The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I

[thedrifter]

November 18, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I
By Richard Miniter

“The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.”
—George Lucas, Star Wars creator

Thundering South from Baghdad in a Black Hawk helicopter in November 2003, I was strapped into the rear seat closest to the door.

There was nothing to do except watch the brightly lit landscape speed by. As we approached the landing zone near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the helicopter passed over a boy herding goats. He looked up—and waved.

Belted in to my left was a reporter from a major American daily. He leaned over to shout into my ear. “Vietnam!”

With the helicopter engine at full throttle and wind roaring in, conversation was impossible. I couldn’t ask him what about Iraq reminded him of Vietnam. So I searched the ground for some sign of Vietnamese terrain. I had been in Vietnam only a few years earlier and was instinctively looking for a broad, muddy river crowded with boats, a thick canopy of trees whose trunks were hidden in shade even at noon, or the colossal red-brick ruins of French colonialism. I saw none of that. Instead, there were flat-roofed, single-story buildings sprouting new satellite dishes, dots of green vegetation carefully fed by irrigation, and a hot expanse of boulder-strewn sand. Even the crewman at the machine gun, just forward of me, was in desert camouflage, not Vietnam-era jungle fatigues. Perhaps the reporter meant that the shadow of the helicopter, now undulating over the parched croplands and silvery irrigation ditches, was reminiscent of Vietnam. But there were no Black Hawks in the skies of Vietnam.

On the ground, the reporter told me that he had no real memory of Vietnam. (In fact, he had graduated from Yale in 1994.) All that he knew of the Vietnam War was Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and a series of television documentaries featuring helicopters, rice paddies, and the music of the Rolling Stones. Now, in Iraq, he said he felt like he was “living inside a movie.”

That same movie seems to be running inside the heads of scores of foreign correspondents, television pundits, think-tank experts, and armchair historians. It is a misconception at home on both the Left and the Right; everyone from Senator Ted Kennedy (Iraq is “George Bush’s Vietnam”) to Pat Buchanan (“While U.S. casualties in Iraq, five dead a week, do not approach the 150 we lost every week for seven years, in Vietnam, the home front does call to mind 1968 and even the early Nixon years.”)4 has raised the specter of an Indochinese quagmire.

Although both terrain and technology couldn’t be more opposite, this tired comparison between Vietnam and Iraq lives on.

Perhaps the comparison is unavoidable. The Vietnam War was a formative experience for the baby boomers, the largest generation in American history. It dominated the newscasts of the three television networks nearly every night for eight years, from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution to 1973 negotiations in Paris. Even when the war was popular—and, yes, it was popular in the early years—it dominated the national conversation. “The Ballad of the Green Beret,” a pro-war song, was a charttopping hit in 1966. Later, when the draft divided America and antiwar protesters filled the streets, Vietnam remained Topic A. For the people who were of voting age during the war, allowing it to slide gently into history is difficult. Now they are perched in high positions—guiding news coverage, shaping the agenda in Congress, and setting the curriculum in classrooms across the country—and can ensure that the Vietnam War is never treated like the Korean conflict, a vital piece of Cold War history with limited lessons for today.

Even the officer corps of the American military, even those who were born after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, are haunted by Vietnam. It was the last time that the U.S. military fought a protracted war against insurgents and the first time the press and the public turned against a military operation overseas. Officer training reflects the “lessons of Vietnam” and, in private conversations, officers tell me that they worry about “another Vietnam.”

What exactly is “another Vietnam”? While hard to define precisely, the specter of it appears whenever the U.S. military is sent overseas. Remember when the war in Afghanistan was supposed to be “another Vietnam”?

Less than three weeks into the ground war in 2001, the legendary New York Times columnist R. W. Apple asked: “Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not.”

The Los Angeles Times warned: “The United States is not headed into a quagmire; it’s already in one.”

In Britain, the Financial Times ran a two-part article on the war in Afghanistan titled “Ghosts of Vietnam.” The Guardian, Britain’s centerleft daily, summed it up with this headline: “This is our Vietnam.” One of the icons of American liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote “Are We Trapped in Another Vietnam?” in the Independent (London): “Evidently our leaders gambled on the supposition that the unpopularity of the regime would mean the bombing would bring about the Taliban’s rapid collapse. And they also seem to have assumed that it would not be too difficult to put together a post-Taliban government. This was a series of misjudgments.”

Even the Australians—whose nation sent troops to Vietnam in the 1960s—thought they were in a time warp. “The war itself in [Afghanistan] has already begun to create a certain déjà vu of the Vietnam variety,” Mike Carlton wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. “You can almost hear the hoots of laughter from Hanoi.”

Then there was the former spokesman for the Australian Defense Department, Adrian D’Hage, who warned that the campaign against the Taliban had “an eerie echo of Vietnam, when Australian soldiers were sent to fight the Vietcong.” The war, he complained, was “being planned by generals who have learned little, if anything, from history.”

All of these learned gentlemen completely overlooked the many essential differences between the Vietnam and Afghan wars. The Vietnam War was a contest of superpowers. In 2001, all the leading powers were united against the Taliban and bin Laden. The Taliban had no superpower (or even regional power) to train, arm, fund, or defend themselves. “The differences between the Soviet Union’s situation and ours are dramatic,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained. “The Soviets wanted that country. We don’t. They lived in the neighborhood. We don’t. They had a superpower opposing them. We don’t.”

Finally, the war in Afghanistan had an unquestionable legitimacy because the United States had suffered an unprovoked and surprise attack that slew thousands of innocents. Even today, four years into the global War on Terror and the nascent antiwar movement, the legitimacy of the war in Afghanistan is rarely questioned. (Indeed, a major argument against the Iraq War contends that it is a distraction from completing the Afghan War.)

Afghanistan, while still a troubled and violent land, has not become another Vietnam. It should stand as a warning to all of those who see “another Vietnam” in every foreign fight. Yet, like so many warnings, it went unheeded.

Then, in 2003, it was Iraq’s turn to be the next Vietnam.

Of course, there are some striking similarities between the Vietnam conflict and the war in Iraq. Both were marked by terrorism against civilians and local government officials, featured massive counter-insurgency operations, and were multi-year wars in which final victory seemed elusive. Both conflicts were characterized by attempts at nation-building in cultures and countries where democracy had yet to firmly take root and faced significant opposition by an antiwar movement at home. And that is where the parallels end.

Perhaps the definitive side-by-side comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq wars appears in a monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), a Defense Department think tank. In “Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights,” Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and W. Andrew Terrill, a former Army officer and Middle East specialist at SSI, made an exhaustive study of the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

The two authors are uniquely qualified. Record served as an assistant province adviser in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and as a national security adviser to Democratic senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen. He is the author of six books and a dozen monographs, including “Why We Lost in Vietnam.” Terrill was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve in the Middle East and is an acknowledged expert on the Iran-Iraq War and terrorism.

Drawing historical comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq is tricky, as Record and Terrill note:

Summarizing by historical analogy is an inherently risky business because no two historical events are completely alike and because policymakers’ knowledge and use of history are often distorted by ignorance and political bias. In the case of Iraq and Vietnam, extreme caution should be exercised in comparing two wars so far apart in time, locus, and historical circumstances. In fact, a careful examination of the evidence reveals that the differences between the two conflicts greatly outnumber the similarities. This is especially true in the strategic and military dimensions of the wars. There is simply no comparison between the strategic environment, the scale of military operations, the scale of losses incurred, the quality of enemy resistance, the role of enemy allies, and the duration of combat.”

Drawing on their monograph and an array of published material, as well as a recent trip of my own to Iraq, let’s investigate whether Iraq is really “another Vietnam.”

The Battlegrounds are Different
Vietnam and Iraq are vastly different societies. The Vietnamese nation has existed for centuries; its people have a long history and well-formed national identity. Vietnamese nationalism was hardened and sharpened in wars against the Japanese and French empires.

On the other hand, Iraq was born when the colonial powers of Britain and France decided to stitch together three Ottoman Empire provinces in the aftermath of World War I. Many Middle East specialists wonder, even now, if the Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish populations really see themselves as Iraqis. Iraq has long been riven by ethnic and religious strife. Certainly Iraqi nationalism seems to diminish the farther one travels from Baghdad. In the western hinterland, many of Iraq’s residents freely migrate across borders, and loyalty is still to family, tribe, and Islam—not Iraq.

Iraq’s nationalism, which is quite real in the major cities, did not emerge naturally from the Arab people inhabiting Mesopotamia. Instead, it was forged by Saddam Hussein as a top-down tool to hold the nation together. Whatever the qualities and merits of Iraqi nationalism, it is distinctly different from its Vietnamese counterpart.

The Progression of the War is Different
In Vietnam, American troops met a guerrilla force that developed into a mechanized, regimented army capable of fielding as many as 80,000 men in a single campaign.

Iraq is Vietnam in reverse. Saddam Hussein’s tanks were abandoned and his predominantly Shi’ite conscripts fled to their homes, replaced by an insurgency that rarely deploys more than four men at a time.

The Vietnamese and Iraqi Insurgencies are Different
The Vietnamese Communists advanced a clear economic, political, and military program supported by a complex ideological dogma. The enemies of Iraqi democracy do not attempt to indoctrinate their fellow Iraqis, but only kill, maim, and terrorize them. The Communists offered a utopian goal for the war: after a final victory, peasants would enjoy a more prosperous, more equal life in a united and independent homeland. The Iraqi guerrillas seem to want nothing beyond the exit of America and its allies and promise nothing. The insurgents do not even promise peace, if they should prevail.

The Vietnamese insurgency was tightly controlled through a rigid hierarchy directed by a central authority, while the one in Iraq is segmented into three clusters. The largest faction is staffed by former intelligence officers and Ba’ath Party loyalists; a second faction is a motley collection of Shi’ite front groups, identifying with Muqtada al-Sadr and most likely run by Iranian intelligence officers; and a third strand, probably run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is made up of elements of al Qaeda who have journeyed into Iraq to wage jihad. So the Iraqi insurgency is not a centralized tool of an enemy power, but three separate movements run by agents of three different powers. This may not be good news for the U.S. military, but it is not a repetition of Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the insurgency was largely rural and peopled by peasants. In Iraq, it is largely urban and waged by well-schooled sons and daughters of the middle class. As a result, the manpower pool for insurgents was greater in Vietnam than it appears to be in Iraq today. The Communists could count on recruits from the peasantry, which accounted for roughly 80 percent of the total population in 1965. With a total membership of fewer than two million in 2003, the Ba’ath Party amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the total Iraqi population. It is a minority even among the roughly 20 percent of Iraqis who call themselves Sunni Arabs. Al-Sadr’s forces and other radical Shi’ite militias number less than 5,000. The al Qaeda fighters—apparently led by al-Zarqawi—are foreigners and number less than 2,000, according to allied estimates.

The size of the enemy forces in Vietnam was much greater. The total number of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong grew from 300,000 in 1963 to 700,000 in 1966 and peaked at roughly one million in 1973, the year the U.S. decided to withdraw. Even the largest estimates of the total number of insurgents in Iraq put their strength at between 5,000 and 20,000 people. Currently, the U.S. alone has more then 130,000 troops in Iraq.

In Vietnam, the enemy was willing and able to take immense losses. The Vietnamese government announced, in April 1995, that their nation had lost 1.1 million dead in their war against the Americans. The military dead alone accounted for 5 percent of the North Vietnamese population and the pockets of South Vietnam controlled by the Communists. As Record and Terrill note, “No other major belligerent in a twentiethcentury war sustained such a high military death toll proportional to its population.”

The entire Iraqi insurgency doesn’t even amount to 5 percent of the population. To sustain losses equivalent to that of the Vietnamese Communists, the Iraqi insurgents would have to sacrifice many times their total number, which is impossible unless the insurgency finds a way to grow.

Richard Miniter is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror." Miniter is a veteran investigative reporter, award winning journalist and author of two previous New York Times bestsellers: "Losing bin Laden" and "Shadow War."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

November 20, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part II
By Richard Miniter

(Note: The following is the second of a two-part excerpt from Mr. Miniter's new book, "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine The War On Terror'.

This Time the Gloves are Off
In the 1960s, the U.S. was constrained by two great powers, the Soviet Union and Communist China. Any move to invade North Vietnam or dramatically escalate the conflict risked provoking the ire of the Soviets. The nightmare scenario: a tidal wave of Chinese army regulars flooding across the border, as they did in Korea.

Today, the U.S. is the world’s sole surviving superpower. The best outside help that Iraqi insurgents can count on comes from Iran and Syria. To date, Iran and Syria can offer only the car bomb, not the A-bomb. And now it is Iran and Syria who dare not escalate too quickly—lest they incite America’s retaliation.

The Big Battles are Over
The duration of major combat operations—defined as combined air and ground operations involving thousands of troops—is another striking difference between Vietnam and Iraq. The Vietnam War lasted fourteen years, more than eight of which were consumed by intense combat against an organized foe. By contrast, U.S. forces smashed the Iraqi army in less than three weeks in 2003.

The Quality of the Enemy is Different
The enemy in Vietnam was well drilled, with a seemingly limitless supply of modern Soviet- and Chinese-made weapons. Some of these Soviet weapons, especially small arms and anti-aircraft guns, were frankly superior to America’s military technology. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, ground forces were poorly trained and equipped with outmoded weapons. Enemy discipline evaporated under fire. Worse still, from the perspective of Saddam Hussein, Iraq had lost its superpower patron with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It received very little new equipment in the decade preceding the war—while the U.S. was fielding new smart bombs and stealth aircraft. Even in engagements with small numbers of insurgents, America has new technology to disrupt the signals used to trigger roadside bombs.

In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, I met Lt. Gen. Barbeio, who showed me new imaging technology that allows tanks and dismounted troops to deploy more closely and more rapidly than ever before—a deadly development for anti-democratic forces. Simply put, the enemy in Iraq does not have the discipline and technological edge that it did in Vietnam.

The War Aims are Different Too
In the 1960s, U.S. officials merely hoped to contain North Vietnam. In Iraq, the goal was a complete “regime change.” In the 1960s, America’s goal was essentially negative, to defend its embattled ally in South Vietnam, to defend the status quo. Today, America’s goal is positive, to bring a new democracy into being in Iraq. As Record and Terrill note, “In the 1960s, the United States was the counter-revolutionary power in Southeast Asia; it sought to preserve the non-Communist status quo in South Vietnam. . . . In 2003, the United States was the revolutionary power in the Middle East by virtue of its proclaimed intention to democratize Iraq for the purpose of providing an inspirational model to the rest of the Arab world.”

In the 1960s, U.S. policymakers feared a “domino effect” that would topple allied governments in the region and replace them with Communist dictatorships; today American officials are openly hoping for a “domino effect” in the Middle East that will replace tyrants with democrats.

The Two Wars Have Differing Policy and Moral Justifications
Secretary of State Dean Rusk repeatedly justified the Vietnam War by arguing that America had to stop Communist aggression and by citing moral obligations to honor commitments to allies. “If that commitment becomes unreliable, the Communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly catastrophic war.”

Rusk’s Cold War calculation simply has no parallel in Iraq. The U.S. was not allied with Iraq before the war, therefore, defending the integrity of America’s treaty obligations is simply not an issue.

The Iraq war was sold on a very different basis. If the United Nations Security Council resolutions were to have any credibility, President Bush argued, they would have to be enforced. President Bush argued that the safety and security of Americans turned on removing Saddam Hussein from power. The argument was simple. Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terror groups. Before the threat to America’s cities became imminent, the president contended, the nation had to act. If not, the dictator might give catastrophic weapons to al Qaeda or other Islamic radicals. Hussein might even use them directly on U.S. bases in the region, as he had against the Kurds. Whatever the merits of Bush’s claims, they amount to a very different rationale for war than the ones supported by the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

American Casualties Were Far Higher in Vietnam Than in Iraq Today
America lost a total of 55,750 dead from 1965 to 1972—a death toll of nineteen servicemen per day. The U.S. has lost fewer than 2,000 dead from June 2003 to June 2005—a rate of fewer than two servicemen a day. Indeed, the number of accidental and other non-battle deaths in Iraq continues to outpace the number of deaths from combat.

The Antiwar Movement is Weaker Now
In the 1960s, America was beset by a large, well-organized antiwar movement. Today, the antiwar movement is fragmented and marginalized and that fact appears unlikely to change any time soon. Indeed, the movement seems to exist as a nostalgia vehicle for some and a dating service for others.

One reason for marginalization of the antiwar crowd is the absence of a draft. “The major reason you don’t see colleges up in arms about the Iraq War is that we no longer have conscription,” Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos told National Journal. “If you stared drafting students again, you’d see protests start up in a hurry.

Without conscription, there is no debate about who serves and who does not. No one resents “privileged” college students lolling in gothic quadrangles while unfortunates are sent to serve in humid fields of fire. Service is voluntary and simply one of a set of choices in a free society.

Nor is there a debate about those who shirked national service or fled to Canada or about the injustice of the draft, an issue that still burns among some baby boomers.

In September 2004, television host George Stephanopoulos asked then secretary of state Colin Powell about a passage in his memoirs, where he reveals that he was “angry at the preferential treatment” given some draft dodgers, while disadvantaged young men were pressed into uniform. “That system was disturbing to me. That’s why I was such a supporter of the voluntary army when it came,” said Powell.

And when it came, the voluntary army looked more like America. National Journal noted in May 2004 that the U.S. population was 69 percent white, 12 percent black, and 11 percent Hispanic. Deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were 71 percent white, 12 percent black, and 11 percent Hispanic. (The balance was Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, foreigners who volunteered, and others.) Unlike Vietnam, it is hard to argue that some racial groups are suffering casualties disproportionately.

Another difference between the Vietnam and Iraq war deaths is that soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan were, on average, four years older than those killed in Vietnam (aged twenty-six vs. twentytwo). This removes another staple of the Vietnam era: soldiers dying before they could vote.

No Enemy Leaders
There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, the popular leader of North Vietnam. “America just saw Ho Chi Minh as a Communist,” said retired Maj. Gen. Chuck Horner, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam and commanded the U.S. Air Force during the Gulf War, “but to many of his countrymen he was a patriot, and there was something quite noble in his message of unification. In contrast, the only people who want to return Saddam to power are the hard-core Ba’athists, and they are a small minority.”

Nor is Iraq likely to produce a charismatic resistance leader. Saddam Hussein is now in U.S. custody and will be put on trial for his crimes against the Iraqi people. Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, could never plausibly pose as an Iraqi nationalist leader. Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite cleric who mobilized his militia against U.S. forces, has been decisively defeated.

Indeed, the strangest aspect of the insurgency is its lack of visible leaders. Leaders can be visible, but disguised, as in other armed revolts against central authority. In the Philippines, the insurgents have had various masked leaders, like the amusingly named “Commander Robot.” In Mexico, the terrorists in Chiapas were said to be led by “Sub-Commandante Marcos.” Iraq’s anti-democratic terrorists do not even cite a shadowy commander with a nom de guerre.

The Vietnamese Were Far Tougher Adversaries
Whereas the Communists stormed U.S. bases in South Vietnam, the Iraqi insurgents almost exclusively favor “soft” targets such as clinics, schools, and police stations. Such tactics may terrorize, but they are unlikely to lead to the decisive defeat of American and allied forces.

The Misery Index is Far Lower in Iraq Than it Was in Vietnam
In Vietnam, America’s high-altitude bombardment and noxious clouds of Agent Orange and napalm despoiled the jungles and left much of the landscape unfit for human habitation. Who can forget the famous photo of the naked girl fleeing her burning village? Refugees were a major miserable dimension of the war, forcing tens of thousands of ill-clad Vietnamese to squat in squalor in southern cities.

In Iraq, the much-feared refugee crisis never materialized. While citizens are still shockingly poor for an oil-rich nation, any visitor to Iraq, especially in its southern reaches, will see many telltale home improvements: satellite dishes from Dubai, new electric generators from Japan, new pots from Malaysia. Here and there an air conditioner pokes out of a window of a home that did not even have electricity before the war.

Far from being miserable refugees, many Iraqis have materially better lives today than they did before the war. Enterprising Iraqis took advantage of the U.S. military’s free-trade policies to import used cars from Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait. Many Iraqis now own automobiles for the first time in their lives. Indeed, the number of cars on the roads is three times higher than prewar levels—leading to long gas lines at Iraq’s filling stations.

While tariffs are now 5 percent, that still represents a huge reduction from the Saddam era, when import taxes were 75 percent on air conditioners and 30 percent on televisions. As a result, prices for consumer goods have plummeted while profits to small businesses have soared. The economy is booming, between the bomb blasts.

Fawzy al-Hashimi owns an appliance store in Baghdad with some $2 million worth of television sets, air conditioners, and refrigerators packed into his tiny storefront. He told the Financial Times that his small business’s total revenues have climbed 300 percent since Iraq’s liberation in 2003.30 Sales are soaring. So is the Baghdad Stock Exchange. The managing director of Dar al-Salaam Insurance Company reports that his firm’s portfolio of shares on the exchange have grown to 3 billion Iraqi dinars (worth roughly $2 billion) from a mere 200 million dinars in 2003.31 “I believe this will be temporary, the looting and the terrorism. If this belief is not correct, Iraq will be ruined,” he told the Financial Times. “We were buying and selling and there were bombs around, shooting and fighting but nobody got scared, they just continued buying and selling. You do not do this unless there is faith” in the future.

It doesn’t seem like these Iraqis, and others that I have met, think of their country as a lost cause like Vietnam. It might well have a different ending, if the cautious optimism of the Iraqis is justified.

Yet too many in the media are so mesmerized by the Vietnam movie playing in their heads that they can’t view today’s feature. They can keep looking for a quagmire in the desert.

Richard Miniter is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror." Miniter is a veteran investigative reporter, award winning journalist and author of two previous New York Times bestsellers: "Losing bin Laden" and "Shadow War."

Ellie