[News] Is Iraq Another Vietnam? Actually, It May Become Worse

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Published on Monday, April 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Is Iraq Another Vietnam? Actually, 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-fundingwar. 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 paddies, 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 liberatorswhile 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 democracyto pacify the American 
public into quiescence. In Vietnam, democracytook 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 councilof 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 democracyin 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-conservativesvision 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 
sympathizersthroughout 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. defeatnow 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 ideasis 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 honorin 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 <mailto:robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com>robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com.


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