Despite a great deal of comparison coming from many sectors, Iraq is not Vietnam. There are too many fundamental differences between the two situations to draw any kind of overarching parallels. In Vietnam, the United States intervened in an explicit civil war between the communist north and the “democratic” south. Most of this effort, at least until very late in the war, was aimed at passifying the communist insurgents in the south – the so-called Viet Cong – rather than engaging in battles with the very large, motivated, and powerful North Vietnamese Army (NVA). There is no such national liberation movement in Iraq, the scale of the war effort is much smaller, and the geography is totally different. Thus, it can be effectively argued that the circumstances of the war – the logistics – are completely different. However, as a student of Vietnam War history – the parallels in terms of the political dimensions of the war are beyond disturbing.
1. Iraq may not be engaged in a explicit civil war, as were the Vietnamese (north and south) during the 1950’s and 1960’s, but the fact remains that factions within Iraq oppose the recognized (at least by us) government of their nation, and that these anti-government factions are fighting against an Iraqi state that maintains its war effort and political viability by means of U.S. aid, in the form of manpower, materiel, and money. We are propping up an administration that we favor by means of violence, and justifying it in terms of “spreading freedom.” Therefore, we are waging war in Iraq without a clear definition of victory, as we did (most explicitly) between 1965 and 1972 in Vietnam. We are passifying insurgents in Iraq in order to maintain the current political regime, as we did in support of Ngo Dinh Diem and his several successors in Saigon throughout the 1960’s. And once again, our political justification for doing so is the interests of “freedom” in Iraq and around the world, as well as, as a result, our own safety at home.
2. Just as we claimed to be – and actually were until the escalation starting officially in 1965 – merely assisting the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) fight their war against the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong, we claim to be merely assisting the Iraqis fight a war that they want to fight against insurgents in their own country. However, in both cases, it is very clear that our assistance is far more akin to dominance than some kind of a secondary support role. Can we realistically frame this war in this fashion – as assistance of an effort that the Iraqis themselves want to carry out? Perhaps so, but the degree to which we emphasize the Iraqis as spearheads of the war effort, as we did in the case of the ARVN, is misleading at best.
3. We claim to be carrying out this war for the benefit of the Iraqi people, and yet their opinion of us as liberators, and our victory in the arena of their hearts and minds, is doubtful at best. Just as in Vietnam, we have ground troops fighting in an environment in which they cannot be sure who is their enemy, and many of the indigenous peoples, despite our role as “liberators,” are willing to die in order to drive us out. There is much evidence to suggest that we had more local support in South Vietnam than we currently maintain in Iraq. However, every day, we hear that the freedom that we are facilitating in Iraq is the purpose of the war, and that we are the liberators of the Iraqi people. Although war has historically been a necessary evil in the context of liberation, the American tendency to justify military intervention in terms of spreading freedom is definitely sounding quite hollow these days.
4. George Bush, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, continually urges us to “stay the course,” and warns us that the battle will be long, difficult, and costly. He lashes out at dissenters and paints them as unpatriotic cowards, just as Johnson and Nixon did during the Vietnam War. And yet, the timetable for victory – in addition to the definition of victory – eludes us. We are told to stay the course until the end, but we are provided with little in terms of a definition as to what constitutes the end, and how we plan to attain those goals. In the meantime, Americans soldiers are dying at an increasing clip, Iraqi civilians are being needlessly killed by bombings and stray fire, and we and they are absorbing these most precious costs with only the assurance by the Bush Administration that we must persist in order to win.
5. Once again, as in Vietnam, we are fighting a war in a region where the insurgents have the distinct advantage in terms of intelligence and knowledge of the terrain, and we are using troops who know little or nothing about the culture to win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. In Vietnam, at least at first, while there was certainly suspicion of western nations and occupiers as a result of the long war with the French imperialists, there was not a majority anti-American sentiment per se. We are liberating a country that we have waged war against twice in the past 20 years, in a mideast political environment that is overwhelmingly anti-American. And we are doing so while simultaneously portraying this as an effort in the interests of the Iraqi people.
6. Although war in Vietnam was largely a foregone conclusion by 1964, the official, party-line justification for escalation was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, and the subsequent congressional resolution authorizing the president to use whatever force necessary to stave of the communist aggression in South Vietnam. Even at the time, but certainly now, the validity of that justification has been largely discredited (the first attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin was provoked, and there is little evidence that the second attack ever occurred). Similarly, the WMD and Al-Quaeda ties justifications have almost no evidence in the case of Iraq. In both cases, there was the result of a congressional resolution supporting the use of force that received almost unanimous congressional support, and yet in both cases, both justifications turned out to be false and yet war continued. Are we ignoring the evidence now, as we did then? It seems fairly obvious to me that, at least to some extent, we are ignoring the facts in the Iraq case. How can we possibly continue to wage war when the justifications for that war have turned out to be false? Were the original justifications not the important ones? Why were they presented as such?
7. Despite mounting casualties, and the rate of these casualties on the rise every month, we hear the familiar refrain that we heard from LBJ, William Westmoreland, and the Johnson Administration: “Progress.” We are making progress, we are passifying resistance, we are bringing freedom to Iraq. The progress in Vietnam turned out to be in no small part illusory, and yet many of us fail to question this President in his assertions that we are moving in the right direction (although many of us, of course, are asking those questions, and asking them pointedly). Although I am heartened by the American people’s faith in government, I must question our lack of skepticism and our willingness to trust an administration that has very clearly misled us.
8. Just as we fought in Vietnam as an “episode” of the Cold War, we now fight in Iraq as an episode of the War on Terror. In both cases, it is good against evil. Just as Vietnam was generally argued by those in power to be a centerpiece – a vital area – in the Cold War, so is Iraq in the War on Terror. We justify a small war in terms of a larger war. And just as Vietnam was, as the years passed, painted more and more as a misallocation of Cold War force, Iraq has already very clearly been painted as a “diversion” from the War on Terror. The latter assertion may end up being judged by history as false, but the possibility remains.
9. Once the escalation of the Vietnam War had become a reality in early 1965, despite exhaustive efforts to build a coalition of nations aligned against communist aggression in South Vietnam, the US was left with just one true ally - Australia. Austrailia was the only nation willing to make only a token commitment of ground troops to the effort. Similarly, despite our best efforts and also despite the fact that a global coalition was a stated precondition for war in Iraq, the Bush Administration has failed to put together anything but a very marginal commitment from the global community, and the US continues to absorb the vast majority of the cost - in terms of blood and treasure - of the war. Once again, we are unilaterally taking military control of the situation in a foreign land, and once again we are doing so without anything resembling support from many of our closest allies.
Iraq is not Vietnam in any overarching sense of valid comparison. However, while the comparison may not be sufficiently valid to warrant the assertion of equivalency, this does not preclude the validity of similarities, just as it does not mean that the lessons of the Vietnam War do not apply to certain aspects of the Iraqi War. The lack of validity of a grand-level comparison means that we cannot say that since Vietnam was a mistake, as is generally acknowledged, Iraq is also a mistake. It does, however, mean that we can view the Iraq War in terms of certain aspects of that in Vietnam, and that we can justifiably apply many lessons learned from the latter to the former.
In my personal view, the mistake of Vietnam had immeasurably horrible consequences for American foreign policy, and perhaps more importantly, for the image of America in the minds of Americans, and for our participation in our system. Making that same mistake twice in the span of 50 years will accentuate this effect, perhaps drastically and in unforeseen ways. We are too good a people to let this happen. At least I hope we are.
