Vietnam and Iraq are Not the Same
Paul R. Hinlicky
Tise Professor
RoanokeCollege
841 words
In my youth, I marched in the streets to bring home peers who were needlessly dying in a lost cause. I can sympathize with the current bumper sticker: “Support the troops-- Bring them home!” All the more so, since my son has been ordered to report for duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom. What should I say to him? Is it Vietnam all over again? What were the real lessons of Vietnam and how do they apply today?
Some today are opposing the war in Iraq as a ‘new Vietnam.’ I have supported the war to oust Saddam, to deprive despotism of a stranglehold over the world’s oil-driven economy and to establish democratic momentum in the Arab world. This cause is not Vietnam all over again. Fraught as is any war with moral ambiguities and further complicated by the Bush Administration’s peculiar capacity to crown incompetence with arrogance, the war in Iraq is nevertheless for the most part dissimilar to Vietnam.
The scale is not the same. Grievous as is each and every US military death, these amounted to 19 per day in Vietnam over 8 years. This compares with 2 per day over 3 years in Iraq. It is estimated that some 30,000 Iraqis have died in these three years. That is horrible, but it compares to hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Counting death and destruction is sickening business but there is no other way to assess the comparison some draw between Vietnam and Iraq. What the statistical comparison does indicate is that democratic Iraq will prevail militarily if we stick to it in what has now become above all a war of perception.
It would be wrong to withdraw as we finally did in Vietnam. Given the ruthlessness of Al-Quida in Iraq –suicide attacks, beheadings, kidnappings, assassinations, roadside bombings, sectarian incitement—on no moral grounds can millions of Iraqis who have risked their lives by democratic participation now be abandoned to a reign of terror at the hands of these villains. Running away would create a vacuum of power that in Vietnameventuated in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, not to mention the reprisals that occurred in South Vietnam.
It is Al-Quida in Iraq that takes the US defeat in Vietnam as its model: sicken the stomach of the American people and they will cut their losses and flee from the fight. Mention of Al-Quida in Iraq points to another important dissimilarity: we do not have a real civil war as we did in Vietnam between the North and the South. In Iraq the so-called insurgency is a fractious coalition of Islamist jihadists with a remnant of fanatical Saddamists against the backdrop of sullen, disgruntled Sunnis who have lost their Apartheid-like privileged position in the previous society.
Democracy is always a work in progress. Bearing in mind where the Iraqis are coming from, there has been real progress, culminating in the national unity government. In Vietnam we allied ourselves with an illegitimate,authoritarian regime, which lacked popular support. In Vietnam, the rationale for intervention during the Cold War was to resist communist expansion – a view that blinded us to the nationalist and anti-colonialist motives of the enemy. In Iraq, the larger ideological issue is opening up the Arab world to popular sovereignty and Islam to religious tolerance. This is a difficult and long-term project that entails limited but real application of military force. Oppressors do not give up power voluntarily. In modern history, democracy has had to be introduced at the end of the barrel of a gun more than once – think only of Germany and Japan!
In Vietnam we went to war with an often undisciplined, conscripted army. As discipline broke down, atrocities occurred. The only serious criticism of our military tactics in Iraq is that the Administration underestimated the potential for insurgency and failed to act forcefully enough, quickly enough. With several terrible exceptions, as in Abu Ghraib or Haditha, the self-discipline of our troops in Iraq has been extraordinary, bearing in mind the diabolic tactics of provocation adopted by the enemy.
It is mere sentimentality to say one ‘supports the troops,’ if one thinks the cause is immoral or cannot be won, unless one is protesting as I did in my youth to withdraw them from Iraq now. I support the troops in their mission, as one who believes that American power must be used in the world soberly and in fashion governed morally and politically by greater goals of freedom, peace and social justice. I support the troops in their mission because they are not fighting for Bush, but for these greater goals in a cause that is far from hopeless. Iraq has certainly been more difficult than it should have been. The swagger has gone from the President’s stride; he has finally admitted to mistakes and confessed regrets.
But Iraq is not about Vietnam nor is it about Bush. It is about Iraqi Freedom – a missionthat can and must be accomplished.