November
19, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I
By Richard
Miniter
PAGE
2 OF 2 | < BACK
Perhaps the definitive side-by-side comparison of the Vietnam
and Iraq wars appears in a monograph published by the Strategic
Studies Institute (SSI), a Defense Department think tank. In “Iraq
and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights,” Jeffrey
Record, a professor at the Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery,
Alabama, and W. Andrew Terrill, a former Army officer and Middle
East specialist at SSI, made an exhaustive study of the Vietnam
and Iraq wars.
The two authors
are uniquely qualified. Record served as an assistant province
adviser in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and as a national
security adviser to Democratic senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen.
He is the author of six books and a dozen monographs, including
“Why We Lost in Vietnam.” Terrill was a lieutenant colonel in
the U.S. Army Reserve in the Middle East and is an acknowledged
expert on the Iran-Iraq War and terrorism.
Drawing historical
comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq is tricky, as Record and
Terrill note:
Summarizing
by historical analogy is an inherently risky business because
no two historical events are completely alike and because policymakers’
knowledge and use of history are often distorted by ignorance
and political bias. In the case of Iraq and Vietnam, extreme
caution should be exercised in comparing two wars so far apart
in time, locus, and historical circumstances. In fact, a careful
examination of the evidence reveals that the differences between
the two conflicts greatly outnumber the similarities. This is
especially true in the strategic and military dimensions of
the wars. There is simply no comparison between the strategic
environment, the scale of military operations, the scale of
losses incurred, the quality of enemy resistance, the role of
enemy allies, and the duration of combat.”
Drawing on
their monograph and an array of published material, as well as
a recent trip of my own to Iraq, let’s investigate whether Iraq
is really “another Vietnam.”
The Battlegrounds
are Different
Vietnam
and Iraq are vastly different societies. The Vietnamese nation
has existed for centuries; its people have a long history and
well-formed national identity. Vietnamese nationalism was hardened
and sharpened in wars against the Japanese and French empires.
On the other
hand, Iraq was born when the colonial powers of Britain and France
decided to stitch together three Ottoman Empire provinces in the
aftermath of World War I. Many Middle East specialists wonder,
even now, if the Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish populations really
see themselves as Iraqis. Iraq has long been riven by ethnic and
religious strife. Certainly Iraqi nationalism seems to diminish
the farther one travels from Baghdad. In the western hinterland,
many of Iraq’s residents freely migrate across borders, and loyalty
is still to family, tribe, and Islam—not Iraq.
Iraq’s nationalism,
which is quite real in the major cities, did not emerge naturally
from the Arab people inhabiting Mesopotamia. Instead, it was forged
by Saddam Hussein as a top-down tool to hold the nation together.
Whatever the qualities and merits of Iraqi nationalism, it is
distinctly different from its Vietnamese counterpart.
The Progression
of the War is Different
In
Vietnam, American troops met a guerrilla force that developed
into a mechanized, regimented army capable of fielding as many
as 80,000 men in a single campaign.
Iraq is Vietnam
in reverse. Saddam Hussein’s tanks were abandoned and his predominantly
Shi’ite conscripts fled to their homes, replaced by an insurgency
that rarely deploys more than four men at a time.
The Vietnamese
and Iraqi Insurgencies are Different
The
Vietnamese Communists advanced a clear economic, political, and
military program supported by a complex ideological dogma. The
enemies of Iraqi democracy do not attempt to indoctrinate their
fellow Iraqis, but only kill, maim, and terrorize them. The Communists
offered a utopian goal for the war: after a final victory, peasants
would enjoy a more prosperous, more equal life in a united and
independent homeland. The Iraqi guerrillas seem to want nothing
beyond the exit of America and its allies and promise nothing.
The insurgents do not even promise peace, if they should prevail.
The Vietnamese
insurgency was tightly controlled through a rigid hierarchy directed
by a central authority, while the one in Iraq is segmented into
three clusters. The largest faction is staffed by former intelligence
officers and Ba’ath Party loyalists; a second faction is a motley
collection of Shi’ite front groups, identifying with Muqtada al-Sadr
and most likely run by Iranian intelligence officers; and a third
strand, probably run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is made up of elements
of al Qaeda who have journeyed into Iraq to wage jihad. So the
Iraqi insurgency is not a centralized tool of an enemy power,
but three separate movements run by agents of three different
powers. This may not be good news for the U.S. military, but it
is not a repetition of Vietnam.
In Vietnam,
the insurgency was largely rural and peopled by peasants. In Iraq,
it is largely urban and waged by well-schooled sons and daughters
of the middle class. As a result, the manpower pool for insurgents
was greater in Vietnam than it appears to be in Iraq today. The
Communists could count on recruits from the peasantry, which accounted
for roughly 80 percent of the total population in 1965. With a
total membership of fewer than two million in 2003, the Ba’ath
Party amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the total Iraqi
population. It is a minority even among the roughly 20 percent
of Iraqis who call themselves Sunni Arabs. Al-Sadr’s forces and
other radical Shi’ite militias number less than 5,000. The al
Qaeda fighters—apparently led by al-Zarqawi—are foreigners and
number less than 2,000, according to allied estimates.
The size
of the enemy forces in Vietnam was much greater. The total number
of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong grew from 300,000 in
1963 to 700,000 in 1966 and peaked at roughly one million in 1973,
the year the U.S. decided to withdraw. Even the largest estimates
of the total number of insurgents in Iraq put their strength at
between 5,000 and 20,000 people. Currently, the U.S. alone has
more then 130,000 troops in Iraq.
In Vietnam,
the enemy was willing and able to take immense losses. The Vietnamese
government announced, in April 1995, that their nation had lost
1.1 million dead in their war against the Americans. The military
dead alone accounted for 5 percent of the North Vietnamese population
and the pockets of South Vietnam controlled by the Communists.
As Record and Terrill note, “No other major belligerent in a twentiethcentury
war sustained such a high military death toll proportional to
its population.”
The entire
Iraqi insurgency doesn’t even amount to 5 percent of the population.
To sustain losses equivalent to that of the Vietnamese Communists,
the Iraqi insurgents would have to sacrifice many times their
total number, which is impossible unless the insurgency finds
a way to grow.
(Part
II: The Iraq War Is Not Another Vietnam will be available tomorrow,
November 20, 2005)
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."
