November
20, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part II
By Richard
Miniter
PAGE 2 OF 2 | <
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No Enemy Leaders
There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, the popular leader of North Vietnam.
“America just saw Ho Chi Minh as a Communist,” said retired Maj.
Gen. Chuck Horner, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam and
commanded the U.S. Air Force during the Gulf War, “but to many
of his countrymen he was a patriot, and there was something quite
noble in his message of unification. In contrast, the only people
who want to return Saddam to power are the hard-core Ba’athists,
and they are a small minority.”
Nor is Iraq likely to produce a charismatic resistance
leader. Saddam Hussein is now in U.S. custody and will be put
on trial for his crimes against the Iraqi people. Al-Zarqawi,
a Jordanian terrorist, could never plausibly pose as an Iraqi
nationalist leader. Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite cleric who mobilized
his militia against U.S. forces, has been decisively defeated.
Indeed, the strangest aspect of the insurgency
is its lack of visible leaders. Leaders can be visible, but disguised,
as in other armed revolts against central authority. In the Philippines,
the insurgents have had various masked leaders, like the amusingly
named “Commander Robot.” In Mexico, the terrorists in Chiapas
were said to be led by “Sub-Commandante Marcos.” Iraq’s anti-democratic
terrorists do not even cite a shadowy commander with a nom de
guerre.
The Vietnamese Were Far Tougher Adversaries
Whereas the Communists stormed U.S. bases in South Vietnam,
the Iraqi insurgents almost exclusively favor “soft” targets such
as clinics, schools, and police stations. Such tactics may terrorize,
but they are unlikely to lead to the decisive defeat of American
and allied forces.
The Misery Index is Far Lower in Iraq Than
it Was in Vietnam
In Vietnam, America’s high-altitude bombardment and noxious
clouds of Agent Orange and napalm despoiled the jungles and left
much of the landscape unfit for human habitation. Who can forget
the famous photo of the naked girl fleeing her burning village?
Refugees were a major miserable dimension of the war, forcing
tens of thousands of ill-clad Vietnamese to squat in squalor in
southern cities.
In Iraq, the much-feared refugee crisis never
materialized. While citizens are still shockingly poor for an
oil-rich nation, any visitor to Iraq, especially in its southern
reaches, will see many telltale home improvements: satellite dishes
from Dubai, new electric generators from Japan, new pots from
Malaysia. Here and there an air conditioner pokes out of a window
of a home that did not even have electricity before the war.
Far from being miserable refugees, many Iraqis
have materially better lives today than they did before the war.
Enterprising Iraqis took advantage of the U.S. military’s free-trade
policies to import used cars from Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait. Many
Iraqis now own automobiles for the first time in their lives.
Indeed, the number of cars on the roads is three times higher
than prewar levels—leading to long gas lines at Iraq’s filling
stations.
While tariffs are now 5 percent, that still represents
a huge reduction from the Saddam era, when import taxes were 75
percent on air conditioners and 30 percent on televisions. As
a result, prices for consumer goods have plummeted while profits
to small businesses have soared. The economy is booming, between
the bomb blasts.
Fawzy al-Hashimi owns an appliance store in Baghdad
with some $2 million worth of television sets, air conditioners,
and refrigerators packed into his tiny storefront. He told the
Financial Times that his small business’s total revenues
have climbed 300 percent since Iraq’s liberation in 2003.30 Sales
are soaring. So is the Baghdad Stock Exchange. The managing director
of Dar al-Salaam Insurance Company reports that his firm’s portfolio
of shares on the exchange have grown to 3 billion Iraqi dinars
(worth roughly $2 billion) from a mere 200 million dinars in 2003.31
“I believe this will be temporary, the looting and the terrorism.
If this belief is not correct, Iraq will be ruined,” he told the
Financial Times. “We were buying and selling and there
were bombs around, shooting and fighting but nobody got scared,
they just continued buying and selling. You do not do this unless
there is faith” in the future.
It doesn’t seem like these Iraqis, and others
that I have met, think of their country as a lost cause like Vietnam.
It might well have a different ending, if the cautious optimism
of the Iraqis is justified.
Yet too many in the media are so mesmerized by
the Vietnam movie playing in their heads that they can’t view
today’s feature. They can keep looking for a quagmire in the desert.
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."
