Note: The following argument is based on the authors article “Viet Not,” recently published in the Winter 2008 issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The article can be read in its entirety at www.democracyjournal.org.

As public support for the Iraq war has dwindled, and momentum has gathered in Congress for a substantial drawdown of troops, President Bush and some of his supporters have revived the argument that congressional Democrats prevented the American military from finishing a war that the United States could have won in Vietnam. In fact, an American victory in Vietnam was always unlikely, and the Vietnam War’s high political costs resulted from withdrawing not too soon but too late.

By 1969, with American dead and wounded mounting in an effort that appeared increasingly futile, the U.S. public no longer supported the Vietnam War. The United States, however, morbidly delayed its exit, expanding the war to Cambodia and stepping up the air campaign against the North. It didn’t work.

Having spent all of his domestic political capital on Cambodia, President Nixon negotiated with Hanoi from weakness. The 1972 Paris Peace Accords required a wholesale American pullout in exchange for a North Vietnamese cease-fire, but did not require the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to withdraw from South Vietnam. Its patience exhausted, Congress would not authorize funds to equip the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) sufficiently to repel a major NVA offensive, and banned all U.S. military activity in Southeast Asia. The decisive offensive came in 1975. South Vietnam surrendered unconditionally in April, as American helicopters staged an unforgettably shambolic and tragic evacuation.

South Vietnam’s hard landing and the United States’ ignominious exit were not inevitable. If, soon after the Tet Offensive in 1968, Washington had seriously offered Hanoi a phased withdrawal for an open-ended cease-fire, Saigon’s position could have been strengthened and casualties reduced. The White House might have secured the political capital necessary to convince Congress to provide the support required for the ARVN to reach parity with the NVA and South Vietnam’s civil institutions to develop. Saigon might then have salvaged a stalemate. Even if not, American prestige would not have suffered to the extent that it did in 1975. What derogated it most was not America’s failure to win the war, but rather its foolish commitment to a losing strategy that foreclosed the possibility of an honorable draw or even a negotiated defeat.

North Vietnam’s population was ethnically and religiously largely homogeneous and united behind its government, while the South Vietnamese were broadly disillusioned by a decadent government. In contrast, Iraq is fiercely heterogeneous, both religiously and ethnically, and in the midst of a civil war. Moreover, whereas the South Vietnamese insurgency stemmed from agrarian hardship and was partly remediable by U.S.-assisted land reform and modernization initiatives, the Iraqi insurgency derives from deepening intercommunal enmities and the American military presence itself. Even if by some measures counterinsurgency is finally working – as it was in Vietnam in 1970–72 – as long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, American political efforts are bound to be frustrated.

The Bush administration, like the Johnson and Nixon administrations, is creating the illusion that we are winning on points through military advances while suppressing the likelihood that the insurgency’s resiliency, Iraqi military inadequacy, and Iraqi political dysfunction will combine to inflict a knockout punch. Iraq is strategically more important than Vietnam was, so the U.S. cannot afford to abandon or ostracize Iraq as it did Vietnam. But contrary to Bush Administration supporters and conservative pundits, this does not mean that any form of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will have terrible and persistent consequences – namely, an all-out Sunni/Shia war; the emboldenment of Iran, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda; and diminished energy security. Those consequences are much more likely to arise from a panicky exit springing from continued American futility. Consequently, the Vietnam experience counsels not staying put but rather minimizing the U.S. military presence soon, while still promoting political progress in Iraq and regional stability. No cost-free solution exists; any “victory” would achieve far less than what was originally envisioned by the war’s architects and strongest defenders. But a strategic withdrawal would constitute a mature response to what has become an obviously futile quest and to the American people’s loss of trust and confidence in the way the war has been conducted.

The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973–75 proved so divisive because conservatives pushed a who-lost-the-war myth condemning Democrats and war protesters. Yet in fact, U.S. involvement ultimately exceeded what the public would tolerate. A timely disengagement might have permitted security and stability in Southeast Asia. Instead, U.S. military escalation spread violence to Laos and Cambodia, hardened the communist Khmer Rouge’s resistance against pro-U.S. Cambodian leader Lon Nol, and lent momentum to Pol Pot’s genocidal designs. Then a frenzied U.S. withdrawal doomed Saigon. These things happened because we left too late rather than too soon.

Comparable things could happen with respect to Iraq. If we do not exercise strategic discretion and design a near-term military disengagement that incorporates residual U.S. support for Iraq, we are likely to be forced – by domestic opinion at least as much as facts on the ground in Iraq – into a Vietnam-esque withdrawal that leaves no room for such support for Iraq and diminished American standing throughout the world. That fate is the one we tempt by keeping troops in Iraq when their presence there cannot secure America’s interests and only weakens the United States’ strategic position. At the end of the day, America’s allies value, and its adversaries fear, not its persistence in a dubious policy that is unlikely to serve its own interests, but its preservation of viable strategic options.

Steven Simon is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.