Vietnam vs Iraq
With President Bush set for another term in office, our attention will soon turn to the elections in Iraq scheduled for this January and the battle to secure the country.
Although many Americans support the war, clearly the warfare in Iraq is not a popular national mission like World War II, wherein millions of Americans joined or were enlisted in the armed forces to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese.
The question of the day now that the election is history seems to be this: Is Iraq another Vietnam?
Many observers of America, including our enemies, wonder aloud if we, as a nation, will eventually decide Iraq is not worth the sacrifice. The Iraq "conflict" has already left behind thousands of dead and has divided our country. It has alienated many of our traditional allies.
We now seem to be succeeding in taking the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah, and the casualties on both sides will inevitably rise and in other parts of Iraq as will the references to Vietnam.
There are some real parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Both wars were not officially declared as wars, rather they are "uses of force" commenced by popular presidents and widely approved by our representatives in Congress and the public at the onset.
Both wars were started under questionable pretexts. In Vietnam (as the Pentagon papers would later reveal) the public was lied to about communist strength in South Vietnam. And the Gulf of Tonkin incident appears to have been entirely manufactured.
In Iraq we started a war based on the presumably false premise that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction and harbored elements of al-Qaida that were intent on destroying America at any given moment.
Both wars seemed open-ended, (Cold War/war on terror.) In both we seem to lack a clear strategy for complete victory. In Vietnam, our plan was to keep killing them until they gave up. In Iraq our plan seems to be to keep killing them until they finally decide to accept our permanent presence in their land. Attrition, even without a nightly body count, is a dubious strategy in this war.
Both wars were fought with a "guns and butter" philosophy. Lyndon Johnson tried to fight an expensive war 10,000 miles away from home while continuing to support our allies around the world and build his Great Society.
Bush has embraced the "borrow and spend" philosophy of contemporary "conservatism," apparently believing that the war will be sustainable as long as the folks here at home get their fat tax cuts so they can avoid feeling any pain associated with the war.
Both wars helped spiral the national deficit and reduce our ability to export manufactured goods.
In both wars the Americans fighting and dying were disproportionately poor, brown or rural. Just like in the Vietnam era, when a special set of rules protected the children of the ruling elites, our current war in the Middle East reveals again that our military is staffed with the children of the working class. The children of the well-heeled and well-educated are mostly shielded from the suffering on the battlefield.
These are a few similarities, yet key differences exist between the Iraq and Vietnam conflicts.
For one, Iraq is not backed by the former Soviet Union and China. Iraq does not, as yet, have a popular nationalist leader opposing us, as was the case with Ho Chi Mihn in Vietnam. The desert terrain of Iraq is clearly better suited to the American military than the jungles of Vietnam.
Iraq has a smaller population of hearts and minds to win, and fewer places to hide. Iraq also has oil, great deals of easily obtainable oil. Although Vietnam has oil and other wealth, its resources are not nearly so necessary to us and the industrialized world as the vast petroleum reserves that lie underneath Iraq.
And there is another key difference between Iraq and Vietnam. Every night during the Vietnam conflict when Americans came home the news showed American and Vietnamese dead and injured, and we saw flag-draped coffins as they returned to the U.S., with the families weeping as they greeted their fallen sons.
There are no bad pictures or films of weeping American families to be seen in the Iraq war. Sadly, the censorship that shields us from war's reality also hides us from the many good things Americans are accomplishing in Iraq.
Americans over 40 will remember the humiliating experience of America losing Vietnam after years of struggle and sacrifice, and the long-term psychological and geopolitical impact of the Vietnam experience. Mindful of our past mistakes, we can act now to avoid another Vietnam and to win the peace in Iraq.
Randal Beeman is a history professor at Bakersfield College. In addition to holding a doctorate. he holds a master's of arts degree in military history from Kansas State University.
