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The Vietnam Analogy
Friday 16 April 2004 Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse. It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict. And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be called up for extended missions overseas. The training of these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to spend years fighting a guerrilla war. Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army. But President Bush hasn't called for larger forces. In fact, he seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have. A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today - the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year - would eliminate most of our budget deficit. By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations. This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern. Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army. Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government - as opposed to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge. If we aren't promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war have already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they no longer have high hopes for what we may accomplish, but they fear the consequences if we leave. The irony is painful. One of the real motives for the invasion of Iraq was to give the world a demonstration of American power. It's a measure of how badly things have gone that now we're told we can't leave because that would be a demonstration of American weakness. Again, the parallel with Vietnam is obvious. Remember the domino theory? And there's one more parallel: Nixonian politics is back. What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious were Nixon's efforts to suppress dissent, like the "Tell It to Hanoi" rallies, where critics of the Vietnam War were accused of undermining the soldiers and encouraging the enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a meta-Nixon: he declared that anyone who draws analogies between Iraq and Vietnam undermines the soldiers and encourages the enemy. Vietnam's Ghost
Hovers Over Iraq War Thursday 15 April 2004 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy needed only one word in a speech the other day to add fuel to a burning national debate: Vietnam. While Americans tried to shake off days of fierce guerrilla attacks in Iraq and wondered whether their leaders have detoured into a quagmire, the last surviving Kennedy brother tapped into a flood of painful memories by calling the U.S. occupation of Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam." With the resistance to occupation in Iraq intensifying, with names like Najaf and Falluja becoming as familiar as Danang and Hue, Vietnam has once again become the ghost hovering over the American political landscape -- a decade-long war fought among a hostile population that cost 58,000 Americans lives and those of two million Vietnamese. The questions are starkly simple: has American blundered into another "war of choice" it will not be able to win or get out of quickly? Will this war stir the street demonstration and stark divisions that Vietnam did? Will it send one party packing into the political wilderness come Election Day in November? A Reuters survey of academic experts, former diplomats, Vietnam veterans and activists, supporters of the president and detractors, found that while virtually all agree that Vietnam and Iraq are different wars, the chance of a misadventure based on false assumptions is a real and present danger. Former National Security Agency head Gen. William Odom, the co-author of a new book, "America's Inadvertent Empire," cautioned, "The problem with analogies is that they always break down but they can be instructive. In many ways Iraq is not Vietnam at all. There is more at stake than what we had in Vietnam." Odom said that one policy option the government might want to consider is to "get out in boats ... but neither the administration nor (likely Democratic presidential candidate John) Kerry are thinking about that because there is a climate now where this thing cannot be discussed in a detached manner." That level of red hot emotion characterized the Vietnam War for years, paralyzing decision makers and obscuring the real choices that Americans had, experts said. Vietnam was the war that America entered with enthusiasm on an ill-fated mission to contain Communism only to reach a tipping point when the generation fighting it turned on the administration waging it. "Forty years we went down the rabbit hole in Vietnam. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again," said filmmaker Errol Morris when he won an Oscar last February for best documentary for his "The Fog of War." "A False
Analogy" For the president, "A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure." His pledge was to "stay the course," a term that, of course, could have come directly from the Vietnam playbook. Like Vietnam, Iraq is a war broadcast daily into a nation's living rooms. Like Vietnam, it is a war with briefings and body counts, a war where the blood on the street contradicts the optimism at the briefing table. It is once again a battle for "the hearts and minds" of people in a far-away foreign land. And like Vietnam, polls show "silent majorities" in favor of what is being done but, again the word "quagmire" has crept cat-like back into daily use. Talking about this the other day, filmmaker Morris said, "I warned about it at the Academy Awards and I think if anything, the warning is far more resonant now. I don't think history repeats itself exactly. Iraq is not Vietnam but ... the same mistakes we made in Vietnam we are making all over again." Rand Corporation expert James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, said another issue in both cases "is not whether the war was worth fighting but whether it was fought competently." He added, "Vietnam was initially less controversial than Iraq because Vietnam was perceived as largely a defensive war. Over time that assumption was reexamined. In Iraq despite having a much less potent adversary and a lower level of causalities, look how quickly we have moved from initial euphoria to whether the current offensive is equal to the Tet offensive." Several of the experts surveyed said that a glaring problem with Iraq is that like Vietnam people question the truthfulness of why the United States went in. Robert Bellah, Elliot Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, said, "The clearest similarity (between the two wars) is that we got into both based on government lies. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution (that Congress passed giving President Lyndon Johnson authority to wage full-scale war in Vietnam) was based on an event that didn't happen. We would never have gotten into the Iraq war if claims about weapons of mass destruction were absent." Ron Kovic, the paralyzed Vietnam veteran who became a symbol of protest with his book "Born on the Fourth of July." said, "There is potential here for the most powerful anti-war movement in the history of the United States and the world." And he grimly added, "We have no sense of history and we are hurling headlong into a major disaster that will kill countless more American soldiers and countless innocent civilians. -------
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