While I was in Costa Rica, I picked up Neil Sheehan’s extraordinary book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, the best book I’ve read about the Vietnam War. The book centers on Vann, a lieutenant colonel who believed the war could be won, but became increasingly disillusioned with the way it was being conducted and went public with his concerns (he spent years attepting to salvage the war, eventually dying in a helicopter crash in 1972).

I despise facile, simplistic analogies between Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but readers today can hardly miss the undeniable echoes of what’s happening today in Iraq: a profound lack of accurate intelligence; areas of the country that are too dangerous to visit; an enemy that does not need to win, but fights at the time and place of its choosing, inflicts damage and then withdraws to wait out the US forces; civilian leaders who only see progress and ignore negative reports; intense pressure on reporters to deliver positive coverage; and a civilian population that turns against the US as the conduct of the war takes a mounting toll. The analogy is hardly complete; there are important differences between the two situations, and our effort in Iraq may still be salvaged. But the strategic logic of the war is undeniably against us, as it was in Vietnam, and the conflict is taking a massive toll on the military.

My question is this: Who will be the John Paul Vann of Iraq? Who will be the patriotic American soldier or diplomat who puts his or her career on the line to try to change the direction of the US effort in Iraq, or to help preserve the capacity of our overtaxed military? The emergence of such a figure is only a matter of time, it seems, given the internal discontent in the military and diplomatic corps.

Right now, you could point to Lt. Gen. James R. “Ron” Helmly, the head of the Army Reserve, who recently warned in an internal memo that the Reserves are “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.” The same clearly applies to the National Guard, also under intense stress from prolonged, repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But no high-ranking official has yet openly broken with our specific policies in Iraq as Vann did in Vietnam. Keep an eye out — it could change the whole dynamic of the debate in a matter of weeks.

Update 1/8: According to an AP story, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and a member of the influential Pentagon advisory group known as the Defense Policy Board, has a new book coming out that criticizes President Bush’s policies in Iraq (in part). It’s not exactly Vann, but interesting nonetheless.

Update 1/17: An astute reader points out that Vann’s views of US strategy in Vietnam evolved during his time there. To be more clear, I’m talking above about the Vann of ’61-’64 who criticized early US strategy, heavily influencing David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and other American journalists covering the conflict (he later became unreasonably optimistic). As far as comments from readers about Vann not being well-known at the time, I think this indirect influence via the press mattered quite a bit.