Is Iraq Another Vietnam?

Now that our armed forces are stuck in the Iraq quagmire, comparisons with the Vietnam war are becoming more common. Anti-Bush partisans do their best to tar the administration with the politically deadly Vietnam brush; pro-Bush people deny any similarity between the two wars.

The real reason that such comparisons are important is that part of a nation's success consists in learning the lessons of history. We need to assess what lessons there were to be learned in Vietnam, and whether our leaders profited from or ignored them.

There are some obvious similarities and differences that we can point out right away. Similarities include the difficulty of fighting a guerrilla war, whether in a jungle or urban environment; and the weakening of national will brought about by the lack of the congressional declaration of war which the Constitution requires. A clear difference is that the government had no well-defined objective or will to win in Vietnam; the Bush administration has both in Iraq.

These are interesting points, but I believe that we must look elsewhere for the key similarity between the two wars. In Vietnam and again in Iraq our ill-advised policy has been to try to impose "democratic" government on a hopelessly fractured populace.

The Vietnam war was largely lost before the heavy involvement of American troops began. Our government's priority in Vietnam during the 1950's was to crush French colonial influence and establish democracy, with the suppression of the spread of communism taking a distant second place.

Pursuant to that policy, the Eisenhower administration first allowed the French to lose their conflict with communist forces by refusing even a single carrier-based airstrike that could have saved the French forces in Dien Bien Phu. Then, instead of supporting the popular hereditary emperor Bao Dai as an alternative to the French, we pushed into power and propped up the massively corrupt and unpopular Ngo dinh Diem as the "democratic" leader of South Vietnam.

Either continued French rule or restoration of the emperor could have made possible the cooperation of the disparate groups that made up the population of Vietnam. These included very effective anti-communist guerrilla forces that had kept Ho chi Minh's followers out of much of rural and jungle Vietnam. Instead, Diem and his family succeeded in destroying most opposition to their rule, including those anti-communist forces.

By the time John Kennedy became president, it was obvious even to the politicians in Washington that Eisenhower's creation and support of Diem's rule (in which, to be fair, Kennedy had concurred as a Senator) had been a disastrous mistake. According to recently released audio tapes from the Johnson White House, JFK arranged the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu a few short weeks before his own assassination. By then the damage had been done, and the burden of fighting communism in Vietnam fell almost completely on the shoulders of not-so-willing Americans.

Iraq is another country cobbled together from bitterly opposed groups, including Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Kurds and Christians. No country made up of such warring factions as these can hope to practice self government. The US is not going to be able to impose a stable republic or democracy committed never to resort to terrorism. Whatever government eventually prevails in Iraq will be of some authoritarian form, and will most likely be hostile to our nation.

The biggest mistake that we made in both Vietnam and Iraq was to try to impose democratic rule. America could have had success in Vietnam with a minimal investment in military and political support for either the French or the indigenous emperor. We could have had success against supporters of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere by limiting our actions to bombing terrorist infrastructure wherever it could be found.

Of course, we are now stuck with the situation that our policy has brought about. At this point we should set up some powerful leader capable of ruling the whole country while preventing a sectarian bloodbath. We must ensure that any such ruler understands that supporting terrorism would be a very, very expensive mistake. Then we should get out and stay out of Iraq.

For the future, our policy makers must recognize that we should not try to impose self government anywhere. If the people are ready for it (i.e., they believe in the rule of law more strongly than in the supremacy of their particular factions), they will bring it about themselves. If not, no amount of outside interference will make it work. All such attempts will bog us down in "another Iraq."