that we have learned from experience, and I worry that we will end up making the same mistakes again and again. It was once famously said that the United States did not have 10 years of experience in Vietnam, but one year of experience 10 times over. Will we say the same about the Balkans? 

Robert S. McNamara was Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He is the author, with James Blight, Robert Brigham, Thomas Biersteker and Col. Herbert Schandler, of “Argument Without End: Searching for Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.” 

© New York Times 1999