CNN.com
Today, we see a dangerous repetition of American hubris as Trump copies Nixon’s “madman’’ tactics by openly threatening to destroy the life-sustaining infrastructure of Iran. This openly stated intention would be a major war crime. It represents a desperate attempt to terrorise the Iranian people and, in turn, break the will of the government of Iran. Trump and his inner circle of grifting cronies assume that a massive, sustained aerial bombardment can destroy a 3,000-year-old civilisation. History tells a different story.
The reality of the air war over Vietnam was vastly different from the sanitised American narrative. The U.S. bombing campaigns, from Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1968) to the massive Linebacker offensives of 1972, suffered a catastrophic failure. They failed not because of a lack of firepower, but because strategic air power proved completely incapable of dismantling a decentralised, agrarian society with an iron will, bolstered by a massive civil defence network and an unbroken lifeline of support from the Soviet Union and China.
German generals writing after World War II agreed upon the catastrophic consequences of fighting a genocidal war of attrition against a fully mobilised population and planned economy. The Americans in Vietnam were forced to learn this lesson the hard way.
The United States launched Operation Rolling Thunder on March 2, 1965. Conceived as a campaign of "gradualism," it was designed to slowly escalate the bombing to coerce Hanoi into a negotiated settlement without triggering a wider war with the USSR or China. Over the next three years, the U.S. flew over 300,000 attack sorties.
Despite the massive scale of the bombardment, Rolling Thunder failed to completely destroy North Vietnam's power grid. When U.S. bombs destroyed 87% of the main power capacity by mid-1967, the North Vietnamese government managed to keep the lights on through a brilliant strategy of decentralisation. They imported around 2,000 small diesel units from the Soviet Union and China, each generating 15-20 MW, and scattered them across the countryside.
Key facilities were physically moved underground; the 3/2 Thermal Power Plant, for instance, was completely rebuilt inside Huyen Trung Cave to shield it from bombers. Strict rationing cut power to all non-essential users, ensuring the military and vital infrastructure survived.
Following the calamitous defeat of the South Vietnamese forces during the Easter Offensive of 1972, the U.S. launched Operation Linebacker I. This campaign, lasting from May to October, marked a significant escalation. U.S. aircraft dropped over 150,000 tons of bombs, extensively utilising new laser-guided and so-called "smart bombs." It failed to break Hanoi's political resolve.
When peace talks stalled in December 1972, President Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the infamous "Christmas Bombings." This was the largest B-52 bombing campaign of all time. Over 11 days, more than 700 B-52 sorties delivered over 20,000 tons of bombs on the Hanoi and Haiphong areas. The objective was purely coercive: to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table on American terms.
This murderous bombing campaign killed thousands of civilians, destroyed over a hundred factories, schools, and hospitals, and decimated 80% of the country’s electrical power production. Over 500,000 workers were mobilised to repair the damage.
As the Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko documents in Anatomy of a War, this campaign was fundamentally an act of terrorism born of desperation, as the US had lost the war on the ground. The Christmas bombing was designed to intimidate and terrorise the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) into submission, serving as a desperate reassertion to the world of Nixon's willingness to use raw, unfettered military power.
AI Gen
Kolko highlights that the U.S. constantly presented ambiguous positions at the Paris peace talks, retracting proposals whenever it suited them. The Christmas bombing was a cynical attempt by Nixon to portray himself as a "madman" to extract concessions. However, the DRV refused to negotiate out of fear.
The bombing achieved no durable military impact. Instead, it resulted in staggering U.S. losses. North Vietnam's active military defence, anchored by Soviet-supplied SAMs and MiG fighters, mauled American attack formations. The U.S. lost between 22 and 27 B-52s and 12 other aircraft. The operation was so costly that Pentagon officials admitted they had not realised the price would be so high. The Christmas bombing did not break the DRV. It merely isolated the Nixon administration politically and horrified the world.
A major reason these massive campaigns of terror failed to bludgeon North Vietnam into submission was the civil defence measures implemented by the government. To protect its civilian population, Hanoi adopted a strategy that moved far beyond simple individual shelters.
The most critical step was the large-scale evacuation of non-essential personnel from major cities. Ahead of the Christmas Bombings in December 1972, over 500,000 people—around 85% of Hanoi's urban population—were evacuated to the countryside. Nearly all schools, universities, and non-essential institutions were relocated.
The core of the plan was the construction of a vast and varied network of shelters. Hanoi alone had around 400,000 individual "ash-can" shelters, often made from concrete pipes or bamboo, alongside hundreds of thousands of group tunnels and bunkers. The population was mobilised to dig an extensive network of tunnels, which reportedly reached 50,000 kilometres in total length by the war's end.
This effort culminated in fully functional "underground villages." In the heavily bombarded DMZ area, the Vịnh Mốc tunnels housed roughly 1,200 people for nearly 2,000 days on three levels reaching 30 meters deep. It was a complete community, featuring freshwater wells, communal kitchens, and even an underground maternity ward where 17 children were born. This massive infrastructure project, built almost entirely by hand using local materials and recycled scrap metal from dud shells, allowed society to continue functioning under constant threat.
The resilience displayed by North Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union and China. Despite Kissinger's delusions that détente had isolated Hanoi, Kolko points out that Chinese military aid to the DRV in 1972 was double that of 1971, and Soviet arms aid more than doubled. Both nations overcame their past wrangling to speed supplies by rail to circumvent the U.S. blockade.
In the end, the U.S. bombing campaigns failed because they could not destroy the North's will to resist or its logistical lifeline from China and the USSR. The ultimate failure lay in air power's inability to resolve the political and military realities of the ground conflict. The American war machine, much like the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front decades earlier, found that technological superiority alone cannot conquer a mobilised and determined people.
Today, as the United States contemplates utilising these exact same tactics against Iran, it seems the Pentagon has learned nothing from its calamitous defeat in Southeast Asia. Iran is a vast, mountainous country with a deeply entrenched decentralised military infrastructure, a massive and highly motivated population, and a sophisticated civil defence network. Much like North Vietnam, Iran has spent decades preparing for an American air assault by moving its critical nuclear and military facilities deep underground.
Furthermore, the United States remains the same bad-faith actor it was during the Paris Peace Accords of the early 1970s. Just as Nixon and Kissinger used the Christmas bombings to terrorise Hanoi under the guise of seeking peace, Washington today speaks of negotiations while actively undermining any ceasefire. We saw this duplicity a mere 12 hours after the agreed ceasefire. Israel, with U.S. collusion, blatantly broke the terms of the deal with Iran by using its airforce to massacre hundreds of Lebanese civilians.
Any attempt by the U.S. to destroy Iran through saturation bombing will hopefully meet the same disastrous fate as Operation Rolling Thunder and Linebacker II. The hubris of imperial air power will once again shatter against the unbreakable will of a nation fighting for its survival.
