No, Iraq Is Not Vietnam

Washington has a bad habit of viewing things elsewhere in the world only through the prism of American experience, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the recent comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam. Both President Bush and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman are wrong in comparing the current violence in Iraq to the 1968 Tet Offensive.

There are, in fact, many reasons why Iraq is nothing like Vietnam or any other U.S. experience, but both sides in the American debate over the war have chosen to ignore them. For the antiwar left, Iraq has always recalled the great American trauma of Vietnam, a misguided war of choice that ended badly after a decade of pointless savagery; for the war’s advocates on the right, Iraq recalled the great American triumph of rebuilding postwar Japan and Germany. Yes, it is hard to imagine that they were serious, but it wasn’t simply PR, either — some of the policy documents used by the U.S. occupation administration in Baghdad were based on policies used in the Allied occupation of Germany.

That comparison obviously looks plain silly, now, so instead we are left with Vietnam — albeit different interpretations of Vietnam. As Professor Juan Cole points out, Bush is probably relying on a hawkish view that while the Tet Offensive was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong, the spike of violence it brought may have struck a crippling political blow at the American public’s will to fight the war. As Cole notes, the irony is that the upside of Tet may not be the first thing that comes to mind for Americans when their President compares Iraq to Vietnam — it may be more likely to confirm the belief that Iraq is another quagmire in which the U.S. can’t win.

What both Bush and Friedman fail to see is that the catastrophe created by the U.S. invasion is a product of Iraq’s own history, culture and composition, and experience of previous invasions — and of the failure of the U.S. leadership to grasp those specifics. It has nothing to do with American experiences elsewhere, and in fact continuing to view events there through the Vietnam prism may have actually contributed to the problem. Sure, just as in Vietnam, the U.S. is fighting an unwinnable war in Iraq. But in Vietnam, the U.S. faced a single challenger, who won because America did not. In Iraq, the U.S. can’t win — but nor can anyone else. To imagine, as Bush and Friedman do, that this is a war between the U.S. and “jihadists” ignores the reality that there are multiple armed conflicts under way in Iraq, and many of those fighting the U.S. are also fighting each other.

The Sunni insurgency has successfully prevented the U.S. and its allies from stabilizing even Baghdad beyond the Green Zone, but it can never hope to restore the control that Saddam Hussein once had over the whole country. The Shi’ites are the dominant force in the elected government and have more men under arms (in their militias and in the government security forces) than do the Sunnis, but the Shi’ites are not really aligned with the U.S. (If anything, they’re closer to Iran.) And as the U.S. has pushed back against the Shi’ites in the hope of dimming the appeal of the insurgency — by expanding Sunni power and cracking down on the Shi’ite militias terrorizing Sunni communities — U.S. forces find themselves fighting on two fronts. Mounting tension between Arabs and Kurds over the fate of the northern city of Kirkuk, the oil town coveted by the Kurds for the de facto state they’re creating in the north, suggests that this could still get even more complicated.

That’s why Washington is so desperately seeking a new strategy for Iraq. The present one clearly isn’t working, and each of the alternatives — from “cut and run” through partition, finding a new strongman regime or bringing in the neighbors to sort things out — carries more peril than prospect. The Tet Offensive analogy offers a false choice between an ignominious retreat and a dogged determination to stay the course.

The reality of Iraq is quite different from Vietnam, more complex, and in its geopolitical implications, quite possibly much worse. The options reportedly being weighed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group eschew both “cut and run” and “stay the course,” and instead seek formulae for damage control under headings such as “containment” and “stabilization.” That terminology is instructive, because from a strategic perspective, Iraq is less like Vietnam and more like Chernobyl, a nuclear reactor in meltdown, whose fallout may be even more dangerous than the fires that burn at its core.