Dave Lindorff: Making Iraq into Vietnam

Making Iraq into Vietnam
by Dave Lindorff | Oct 3 2007



The Bush/Cheney administration seems hell-bent on making President Bush’s
seemingly ludicrous analogy of Iraq and Vietnam into a reality.

A few weeks ago, the president drew hoots of derision from critics and
pundits for claiming that the US lost the war in Indochina because it pulled
out of Vietnam too early. His implication was that even though the country
had killed several million Vietnamese and had lost 58,000 of its own troops
in years of escalating fighting there, if we had only stayed on and killed
and lost even more people, we would have eventually prevailed, and that
thus, it would be a mistake to pull out of the quagmire in Iraq.

That analogy and its bloddy-minded “moral” were seriously flawed for two
reasons. First of all, the U.S. couldn’t stay on and fight in Vietnam, even
if it wanted to, because increasingly after 1968, the soldiers on the ground
were refusing to fight, and in many cases were in passive or even open
revolt against their officers, and besides, they were losing to the
infinitely more motivated Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. And secondly,
Iraq’s insurgents are not coming from another part of the country that is
sheltered from attack US troops, the way North Vietnamese regulars were
coming down to help their brothers and sisters in South Vietnam,. Iranian
troops aren’t fighting and dying, or even being captured, in Iraq. It is the
Iraqi people who are living in and around the U.S. forces that are fighting
them.

No matter. Bush, safe behind his mahogany desk in the Oval Office and his
phalanx of Secret Service guards, is now trying to shoehorn Iraq into the
model of the Vietnam War that he so famously ducked out of 40 years ago.

Claiming that all of the problems faced by American forces are the fault of
Iran and its Revolutionary Guard forces, Bush and his sycophantic backers in
the military like Gen. Peaches Petraeus are trying to suggest that, like
North Vietnam in that earlier conflict, Iran is sending people and weapons
to the fighters in Iraq, and that that’s why we’re losing.

It’s a bald-faced lie. Most of the attacks on American forces for the past
four years in Iraq have come from Sunni forces who assuredly are getting no
help from Shia Iran. If they are getting outside help, military or
financial, it is coming primarily from Saudi Arabia! The Sunni militias,
like the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army, both of which have leaders who
spent long periods of exile in Iran during the Saddam Hussein era, no doubt
forged relationships and likely even did receive training in Iran, and
probably have also received some financial and other aid from Iranian
allies, but for the most part they’ve steered clear of confrontations with
American forces, preferring to target Sunni rivals. And given that the US
has been trying mightily to prove a connection between the fragmented Iraqi
resistance and Iran, the evidence of any significant flow of arms from Iran
into Iraq has been pretty damned pathetic (and even what evidence has been
shown looks trumped up).

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