Iraq & Vietnam: Reassessing the comparison

The American left (bless their hearts) jumped in pretty early in comparing the Iraq War to the Vietnam War.

Their intent was to assert that that cause there is futile and that withdrawal is the best option for the United States.

The comparison was strained, since the United States did what was planned for Iraq--build up a homegrown security force--and then abandoned South Vietnam by withdrawing the material support we had promised to their security forces. We watched as North Vietnam broke the peace agreement between the two sides. The result was that hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were put in reeducation camps and hundreds of thousands more fled the country--many by boat (the Boat People).

And many Americans--especially from the left--seem to think that's an acceptable result--the same strategy that resulted in untold misery in South Vietnam (not to mention Laos and Cambodia) is the one we should employ in Iraq.

That's the part of the comparison that I accept: Removing our support from the constitutional government in Iraq would have a comparably disastrous result for Iraqis, and the damage to the U.S. position in the world would be comparable. The United States was viewed as weak in the aftermath of Vietnam. Along with President Carter's weak leadership, it no doubt encouraged the uprising in Iran that resulted in the ascendancy of the radical regime that today is eagerly trying to acquire nuclear weapons while threatening Israel and criminalizing the wearing of soccer jerseys in public.

While there are many clear differences between the situation then in Vietnam and the situation now in Iraq, another important difference has become increasingly clear: The Iraqi people do not want the insurgents to rule them.

The insurgent forces in Iraq have accumulated a history of badly mistreating Iraqis whenever they gain control of an area. Independent reporter Michael Yon recently documented an instance where the insurgents apparently killed the residents of a village they controlled. This dynamic has led to a surprising turnabout in allegiances. Sunni tribes in Iraq--exactly the group that had been most opposed to the U.S. deposing Saddam Hussein--have increasingly sought out alliances with the U.S. and coalition troops in opposition to the insurgents.

The insurgents, if they were ever mostly Sunni loyalists, seem to have completed their transformation into an al Qaeda-allied coalition of foreigners, and U.S. military forces have increasingly detected signs of cooperation with the Shiite extremists in Iran.

Evidently it's not impossible for extremists from opposite poles of Islam to cooperate against a common enemy.

The strategy of the insurgents, which seems to have placed a premium on eroding public support for the war among U.S. citizens back home, has had the unintended consequence of priming the country for the success of General Petraeus' surge strategy.

That's where the comparison to Vietnam breaks down most notably at present.

While that should be good news, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.

There is a popular discontent with the direction of the Iraq War, fueled partially by a news media that stands ideologically opposed to the war, and additionally fueled by politicians who detect their political future in the resulting winds of public opinion.

The Democratic Party found itself able to wrest control of both houses of Congress from the Republicans based largely on its wide-ranging criticisms of Iraq policy, which had legs because of real failures in executing the war. Once in control of Congress, however, the Democrats found that they had no consensus regarding how to proceed on the Iraq issue. Big surprise, there.

Democratic presidential hopefuls have increasingly hitched their wagons to a policy of cutting short the U.S. effort against the insurgents. The rest of the party will have to follow their eventual presidential candidate on policy--at least up through election day.

What that probably means is that a Democratic victory in 2008 will result in a lost opportunity to win the war in Iraq, and devastation in that region perhaps comparable to what was seen in South Vietnam.