Last Wednesday, in his speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, President Bush made parallels between the current War in Iraq and the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, Bush was not clearly defining the similarities between the two wars. Rather, he was using the results of the American withdrawal from Vietnam to reiterate the necessity of keeping American troops in Iraq "until the job is done."
In the speech, Bush stated that "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens. He added, "There's another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001." (read more from Time at here.)
Now, the President is right on one thing: there are certainly parallels between the two wars. However, his statements do not go far enough to highlight these numerous similarities.
For one, just as was the case with Vietnam, Americans have pursued a convoluted, destructive foreign policy in Iraq over the years. Just as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman supported Ho Chi Minh because of his desire to overthrow the Japanese and promote a new Vietnamese state free from oppression, so too did Ronald Reagan support Saddam Hussein in his war to stave off the Iranians in the wake of the Iran Hostage Crisis. (Unlike Reagan, however, FDR and Truman did not sell weapons to Japanese, Chinese, or the Russians in order to bankroll other military exploits). Once our interest in these men ran its course, we found that they were not the noble freedom fighters we took them for; on the contrary, their political desires ran completely counter to our own.
Just as in Vietnam, there is a tenuous and tricky mesh work of ethnic, political, religious, and ideological groups living in Iraq. Both of these situations were largely the results of Western imperialism and colonization. In Vietnam, the US allied itself with the non-Communist South Vietnamese government against the Communist North. We completely funded and equipped the entire South Vietnamese army and police forces. Despite their large numbers and superior weaponry, these South Vietnamese soldiers were completely incapable of overcoming their Communist brethren without American support.
In Iraq, we are perhaps even in a worse setting. The Vietnamese were at least ethnically related, and religion played a fairly minor role in the conflict among the people. In Iraq, however, there are Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, all of whom have hated one another for generations. Throw into that volatile situation the fact that Iraq is not a nation of ethnic identity, but rather clan loyalty, and you have considerable divisions within these clans. Just as the South Vietnamese people were divided in their loyalties between pro-US, anti-Southern government and VietCong, so too are the Iraqi sects divided into dozens of groups, each with differing loyalties and agendas. You have Shiites who run the government, while other sects, such as the Madhi army under Moqtada al-Sadr actively seek to use force and coercion to undermine that same government and oppose the American presence in Iraq. Sunnis are cleft in many groups as well, with some still ultimately loyal Baathists from the Saddam-regime who hate the US accordingly, others who sympathize with or openly work with and for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and still others who have decided for the time being that their best chance for survival and a decent way of life rests in fighting with Americans, not against them. In addition, though it continues to improve, the Iraqi army and police are still almost wholly dependent upon American aid and support and are not in the least insulated from these difficult questions of loyalty and sectarianism.
Just as Vietnam was neither a conventional war, nor one fought in terrain favorable to Americans, so too is Iraq. In Vietnam, Communist and VietCong forces lived in a manner incomprehensible to Americans. They ate, slept, and fought in tunnels that they dug; they worked in small groups traversing dense jungles; they seemed to lack any real need for centralization or large-scale organization; they were more than willing to sacrifice themselves and others to take out the American soldiers. Vietnamese fought a rigorous guerrilla war - one that was, to paraphrase Ho Chi Minh, between a tiger and an elephant, with the powerful elephant succumbing to the quicker, more agile tiger. The climate and geography of Vietnam also made it nearly impossible for Americans to adapt, while the native Vietnamese took advantage of every nook and cranny.
In Iraq, the different hostile forces - sectarian fighters, insurgents, terrorists - all employ a variety of tactics, none of which is conventional. They use car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, ambushes, civilian attacks, etc. to defeat the "imperial" Americans. Because they never know who will be their allies and enemies from one day to the next, US soldiers must fight with the rifle in one hand and the flower in another. This lack of knowledge and constant sense of change continues to act as a death knell for hundreds of young Americans. Insurgent warfare plays well in the type of environment in which the Iraq war is taking place - congested, difficult urban areas where terrorists can easily blend in among a crowd of market-goers or innocent people on the way to the mosque.
Southeast Asia in the mid-20th century, like the Middle East then and today, was a region of extreme political confusion and difficulty. Communism, which had taken hold in China under Mao Tse-Tung was spreading its influence rapidly into the remaining nations of the region, including Vietnam. The Vietnamese have a history as a bellicose people, however, and had interests for expansion into Laos and Cambodia. The Middle East is an extremely contentious and fiery region today. The ethnic and religious divides that dominate Iraq also work to define relationships and political intercourse in the region. While Saddam Hussein was in power, a Sunni government in Iraq fought bitterly with the Shiite government in Iran. Now that Iraq is ruled by the Shiite majority, Iran sees its neighbor and longtime enemy as a new ally and possible alley for influence. In addition, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, & the United Arab Emirates all have a vested interest in the situation in Iraq.
During the Vietnam era, Lyndon Johnson and particularly Richard Nixon took steps to consolidate all real power into the vested Executive control of the President. This had numerous circumstances, including Congress being swept to the side, the will of the President defining all foreign policy for better or for worse, and the Executive Branch taking drastic steps to curb opposition at home and shore up support for policy. This ultimately led to the Watergate scandal. Just as the political problems in the 60s and 70s stemmed mostly from Vietnam, so too do the Bush administration and the Republican party's political dilemmas mostly derive from Iraq. Like Nixon, President Bush has taken steps to further consolidate power in the hands of the President and prevent Congress from having much say in the manner in which the war is dictated. Also, Bush has increased the government's interference into the civil liberties of American citizens in the pursuit of fighting the War on Terror.
Unfortunately, both Vietnam and Iraq polarized a significant portion of the populace. Just as in Vietnam, when supporters of the war continually called for the government to ramp up its efforts - General Westmoreland requested Lyndon Johnson increase the number of troops by over 200,000 in 1968 to a total of 700,000+ - conservatives and war supporters are of the mindset that if the military could ramp up the war as is deemed necessary without political or public interference, the war would be won almost overnight. As misguided as this notion is, so too are those who in both wars have demanded an immediate withdrawal of American forces with no questions asked. Both solutions try to place a simplistic one-size-fits-all solution onto an extremely complicated war laden with numerous and diverse issues.
Also, on the home front, war supporters have, just as they did in Vietnam, made the media their whipping boy and used the nightly news as a call to action for their supporters. This comparison does not hold as much water today, however, because the news coverage of the war has been more fair and straightforward than it was during the 70s.
In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopolous last October, President Bush accepted the given parallel between last fall's increased violence in Iraq and the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive, which is considered to a major turning point in the war, if only from a public opinion standpoint. When asked if he agreed with the comparison made by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Bush said ""He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election." (read about this here).
I'm glad to see that the President, if only in a roundabout way, finally understands that the war he is conducting is in many ways merely another Vietnam. Unfortunately, the manner in which the Vietnam War was resolved did, as Bush asserted, cause a whole heap of problems, including the deaths of countless thousands of Vietnamese from starvation and violence, the spread of Communism to the south, a general feeling of mistrust among Americans towards their government, and a significant loss of face for the United States in the international community. We have already encountered some of these problems, if albeit to a lesser extent. The world distrusts us and was not willing to assist our invasion. The president has approval ratings consistently in the 30s - the lowest numbers since Nixon. According to Time, 70% of people disapprove of the war, while only 1/4 approve.
If the president wanted to learn from his history and try to avoid repeating the mistakes of his predecessors, he should have done so before he invaded Iraq. If the administration was 1/100th as good at digesting the past as Dick Cheney was at predicting the future in 1994 (keep in mind that half of this administration actually helped architect Vietnam, i.e. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and consultant Henry Kissinger), then maybe they would not have made this blunder of such a monumental scale. Unfortunately, the time for positive results have passed. They disappeared in March of 2003 when we invaded Iraq. The best solution is to cut our losses now, take about one-half of our troops home and leave a residual force of 50,000 in Iraq. Thirty-thousand would patrol Baghdad, Anbar, and other hot spots, while 20,o00 would defend the borders to Iran and Syria. Another 10-25,000 naval and marine personnel should remain in the Persian Gulf as a constant presence to deter further violence and provide an immediate reaction to any problems that do arise.
They say those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it. I know that President Bush was a C-student, but what are the rest of the administration members' excuses?
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