November
19, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I
By Richard
Miniter
(Note:
The following is the first of a two-part excerpt from Mr. Miniter's
new book, "Disinformation:
22 Media Myths That Undermine The War On Terror')
“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.
CONTINUED
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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."
