[Peace-discuss] Iraq and Vietnam parallels

[patton paul]

Iraq is Not Vietnam. It May Become Worse.
by Robert Freeman


A virtual cottage industry has sprung up comparing Iraq with Vietnam. And
well that it should. Vietnam cost the lives of not only 58,000 Americans
but of three million Vietnamese. Neither the US nor the Iraqi people nor
the world need another such horror.

The similarities between Iraq and Vietnam run both shallow and deep. The
shallow similarities are obvious and can serve to signal our attention.
But it is the deeper similarities, those that shape policy and drive
alternatives, that should signal our fears. For they point to the
possibility of an outcome perhaps even more calamitous than in Vietnam.

Both Iraq and Vietnam were founded on lies. In Vietnam, the original lie
was that an impoverished nation of pre-industrial age farmers posed a
threat to the mightiest empire the world had ever known. The Gulf of
Tonkin hoax was the manufactured excuse to jump in with all guns blazing.
And the Pentagon Papers were the meticulous, irrefutable chronicle of the
litany of all the rest of the lies.

With Iraq, we dont need to wait for a Pentagon Papers to know the trigger
or the extent of the lying. It is already notorious. Weapons of Mass
Destruction. Connections to Al Qaeda. Complicity in 9/11. A cakewalk.
Being welcomed as liberators. A self-funding war. Weve found the weapons
of mass destruction. Reducing global terror. Mission Accomplished. The
real question in Iraq is not whether the Bush administration has told any
lies but rather, almost literally, whether it has told any meaningful
truths.

Both wars quickly became guerilla wars. In Vietnam, the battlegrounds were
jungles, rice patties, and small rural hamlets. It was the antithesis of
the set-piece battle style of warfare the U.S. military had been built and
trained for. In Iraq the battlegrounds are city blocks with houses,
apartments, stores and schools. In both settings, the enemy controls the
timing, scale, and place of engagements.

They shoot opportunistically and quickly melt away into their
surroundings. Combatants are indistinguishable from civilians with the
result that eight civilians are killed for every combatant. This
understandably alienates the civilian population from its liberators while
increasing its support for the resistancean inescapable and fateful cycle.
In Vietnam, this process became mockingly known as winning the hearts and
minds of the people. It hasnt been graced with a name yet in Iraq.

Both wars used the palpable fiction of democracy to pacify the American
public into quiescence. In Vietnam, democracy took the form of a clique of
wealthy, urban, Catholic dictators running a country of poor, rural,
Buddhist peasants. After the US had its puppet, Diem, assassinated in
1963, it took two years and seven different governments before a suitably
brutal but still obeisant figurehead could be found.

In Iraq, a governing council of US-appointed stooges pretends to represent
Iraqi interests by handing over almost all industries to large U.S.
corporationsall of which just happen to be munificent donors to the
Republican party. Commenting recently on the handover of sovereignty, US
proconsul Paul Bremmer noted in seemingly oblivious irony that, Theres not
going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what
it is on June 30th. This is democracy for foreign subjects, American
style.

But there are still deeper bases for comparing Iraq with Vietnam. It is
these that are most disquieting for Americas prospects.

Both wars were against victim nations already deeply scarred by colonial
domination. It is this legacy that poisons all U.S. sanctimony about
installing democracy in Iraq. Vietnam was dominated for over a century by
first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and eventually
the Americans. But all the Vietnamese people ever wanted was to be free of
such domination, to craft for themselves their own destiny, much as the
American colonists had done in their revolutionary war.

Iraq, too, bears the scars of a long and repressive colonial legacy. It
was created in the aftermath of World War I, literally carved out of the
sand by the British for the sole purpose of controlling the worlds oil
supply. The US helped Saddam Husseins Baath party overthrow the uppity
Karim Qasim in 1963 but its purposes were the same as the Britishs: to
control the worlds supply of oil. The aggressively disinformed American
public is unaware of this legacy and, therefore, the reason behind Iraqs
vociferous resistance to its would-be liberation.

Still deeper in meaning is the strategic context of the two wars. Both
wars were fought in the vanguard of grand U.S. strategy. In Vietnam, the
strategy was Containment, George Kennans famous formula for stopping the
Soviet Union from expanding its empire. Eisenhowers overwrought and
ultimately disproved version had dominoes falling from Laos and Cambodia,
on to Thailand and Burma, all the way to India.

In Iraq, the grand strategy is global hegemony. It is the
neo-conservatives vision of the once-in-a-millennium chance to dominate
the world. With the Cold War ended and no plausible military challenger in
sight, such a chance must not be let to pass, certainly not for want of
sufficient manhood. Iraq is simply the first tactical step in this vision,
the basis for controlling the worlds oil and, thereby, the USs strategic
competitors. This is the reason the Pentagon plans to leave 14 military
bases in the country indefinitelyto project military power throughout the
Persian Gulf, site of 55% of the worlds oil.

Finally, it is the ideological context that perhaps most eerily presages
(and dooms) the U.S. role in Iraqjust as it did in Vietnam. The Vietnam
quagmire was formed in the toxic aftermath of World War II. When China
fell to the communists in 1949, Republicans mounted an ideological dragnet
to purge the government of those who had lost China. This morphed into Joe
McCarthys witch hunts of the 1950s that targeted supposed communist
sympathizers throughout the country.

It was close personal knowledge of these ideologically-driven purges that
drove Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon to aver that they would
never allow the U.S. to fail in Vietnam for fear of being portrayed as
soft on communism. Despite the fact that all of these presidents were
warnedrepeatedlythat Vietnam was unwinnable, all soldiered on, dooming
ever more soldiers and civilians to death and destruction.

For years, the public rationale for U.S. involvement in Vietnam had been
to keep Vietnam out of the hands of communists. But in March 1965, before
the massive escalation that would make the war irreversible, Pentagon
briefers told President Johnson that the true U.S. goals in Vietnam were,
70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 20% to keep South Vietnam (and
adjacent territories) from Chinese hands; 10% to permit the people of
Vietnam a better, freer way of life. This is the smoking gun of the
ideological aversion to withdrawal.

And so, because of the strategic imperatives of containment and the
ideological pressures of McCarthyism, the U.S. couldnt stay out of
Vietnam. But because of the colonialist taint, the nature of guerilla war,
the ludicrous fiction of democracy, and the foundation of lies that
undergirded the entire venture, it could never win either. This was the
essential, inescapable, tragic dilemma for America in Vietnam: it could
not manage to stay out; but it could never manage to win.

Much the same can already be said of Iraq. Bushs latest post-hoc
rationale, that were changing the world, betrays a near-messianic
obsession to stay. Such compulsion is impervious to mere logic or facts.
Steadily increasing violence and chaos are cheerily parried with
ideological divinations that these are actually proof we are winning! In
psychiatric wards, this would be dismissed for what it actually is:
dangerous delusion.

But as was the case with successive presidents in Vietnam, the necessity
to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat now drives Bush policy more than
anything else. And we should be clear: this goes far beyond the need to
simply maintain appearances until November. If the U.S. is driven from
Iraq, the credibility of U.S. force and the potency of U.S. power in the
world will be irreparably damaged, far more than it was by the loss in
Vietnam. This is why Iraq may actually become worse than Vietnam.

The reason is that military force has increasingly become the principal
tool of persuasion for the U.S. in the world. Unlike the 1960s when its
economy was still the envy of the world and its ideals were still the
model for many nations, the U.S. economy is now a wreck and U.S. ideals
are in tatters.

The private U.S. economy is so uncompetitive it runs a half trillion
dollar a year trade deficit with the rest of the world. And the U.S. lives
so far beyond its means it runs a half trillion dollar a year federal
budget deficit. It must go, hat in hand, to the rest of the world to
borrow these sums, well more than two billion dollars a day. This is
hardly a model of economic vibrancy. And the U.S.s civic culturewhat the
neo-cons once lauded as the soft power of ideasuis now feared and mocked
by much of the world, including former allies. And herein lies the danger.

What is the point of spending more on the military than all of the rest of
the world combined if it cannot deliver when called upon? In Vietnam,
General Curtis LeMay answered this question with his famous dictum: Well
bomb them back into the stone age. And Nixon tried, mightily. During one
twelve-day period in December 1972 (the Christmas Bombings), the U.S.
dropped more tons of bombs on North Vietnam than it had dropped during the
entire period from 1969 to 1971, the military height of the war. When the
only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

This is now the danger for both Iraq and the U.S. Because of Bushs
strategic commitment to global hegemony and his messianic ideological
persuasions, the U.S. cannot get out of Iraq; but because of the realities
of colonialism, guerilla war, phony democracy, and the foundation of lies
to justify it all, it will not be able to win either. Does this sound
familiar?

Worse, the forces for moderation in Vietnam (such as they were) are
nowhere in sight in Iraq. There is no independent media capable of calling
out the emperors nakedness. There is no China next door to threaten
another Asian land war should U.S. aggression become too heinous. There
are no allies the U.S. needs to heed for its Cold War against the Soviet
Union. In fact, without the Soviet Union, the U.S.s former allies look
more and more like its future competitors. Hence its public derision for
their counsel of restraint.

Finally, if Iraq falls, Bushs cabal of neo-conservative policy makers,
never so much concerned with American interests as they are with their
own, will be decisively, publicly, embarrassingly repudiated. All of this
is a formula for potential catastrophe.

The damage to U.S. prestige in the world for its illegal invasion of Iraq
is already done. The danger now is that in his desperation to avoid a
humiliating U.S. defeat, the repudiation of his entire presidency, and a
generation-long disdain for U.S. military power, Bush will resort to
apocalyptic barbarism. This is exactly what Nixon did trying to salvage
peace with honor in Vietnam. It is this temptation that only the American
public can force Bush to resist.

Robert Freeman writes about economics, history, and education. He can be
reached at robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com.