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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War / Iraq is not Vietnam

Iraq is not Vietnam

by John Cole|  July 1, 20053:42 pm| 10 Comments

This post is in: War

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Interesting piece on Iraq in the NY Times:

IRAQ is not another Afghanistan. Notwithstanding what President Bush said in his speech on Tuesday, our primary problem in Iraq is not terrorism, and the administration’s single-minded focus on terrorism may help explain why we have not yet adopted a true counterinsurgency strategy or properly tackled so many of the country’s other problems.

Nevertheless, critics of the president who make parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are equally wrong. Iraq is far more important. Because of its oil wealth, its location in the most politically fragile region of the world, and its importance in the eyes of Arab nations that wonder if democracy is possible for them too, Iraq is critical to American interests in a way that Vietnam never was.

There is one way, however, in which Iraq is like Vietnam: how the United States is handling it. We lost in Vietnam for a complicated set of reasons. But the most important was that we refused to use an effective counterinsurgency strategy. We focused more on hunting down Vietcong guerrillas than on protecting the Vietnamese people, which in turn prevented the South Vietnamese economy from growing and giving the people an economic incentive to support our side of the war. We also tolerated a series of corrupt, unstable South Vietnamese leaders who made little effort to connect with the people and spent their time squabbling over power and graft.

Iraq, however, may not be doomed to the same fate. For one thing, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his government are far more popular and better-intentioned than President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and his kleptocratic colleagues ever were. And, because the Iraqi insurgents are as happy to blow up Iraqi civilians as American convoys, they do not enjoy the broad appeal of the Vietcong (let alone the firepower of the North Vietnamese Army).

So it is unfortunate that we are squandering these advantages by repeating many of our own mistakes from 40 years ago, and in doing so alienating the Iraqi people and raising the risk of chaos and civil war. So how do we save the reconstruction of Iraq? Again, Vietnam – as well as Northern Ireland and other guerrilla wars – has much to teach. There are at least five specific lessons that must be adapted to today’s cause…

Read the five and tell me what you think…

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10Comments

  1. 1.

    p.lukasiak

    July 1, 2005 at 3:57 pm

    Pollock is one of the intellectual giants that told us that Saddam represented so much of a threat that we simply had to invade and occupy Iraq, right?

    He does have one very good, and possibly realistic idea — buying off the Sunni sheiks and tribal leaders. But can we at least get a receipt this time for our bribes and kickbacks? I don’t want to hear about another 9 Billion in “unaccounted for” funds….

    The rest of his ideas sound good, but they are all dependent upon significant increases in feet on the ground in Iraq — so I guess Pollock is just one more person who doesn’t know what he is talking about because the generals are telling Bush we have all the troops we need….

  2. 2.

    JG

    July 1, 2005 at 4:09 pm

    Nice article but the people who need to read it won’t read the New York Times. Its just librul bullshit right?

    If you watch ‘The Fog of War’ Mcnamara explains why we lost Vietnam and how eerily similar the Iraq war is. Never even occurred to me that the whole time we thought we were helping Vietnam stave off communist China, north and south Vietnam were trying to oust us.

  3. 3.

    KC

    July 1, 2005 at 4:36 pm

    Wait a minute, Pollack’s a Dem, right? I mean, he worked for Clinton. Well, at least someone’s put some newish ideas forward.

  4. 4.

    BumperStickerist

    July 1, 2005 at 4:53 pm

    —-
    A Quagmire Ain’t Nothin’ but a Wetland
    —-

  5. 5.

    Steven

    July 1, 2005 at 5:05 pm

    I think Pollock makes one important point: a solution to Iraq will come not from defeating terrorists, who are primarily non-Iraqi Arabs, but by getting the Iraqi insurgents to stand down. How can this be accomplished?
    I actually think he has hit on the one idea that will work: buy the Sunni sheiks. I believe they could effectively end the insurgency quickly if they wanted to. I also have to believe that we have already tried to buy the Sunni sheiks and their asking price was too high. A strategy that continues to put military pressure on the insurgents and that attempts to rally Sunni opposition to the insurgency may weaken the Sunni chiefs hand enough that their price comes down to an acceptable level.

    The other piece which cannot be overlooked is the following from Pollock:

    “Perhaps the most underreported story in Iraq today is the theft of its oil revenues. Thanks to the high price of crude, Iraq should make well over $20 billion from oil sales this year, yet almost none of this money seems to be going to actual reconstruction projects. One senior Iraqi official told me recently that the theft of oil revenues today is making Saddam Hussein’s regime look frugal by comparison.

    Moreover, in their determination to snuff out competitors, many politicians have fought tirelessly to prevent any delegation of authority or direct distribution of money or supplies to provincial or local officials.”

    If it is the Sunnis who are stealing most of the oil, then their chiefs benefit from the chaos and the incentive to settle is far less. The libs have been saying it’s all about the oil, and they may be right, but not for the reasons they think.

  6. 6.

    bob

    July 1, 2005 at 6:03 pm

    One can make analogies to all sorts of conflicts that happened in the past. It certainly does not mean that the results will pan out the same way. A few weeks ago Cunning Realist made the Vietnam case and this was my rebuttal.

    Frankly the WoT feels much more like an intractable clash of cultures. The closest thing in U.S. history that is an analogy is the Western expansion and the Indian wars of the late 19th century. This time though, expansion is not physical, it is cultural via technologies such as the Internet and the global economy. This time though, the Indians are a billion strong and are arming themselves with nuclear weapons.

    We are in a race against time.

  7. 7.

    JG

    July 1, 2005 at 6:28 pm

    ‘One can make analogies to all sorts of conflicts that happened in the past. It certainly does not mean that the results will pan out the same way.’

    No but it can illustrate how incompetent our leadership is. Even funnier that the ones in charge of this war were the ones who skipped out on Vietnam. I always figured that was a big reason why almost all presidents have done time in the military. Seeing war makes it harder to arbitrarily declare war.

  8. 8.

    d

    July 1, 2005 at 6:33 pm

    If I made the ass out of myself that Pollack did with Threatening Storm, this is the argument to liberals I would make too.

    That being said, his try on Iran is much more [ahem] nuanced.

  9. 9.

    bob

    July 1, 2005 at 9:04 pm

    The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Vietnam all suffered from incompetence that caused the deaths of thousands if not tens of thousands of American soldiers. The Civil War was nothing but incompetence. Anyway, the NYT’s bottom line was the same conclusion I came to a long time ago.

  10. 10.

    Hokie

    July 2, 2005 at 8:38 am

    I always thought, militarily, Iraq was more like Lebanon, though it’s like Vietnam in terms of how the administration dealt with it politically.

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