Dan Schneider at Unlikely 2.0

Iraq, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the Couch Potato's Burden: A Muscular Centrist Attack on the Pro-War Position
Part 1

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

One of the most interesting things I have noticed in the pro-war position is the fanatical denial of any parallels in the current war to the Vietnam War. One would believe, reading pro-war blogs, or watching pro-war tv shows, that the liberals/Leftists/traitors/Un-Americans are doing nothing BUT comparing the two wars. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not to say such parallels have not been drawn, but they have usually been sparse and hazy, and most done in early stages of the war, in very Boy Who Cried Wolf fashion- only further delaying its true dawning since the early comparisons were when we were doing relatively well, after Bush declared Mission Accomplished! It’s as if the pro-warriors see the parallels and are desperately trying to stave off that dawning in the general populace.

In fact, there has been precious little in way of comparisons, yet gonzo journalist Christopher Hitchens recently reacted to comparisons with his usual gusto. Yet, the parallels exist, are manifold and manifest- not so much in ‘the enemy’ but in our conduct and deceptions in this war. As Pogo might have said, in regards to both wars- ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us!’ Despite that, there have been few comparisons and the major reason is the Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome.

In the decades since Vietnam, nearly every American military action has been greeted with the ghosts of that failure. ‘This could be another Vietnam’, ‘bogged down’, and ‘quagmire’, among the top words and phrases repeated in articles and newscasts covering those later military actions. Yet, none of them- from the smallest, our invasion of Grenada, to the largest, the Gulf War, were remotely like Vietnam- not in cost, death, length, nor outcome. Our confidence was high, with a sense of redawning American might. But, it should also be noted, despite occasional lapses, those campaigns, whether or not you agreed with them, had rings of truth; if not always fully, enough to dispel legitimate comparisons to the deceits that corrupted the Johnson and Nixon Administrations’ conduct of the Vietnam War.

A new generation, not scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, was apt to trust the government again, and think this new war would be like the other mini-wars. After all, we seemingly cleaned up Afghanistan rather easily, so Iraq, while a little harder, would still be a cakewalk, especially once Saddam Hussein was toppled. Did not our conduct and planning of the war bespeak that triumphalism? Vietnam was no more relevant than the Civil War to this generation. And there had been so many faux Vietnams the past three decades most folk simply did, and still do, not take the idea seriously, despite alarming evidence to the contrary.

After all, El Salvador was not another Vietnam. Nor was Nicaragua. Little Grenada- a nation that any moderately sized street gang from the Bronx could have taken over? Panama? Recall, Manuel Noriega was another dictator on our payroll (literally) who spurned us. Haiti? How about the Old World? The Gulf War? Somalia? The Balkans? And on the media Boy cried Wolf. People grew inured and the irresponsibility of the media has its share of the blame for the narcotized dismissive grins of, ‘Vietnam! Yeah, right!’ The hyperactive video game age is not one where long memories serve well- Vietnam is farther removed from this generation than the Civil War was from the World War II generation, despite being only a third of the time’s difference in real chronology. However, people over the age of fifty have no such Santayanan excuse.

So, ignorance of the past, due to the Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome, is one reason we uncritically accepted this war’s premises. Another is this war has been tied to the War on Terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden- i.e.- the long shadow of 9/11 has given Bush political capital and trust Johnson and Nixon could only fantasize of. Although I give Hitchens plaudits for his forays into areas few media types dare touch- such as his exposure of Mother Teresa as The Ghoul Of Calcutta- when he claims there are no parallels between Iraq and Vietnam he is flat wrong.

In fact, the parallels are eerie and growing with time- so much so the joke making the rounds currently, the only difference between Vietnam and Iraq is George W. Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam, may turn out, unfortunately, to not be so funny. Note that I have highly condensed the parallels down to eight, yet could easily have stretched them into dozens. This will be important in comparison to the Administration’s stated reasons for war in Iraq, which I will deconstruct later.

The US

Military Error: plain old human error.
1. Military hubris: In both conflicts swift victory was ‘assured’. In Iraq victory was declared in little over a month, yet nearly two years on we are nowhere near real victory. Our might- greater firepower in Vietnam than all of World War II, and Iraq’s ‘Shock and Awe’ would carry the day. But, our hubris allowed our soldiers to invade Iraq in far too few numbers, with far too little protection and support. This occurred while Colin Powell was State Secretary- sadly ironic, for it violated The Powell Doctrine he crafted as his lesson learned from Vietnam: not enough troops, no clear mission, no consensus support, and no exit strategy. In Vietnam we also thought, early on, we we were winning, and would win easily.
2. Quagmire logic: This the result of military hubris, evidenced by both wars’ supporters. It is known as the hook, that as soon as you let yourself get hooked onto a losing proposition you find you cannot get off easily, so the fallacy says ‘send more and more’, except this leads to the logic that ends Night Of The Living Dead- ‘another one for the fire, boys!’ The hook in Iraq, for many, was supporting the invasion to get rid of Saddam, which morphed into supporting the occupation to ‘bring democracy’, and, when things didn’t go as planned, morphed into supporting crushing ‘opposition’, which meant killing innocents, manifold more than died in 9/11, and on and on, all justifying it as ‘noble and humanitarian’. There are the appeals to machismo and shame- ‘we cannot cut and run’, ‘we cannot show weakness’, and ‘don’t let the dead have died in vain’, but they are fey in comparison to likely alternatives- a long occupational war that fuels more insurgents from former moderates, with many more dead troops and civilians, an increased chance of terrorist attack domestically, bankrupting our nation which could lead to domestic problems unforeseen, as well as a decline of America as a superpower. Yet, appealing to machismo and shame shows how bankrupt support of the war is. Many still support the war only because they fear the consequences of leaving, not because they see anything positive that can come of the war. Although they prolonged the Vietnam War unnecessarily, even Nixon and Kissinger- masters of quagmire logic- finally simply left, cutting their political losses. We should follow suit, but sooner, not later, before an Iraqi ‘Tet Offensive’ turns the hook further, for we will someday have to leave, and the circumstances later are not as likely to be as good, relatively speaking, as now.
3. War conduct: Quagmires arise because we forsake General William Tecumseh Sherman’s ideal all wars should be total- brutal and short as possible, ensuring minimal casualties on your side, while giving the enemy pause before ever warring again- for pussyfooting around. In Vietnam we were afraid all out war would draw the Soviets or Red Chinese into the war. In Iraq we are afraid all out war, with its body count and sundered mosques, would turn the Moslem world against us. Thus, we sink in against vastly militarily inferior enemies. Ironically, as pure military strategy an Operation: Rolling Thunder would be far more effective in the Iraqi desert than in the Vietnamese jungles. Note: this point is not a contradiction of other points. I am not endorsing policy, merely showing similarities.
4. Tactical stupidity: In Iraq interim Iraqi Administrator Paul Bremer disbanded the conquered Iraqi Army, providing disgruntled, penniless fighters the terrorists could recruit and/or contract services from, while in Vietnam the US policy of hamlet pacification provided a pool of countless survivors from which the NVA and Vietcong could recruit from. There is growing consensus that, like Vietnam, this war is being waged incompetently.
5. No empathy: In both wars’ early stages empathy for ‘the enemy’ was nearly non-existent. The NVA and VC were ‘Godless Communists’, the Iraqi insurgents ‘Evil Terrorists’. This mindset can lead to Abu Ghraib or Rolling Thunder. The enemy must be dehumanized. Worse than a lack of empathy for the enemy, is the lack of empathy for innocents killed by the enemy and our forces. Basement estimates for Iraqi war dead are ten to twenty thousand while a hundred thousand is the top estimate. Yet, to read the Right Wing bloggers you would not think any of this occurred. In The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a 2003 Academy Award winning documentary by Errol Morris, McNamara makes a cogent point that the reason we were able to avert nuclear disaster in 1962 was JFK empathized with Khrushchev and the Soviets over the missile dilemma. LBJ and Nixon were incapable of empathy for the Vietnamese, and Bush and the pro-warriors likewise cannot empathize with anyone nor anything, save their tunnel vision.
6. Torture tactics: The result of no empathy. The American public was shocked over last year’s Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, but the question of which shock was bigger- the fact that the US employs torture, as have all countries since time immemorial, during war, despite the Geneva Convention, or that its practitioners were arrogant and dumb enough to document it? Worse, it is still being whispered that torture continues, at a much lower profile, despite its discredited effectiveness in gaining good intelligence. Of course, torture was regularly applied during the Vietnam War by the South Vietnamese and CIA during Operation: Phoenix. And this does not even deal with atrocities inflicted by mercenaries, under our aegis, such as this NBC report on the company Custer Battles.
7. Retributive frustration: The stated reason we went into Vietnam was to avenge an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, not to mention our frustration with not being able to topple Fidel Castro. In Iraq, Bush saw he failed to smoke out Osama bin Laden, so turned toward a target he knew the location of, one who had tried to assassinate his father.
8. Incompetent intelligence: As well as corrupt. The CIA and military failed miserably to properly intell the Vietnam War- from the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, daily press briefings laden with distortions and lies, repeated, failed CIA attempts to assassinate Ho Chi Minh, to the shock of the Tet Offensive. Iraq has been a Swiss cheese of intell problems- from the failure to properly assess the existence of WMDs, failing to project needed personnel and materiel, failing (in Afghanistan) to capture Osama bin Laden, letting tons of munitions slip from their control, to failing to protect military commissaries. Iraq has been so poorly run any other President would likely have long ago fired his Defense Secretary. Wars like this prove assassination is a viable option to war- but to surgically assassinate intelligence must be excellent. Ours was not.
War Fog: complexities of war are subject to the law of unintended consequences, especially if presuppositions are in error.
1. Relative Size: Iraq is a little war, so far, compared with Vietnam. But, relative to the size of our military, and percentage of forces in Iraq, the wars are comparable, for the military was larger during the Cold War.
2. Expanded war: The reason for no exit strategy may be, as in Vietnam, a growing sense among pro-warriors one nation may not be enough. We are rumbling about going into Iran, to knock out nuclear capabilities, or Syria, to go after phantom WMDs and Baathists thought to be ferrying men and weapons for the insurgency. Expansion may be declared inevitable, as was ‘going after the Commies’ in Laos and Cambodia. The aftermath of that decision led to the Killing Fields of Pol Pot.
3. Frontless/Occupation: Except for the Indian Wars, the Philippines War, and the Vietnam War, all of our wars have been conventional, most were reactive wars against aggression, including the Gulf War. Iraq is a non-conventional, frontless, guerilla war, like Vietnam, as well an occupational war, after ‘supposed’ aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
4. Theater war: While many argue the war in Iraq is a diversion and enervation from the real War on Terror, there is little doubt Vietnam and Iraq were viewed by their American enactors as mere theaters in larger campaigns. Vietnam, along with Korea, were hot theaters in the Cold War, while Iraq has been hinted at being merely the second theater, after Afghanistan, in the War on Terror, with Iran, Syria, and North Korea possible future theaters. An argument can be made that the difference is we were reactors in Vietnam, and provocateurs in Iraq.
5. Domino Theory: A cousin to theater war. This was the Cold War theory Communist aggression should be countered everywhere and at all costs, lest country after country fall to totalitarianism. History has shown the claim to be dubious, as the rejection of communist groups like The Shining Path in Peru, the regressivist failure of Cuba, the grass roots formation of counter-movements like Solidarity, the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, and the drift away from Communism in post-war Vietnam have shown much could be achieved with smarter, less-involved opposition, at far lesser costs, and without America’s help. In some circles, after the release of former Soviet documents, the collapse of the Soviet Empire is thought to have been delayed by twenty years by the Vietnam War and Reagan military buildup, in rote Domino opposition, for it allowed hard line militarists to counter reform agents that sought to unleash glasnost and perestroika years earlier than Mikhail Gorbachev. The folly of the Domino Theory is explored in the brilliant The Fog of War, one of the few films of the last century that will still be relevant in an eon, and should be required in all history classes. McNamara admits the idea was a false premise in Vietnam. In similar fashion, in Iraq, one new Domino Theory is proposed- instead of America being domino stoppers we are the domino pushers of democracy. Yet, a second Domino Theory claims Islamic Extremism must be stopped in Iraq, lest it become a second Iran, that will topple other governments across the Moslem world. The problem with that is by removing Saddam we set that very second Domino Theory in motion, for as bad as the Baathists were, they were rabidly anti-theocratic. Our invasion may have galvanized large segments of radical Islam in nations that are, on paper, our allies. Are we really prepared to invade nuclear Pakistan- where great sympathies for Al Quaida lie- were that to fall in an Islamic revolution?
6. Global domination: A cousin to the Domino Theory. We are told Islamic Fundamentalists/Extremists/Islamofascists/Terrorists are a global threat, as was Communism, bent on destroying Western Civilization. While there is truth in these claims, insofar as stated aims, there is a huge difference in the strength and ability of ‘the enemy’ in carrying those threats out. Communism was a serious threat to world democracy and liberty, but even it, at its height, controlled only a quarter of the world. Islamic Extremism rules in only a few minor nations. It isn’t a threat at the level of the Soviets, nor Nazis, rather the last gasps of fanaticism in the Moslem world that resents being dragged into McWorld, like the youth in Iran who, less than a quarter-century after the imposition of theocracy, resent and openly rebel against their masters. The conflation of these criminal terrorists with industrial state dictatorships with global aims, the Communists or the Fascists (the Three Axis Powers of World War II), is patently absurd, and an illustration of the desperation of the current Administration to give its war relevance. George Bush and Tony Blair are not world figures on a par with FDR nor JFK nor Winston Churchill, nor were Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein world threats on an order of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. They would have been minor bandit irritants in the Cold War. Big Times have a historic tendency to call out Big Leaders and George Bush is manifestly a Small Leader for Small Times. Proof of this comes from the fact of Bush’s near-constant missteps post-9/11. Hailed a great leader after 9/11, I ask what did he do that no other President would not have done? The real test of his leadership came in the failure to properly war plan, or avoid war, between 9/11 and the start of the war. Also, consider if you told the public, right after 9/11, that three and a half years later we would not have captured Osama bin Laden, and started an unnecessary war with a nation that had no involvement in 9/11. 98+% of the public would declare the President an unqualified failure. That he is not is testament to the great agitprop, dull electorate, and complicity of the MSM in shilling the war.
  Compare his leadership to the well-documented skills of JFK during the mere thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis- the closest the globe has yet to come to extinction, and imagine Bush as President then. Would any of us be here? 9/11 was not the start of World War III, as some feared, rather the first post-millennial death knell of Islam, and, indeed all organized religion in its long slide to irrelevance. 9/11 wasn’t a declaration of war on the West, but a paroxysmic admission of defeat.
7. No Exit: In Vietnam we went for years before a strategy emerged- ‘Peace, with honor’, then ‘Vietnamization’, and finally, ‘Get outta Dodge!’ This war has not even had that- no Marshall Plan for after the war was thought needed before the war, and still there is no exit strategy.
Political stupidity: political folly’s hand in war.
1. Orwellian deceit: Mainly euphemizing agitprop and historical revisionism. In Vietnam we were out ‘to win hearts and minds’. In Iraq we will be ‘welcomed as liberators’. In Vietnam victory was always a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, even as the tunnel lengthened and light dimmed. In Iraq success is always near, as we’ve ‘turned a corner’. The problem is every third corner turned heads us back to square one. ‘Vietnamization’ of the war becomes the ‘brave new Iraqi Army’. The destruction of towns and cities in Vietnam was ‘pacification’, while in Iraq it is ‘liberation’, with Najaf and Fallujah what Hue, My Lai, and Danang were to Vietnam. There was the State of the Union ‘moment’ when an Iraqi woman hugged an American mother whose son had been killed in Fallujah, only to have many on the Left point out her past’s not being what was claimed, which along with revelations of conservative columnists on the White House payroll, further bolsters their ideas the government may be funding many of the pro-war Iraqi blog sites, many claimed by the Left to not even be in Iraq. There is the denial of the wars’ starts and history. In Vietnam blame was shifted from Johnson to Kennedy to Eisenhower to the French. In Iraq the war was about WMDs, then not- just a laundry list of minor complaints (which I will deal with later). There is also demonizing political opposition. LBJ and Nixon claimed dissent undermined the military and encouraged the enemy. Bush recently went further, stating drawing analogies between Vietnam and Iraq does what dissent did then.
2. Big Brother: Manifestly a corollary of Orwellian deceit. In Vietnam it was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the CIA, along with Nixon’s infamous ‘Enemies List’. Today it is the overreach of the Patriot Act. For those who claim unwarranted searches or seizures of library records could happen, but have not, I counter if employed as successfully as the Patriot Act claims is needed for National Security, there is no way a good citizen could know, until wrongly accused. If you counter the government was doing this all along, a credible argument, then the Patriot Act is still a disaster, in its revelation of possible counter-tactics any terrorists would need be wary of.
3. Callow Presidents: Johnson and Bush were ‘accidental’ Presidents. Both had little foreign policy experience, or interest in it, and Bush no war experience, while both relied on a small coterie of experts. Both were plagued with a paranoia the powers that be were out to get them- LBJ from Kennedy holdovers, Bush from ‘East Coast Elitists’. Both had ambitious domestic agendas that were compromised by their wars.
4. Presidential deceit: A corollary of Orwellian deceit. In Vietnam the Gulf of Tonkin incident, now admitted by former Johnson Administration officials as most likely never occurring, was the pretense for our entry into Vietnam. In Iraq fallacious claims of WMDs, Saddam’s ties to Al Quaida, poor intelligence, and a will to believe only information that reinforced pre-existing biases, led Bush to engage us in Iraq. Although pro-warriors will claim this is not true I will show below it is. The truth is we would never have gotten into Iraq absent the debunked claims of WMDs- other reasons were too few, too weak, thus the priority of the WMD claim.
5. Fear Mongering: A corollary to Orwellian deceit. Presidents playing off fears of conquest. During Vietnam there were variations of ‘a Red under every bed’ and LBJ declaiming if Reds weren’t stopped in Vietnam they’d be in Hawaii, then San Francisco, while Bush declares terrorists could be everywhere, but must be confronted in Iraq, lest strike New York, St. Louis, or Los Angeles, thus justifying the ultimate Boy Who Cried Wolf game- the color coded Terror Alert System, which has been ignored since the third or fourth time it was raised to paisley.
Domestic problems: domestic reasons a senseless war is engaged.
1. Silent majority: Both wars started with broad support by the oft-invoked ‘silent majority’ of the American public, but recent polls show Bush’s approval ratings are slipping each month, as did Johnson’s and Nixon’s. In Vietnam the ‘silent majority’ of support slowly became the ‘vocal majority’ against the war.
2. Cowardly opposition: In respect to opposition parties. The Republicans in the 1960s, especially after LBJ’s landslide over Goldwater, were scared of being seen as unpatriotic in opposing Communism, while the Democrats, after consecutive narrow losses by two terrible candidates, are still wavering on opposing the war. Republicans in the 1960s never got to the point where they condemned the war because they took the Presidency in 1968. It remains to be seen what Democrats will do- stand on principle and speak out against the war, or do so only when they sense the tide has turned. John Kerrey stated had he won the 2004 election he would have stayed the course, become the Democratic Nixon to Bush’s GOP LBJ.
3. Saturation war: Vietnam was the first war that was broadcast daily via television, thus intimating the American public to war on a scale never before known. In Iraq there is not only television, but live updates on blogs, 24/7 cable media outlets, and satellite and webcasting. There is a major difference, however- in Vietnam the MSM was comparatively free of censorship, while this war has embedded the MSM, as the Administration has co-opted of a large section of the blogosphere as a ‘see no evil’ peanut gallery. Fortunately, where the MSM has failed there has been the rise of many online blogs and ‘independent’ media outlets that have independently reported the war without the government’s aegis/grip, and certain MSM, the press corps, the Washington Post and New York Times, have started becoming more critical, where their electronic counterparts have still not shown spine, thus earning them the wrath of the Right Wing as ‘traitors’.
Miscellaneous reasons:
1. Sham elections: The recent elections on 1/30/05 were hailed with an instant agitprop icon- the purple-inked thumb- as indisputable proof of American rectitude. Yet, many trumpeted claims- a peaceful day (only 24 dead- and dismissively sneered at by pro-war bloggers), 70+% turnout, and celebrating voters- rang hollow. Reality set in- it was one of the most violent days yet- with 60+ people dead (including a downed British airplane), voter turnout below 60% (58% of 8.5 million registered voters), with many precincts never opening, charges of election fraud (the nearest election observers were in neighboring countries), thousands of Iraqis protesting disenfranchisement on 2/6/05, not to mention Sunni boycotts, and slate ballots which most voters knew not who nor what party was on the ballot, nor what they stood for. The American puppets, the Iraqi List, finished a distant third, in most places, with Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani ’s theocratic party, United Iraqi Alliance, getting the most, and Kurdish Alliance coming in second. He seems to be the real winner; it was his fatwa declaring voting a duty that did more to push for elections than Bush’s initial reluctance to allow voting. The parallels to Vietnam become obvious looking at this New York Times piece from 1967:
  
  U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote: Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967)
  WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
  According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
  The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
  ***
  A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.
  ***
  The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent.
  
  A question to ask is will we tolerate ‘democracy’ if it results in a Shiite Islamic coalition republic, a distinct possibility- one in which anti-Israeli sentiments are not hidden? Or will there be an ‘incident’ that forces us to depose the government?
2. Military unrest: Absolutely verboten in pro-war corners, but the truth is growing numbers of injured Iraqi war veterans, abandoned to the wayward US healthcare system, denied proper medals, denied other basic rights, along with active resentment among many reservists whose service ended years ago, but subjected to loopholes of the back door draft, have voiced concerns that military personnel safety is not as high a priority as protecting Iraqi oil fields, and their outrage over their treatment. While not nearly at the levels of anti-war veterans movements of Vietnam the potential is there. On a Vietnam timeline the level of military unrest now is greater than it was at the two year mark in Vietnam. All this while Bush says he supports the troops, but cuts their benefits.
3. World doubts: Vietnam was not a heartily endorsed war, as the Korean War had been, by the UN, and American motives were suspect in world opinion from the beginning. Iraq has been almost wholly a dual American-British effort, in stark contrast to the nearly unanimous UN approval of the Gulf War, due mainly to doubts, later proven correct, about the existence of WMDs, and the American corporate power grab for post-invasion contractual booty. The doubts have only continued and grown with the clash between the daily bloodshed and the sunny briefing room optimism, bolstered by claims that are mostly or wholly false. Yet, in a typical tactic, pro-warriors claim France, Germany, and Russia, among other nations, never out and out stated they did not believe Saddam had WMDs, even though their actions did, nor did they deny Saddam was a bad guy- although that was not the point of the war.
4. Ugly Americana: The stereotype of the Ugly American arose in Latin America, due to our government’s, and corporations’, support of dictators through the centuries, and spread across the world throughout the 20^th Century- to the Middle East, Africa, Polynesia, and the Orient. In Vietnam it was corporate interests, plus our refusal to decry French colonialism, that earned us that title across Indochina. In Iraq our corporate post-invasion power grab for war spoils (mainly oil) did little to dispel that appearance, as did our indifference to the looting of Iraq’s national treasures. In both wars there was and is almost total denial to see our role as exploiters of less developed nations as a reason for their hatred. Instead, reductively simplistic slogans like ‘They hate freedom!’ predominate. Never is the question asked why it’s so easy to recruit anti-American haters into our enemy’s fold.
5. Spurned tyrants: In Vietnam Ho Chi Minh was a tyrant whom the US had many opportunities to bring under our wing, as we had with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Shah, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, and dozens of Latin American despots, for his record of seeking American aid in overthrowing French colonialism dates back to a post-World War I attempt to get President Woodrow Wilson to get Vietnamese recognition as an autonomous colony in the French Empire, to President Harry Truman’s spurning of Ho in the late 1940s. US authorities never fully trusted Ho, nor thought he would be a ‘good little stooge’. With good reason- he spent decades using and frustrating the Soviets and Red Chinese, who knew he was a Nationalist in Communist’s clothing. Our prescience had its toll. In Iraq, Saddam had no problem being under US protection, and even thought he would get a look the other way from us, as President Jimmy Carter did for Suharto, in East Timor, in the 1970s, when he invaded Kuwait. Unfortunately, Kuwait had oil, East Timor didn’t. To extend the analogy further, if one accepts the premise pro-warriors give, that Saddam was indeed tied to Al Quaida, it’s worth noting Osama bin Laden was a CIA-trained operative during the years of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. All three tyrants were spurned by the US at one point or another.

Now that I have pointed out parallels in our conduct of the two wars, let me point out a few the enemies share.

The Enemy

Enemy not: The enemy the US thought it was facing in both wars was simply not as reductively simple as first thought. In Vietnam all US opposition was ‘evidence of Communism’, and while true there were die-hard Communists in the NVA and VC it is clear the primary thrusts of your average anti-American Vietnamese was anti-imperialist, pro-nationalist, and civil war. This fundamental misreading of the war has led even former die-hard supporters to admit the war was a costly mistake and diversion in the Cold War. Ho Chi Minh is recognized as having played both sides of the Cold War against the middle to get what he wanted, a Vietnam free from colonialism, and under his thumb. Ho chose perhaps the most apt alias of all time because he was the consummate ‘ho’- willing to sell out to the highest bidder who’d fund his campaigns. Only the Commies bit, and came to regret it when he backstabbed them. Only the deluded Far Right still spouts the debunked mythos Ho was a committed Communist, even though his attempts to sell out to the US are documented. In Iraq a similar misread is going on, as all insurgents are lumped together under the heading terrorist- connoting the Apocalyptic Al Quaida. In truth there is a range of insurgents. There are the Apocalyptics, but also Baathist remains, supported by Sunni splinter groups, Shia and Sunni civil warriors, religious jihadists, foreign elements, anarchists, anti-occupationists, nationalists, and pure mercenaries- Average Mohammads who will sell their services to the highest bidder, while many ex-Baathists were in the officer and managerial ranks, with organizational skills, access to looted money, and perhaps access to munitions our military ‘misplaced’. Add to that, Arab dynasts who secretly will fund Sunni insurgents, and the enemy is no pushover, and every bit as formidable and resilient as in Vietnam.
Enemy bad: Our enemy is ‘pure evil’. This demonization is linked to ‘no empathy’. The Communists were worse than the Nazis, and the terrorists/insurgents are worse still. Evil exists in the terrorist camp, but has to be recognized as a nuanced evil- with origins, reasons, and support among many. To fail to recognize that would mean ‘we’ are as unspeakably evil, for how manifold more innocents have we killed in Iraq, which never attacked us, than the terrorists did on 9/11? This rationale leads to the spineless Joe Lieberman Doctrine- ‘any thing we do is good because they’re bad guys’- and the hubris that led to Abi Ghraib.
Enemy more: We were not going to win in Vietnam because the North had a near endless source of manpower and materiel from the Soviet Union, and its satellites, that beat us through attrition. The Iraqi insurgents can call on reinforcements from the whole of the Arab and Moslem worlds.

Let me end with restating I have given over thirty stark and tenable parallels between the two wars, and, had I gone the route many dialecticians do, could have parsed them out into over a hundred. The purpose of this all is to dispel the disingenuous denials of parallels, and show that unlike the many Boy Who Cried Wolf claims of the past, these are not bogus. Iraq is not yet the bloodbath Vietnam was, but it has the potential to be, and at similar stages of the wars we are already in as far, or farther, than Vietnam.

The next time a pro-warrior, or Right Winger pooh-poohs the comparison, simply use this handy Baedeker. To deny the manifold and manifest parallels is for someone to willfully reveal an agenda beyond rationality. Now, it’s time to tackle the motivations behind this current war in Iraq.