I read a little quote from the VN war that goes something like: "If that man was not a communist sympathizer before, he is now, after his village was burned ..." For every enemy we kill in Iraq, we don't want to make 2 new ones !
RF, Most of the Volunteers for the the Gulf war 2 were not in the military yet for Gulf War 1, Serbia, Nicoragua or Grenada so I doubt that many were naive about their chances of seeing combat. There is a definite moral difference in sending a volunteer military and a conscritped military to war. I am sure the in the first years of Viet Nam fighting communism seemed worthy to the carrer military that were sent there. However, by 1969 when the utter futilityof our political effort was exposed even patriotic, military minded youths like myself at the time, choose to deny the call to duty and to even defy conscription laws. The political leaders had decided that the youth of America could be wasted as cannon fodder in a war they couldn't event try to win. Imagine how that would effect your psyche. The country was sending your friends to die in a foriegn land with no hope that Viet Nam would ever be a free and democratic nation. That is why , I believe that whether deposing Saddam Hussein was right or wrong , we owe it to those who have been injured or died to not let their sacrifices be in vain.
My conclusion came from some articles I read. I would also argue that most people/ soldiers don't like to kill and be killed, especially for the wrong reason. (You said it yourself about the VN war) In Iraq, the morale of (at least some of) our men are pretty low and that is very sad. None of them should feel this way if this is a just war. You are right. I did not argue against that. My point was/ is this conflict becoming another quagmire/ another VN has nothing to do with the kind of soldiers we send over. They are 2 separate entities. I too feel for the soldiers we sent over. The problem is if we should sacrifice even more of them? If we let this go quietly. If we let this adminstration pulls the wool over our eyes ... history will repeat itself ... it's already done so ... and we will again come back to this mess ... in the near future.
We are losing our best and brightest (so we can prove we can win with a smaller Army). http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24877-2003Nov11.html Stafford Man Killed During Mission in Iraq Senior Army Sergeant, Part of JAG Corps Group, Died When Copter Went Down By Martin Weil Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page B07 Army Command Sgt. Maj. Cornell W. Gilmore, who grew up in Maryland and lived in Virginia, and was devoted to the Army and to his church, was killed in action in Iraq on Friday, the Pentagon announced. Gilmore, 45, was assigned to Army headquarters in the Pentagon. He was one of two members of a top-level delegation from the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps who were killed in Tikrit when a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter went down. A relative who said she was speaking for Gilmore's wife, Donna, said last night that he was "a soldier for the country and a soldier for the Lord." Speaking by telephone from Gilmore's home in Stafford, Sandy Gilmore, a sister-in-law of Gilmore's, said the 22-year Army veteran "had a special relationship with the Lord." She said he was minister of music at Shiloh Christian Church, leading the choir and playing the organ, an assignment he shared with his son, Cornell Gilmore II. Both the son, 18, and a daughter, Dawnita, 19, attend college in North Carolina. The Judge Advocate General's Corps deals with legal matters. Gilmore was the top enlisted man in the corps; the organization's top warrant officer, Sharon T. Swartworth, who until recently had lived in Fairfax County, also was killed when the helicopter went down. Friends and relatives have said their mission involved morale building. It was a task well suited to Gilmore, who, according to his sister-in-law, had a special gift for raising people's spirits. "It's just the way he made people feel when you met him," Sandy Gilmore said. She said his first words in an encounter were, "Greetings! How are you?" It was no perfunctory ritual for him, she said, but a question he really meant. Through his obvious concern, she said, "he won your heart." He was a high-spirited, athletic man who led a full life, she said. "Whenever you saw him, he always smiled." Gilmore was born in Baltimore and graduated from the University of Maryland in 1980 with a degree in sociology and a minor in criminal justice, according to Army data. He joined the Army the year after graduation, and once he did, "he loved it," his sister-in-law said. According to the Army, successive postings took him from Fort Polk, La.; to Buedingen, Germany; Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; Nuremberg, Germany; Wuerzberg, Germany; Schofield Barracks, Hawaii; and Fort Lewis, Wash. His many decorations included the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Achievement Medal and the Kuwait Liberation Medal. He had received several decorations three or four times. Gilmore was the youngest of 12 children of a religious family, Sandy Gilmore said. He and his wife had both grown up in Baltimore's Cherry Hill section, and they had been married for more than 20 years, the sister-in-law said. She said Gilmore's father died two years ago, but his mother, Louise Gilmore, lives in Randallstown, Md. In a news release distributed on Sunday, the Pentagon said the helicopter carrying Gilmore, Swartworth and four other soldiers was shot down by "unknown enemy ordnance." All six were killed. Some accounts have indicated that the ordnance was a rocket-propelled grenade. The Pentagon said that the incident is under investigation. Sandy Gilmore said her brother-in-law had been in Iraq less than a week and was heading back home when the helicopter went down. "He will truly be missed," she said. Staff writer Steve Vogel and staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report. © 2003 The Washington Post Company
One difference (and I apologize if this has noted elsewhere in the thread... I'm old and cannot read that small stuff) is that in Vietnam, at least there was a reason, however flawed, and it took a while for disillusionment to really set in. Here's a quote that sums up the Iraqi War in that regard... "If I went to a funeral this afternoon of a fallen soldier in Iraq, what would I say? Did they fall there for democracy? They are not going to have a democracy. It is going to be the Shiite democracy, like they have in Iran -- at best. That is exactly what Secretary Rumsfeld said we were not going to have. Was it for nuclear? No. Was it for terrorists? No, they didn't have terrorists there. Your son gave his life for what? As their Senator, I am embarrassed. It wasn't for any of those things. Why we went in, the administration has yet to tell us. They keep changing the rules and the goalposts every time." --Senator Fritz Hollings
I think those mothers and fathers should be proud that their children gave their lives in the cause of freedom. Saddam gassing thousands of Kurds is exactly like Hitler gassing millions of Jews. At some point we have to decide that all we are one people on this planet, and we are all responsible. Does that mean the US can fight a war everywhere there is repression? Obviously not, our armed forces a spread thin now in just two countries the size of states. We could not possibly support actions that could cover entire continents. We can only commit our troops to winable objectives that have a moral imperative (obviously I believe this is the critcal difference between Iraq and Viet Nam). Every tough battle is not a quagmire. It's only a quagmire if there is no achievable objective or honorable exit stategy.
gene, you have a very idealist view of the world. are we really fighting for freedom? are we all one people? if we were one people should we not listen to the rest of the world before we start a preemptive military campaign aganist a soverign nation? or are we morally surperior to everyone else in the world? by the might of our swords we will make the rest of the world march on our righteous path! we should have the moral impertive to take down north korea! they unlike Iraq have a visible weapons of mass destruction program, a dictator, and even better they are a communist country! So why are we making security guarentees with North Korea? would we allow Iraq to form a fundamentalist government? even if it is the will of the Iraqi people? well who knows why we really went to war with Iraq...hell I'd even feel better about this war if mr bush just came out and told me that we are securing a sphere of influence in the oil rich middle east to facilitate greater economic gain for american companies and in turn would make all americans richer. haha now that would be something I can rally behind.
This is a topic in which I think the sides have pretty much decided on their opinion. I really don’t think sighting facts are figures one way or the other will really change anyone’s mind, but I guess that’s what a bbs is for so I’ll give my 2 cents. The Iraq and Viet Nam conflicts are not that similar. Viet Nam involved guerrilla forces, the Viet Cong, fighting in support of regular forces, the NVA. The Viet Cong had popular support throughout S.Viet Nam as well as secure staging areas in N. Vietnam and all along the Vietnamese border. In addition, two super powers, Russia and China, worked against the US both militarily and politically. Iraq on the other hand involves US forces who are fighting foreign terrorists, and displaced Sunni Bathists. Our opponents have no regular troop support and no support from any real world power. They don’t even have the popular support of the majority of the Iraqis. They cannot defeat the US militarily. Instead victory will only come for them if they make it to expensive in manpower or capital to stabilize Iraq under a popularly elected government. This is why the enemy attempts to hit and terrorize everyone who has the ability to bring order to the country. Red Cross, UN, US, other Pro Coalition Iraqis are all targets. They cannot win any other way and they want their power back. In a nut shell Iraq is all about a small, violent and ruthless minority attempting to have their way by instilling fear. One of the problems the US has had ever since Viet Nam is that we look at every conflict through a Viet Nam lens. That’s wrong and dangerous. Each war is different. That’s not to say that those who oppose the war in Iraq, or who think we aren’t doing it the right way are totally wrong or that their criticisms are without validity, I’m just pointing out that we have to get over continually comparing every military conflict to Viet Nam. The US puts itself at a disadvantage when they do this. It emphasized the impression to other nations that they US will not endure combat losses. I know this sounds callous, but a nation cannot go into every war afraid of high casualties. And when we continually harp on a Vietnam analogy I’m afraid we send the message to our enemies that they to can beat us if they only kill enough of us. Kill enough Americans and they will do what we want seems to be the running theory. This is why we must not leave Iraq and we must win. This strategy of intimidation though terror must be defeated. They can’t defeat the US any other way. Terror is all they have. That’s what Bush means by saying the enemy is desperate. When suicide bombs and terror are a group's weapons of choice they have no other choice. My last point is concerning the word Quagmire. We are in Iraq doing a hard thing. It’s not pretty, its not easy, and it will take time, money, and unfortunately people’s lives. If these facts define a quagmire then yes we are in a quagmire, but then every hard costly thing we do is a quagmire. If by quagmire you mean that we are stuck in a no win situation that is simply going from bad to worse, then no, we are definitely not in a quagmire. Incredible progress has been made for the coalition side. Sadaam’s regime is no longer in power and the majority of Iraqi’s are glad. I know that is kind of obvious, but there are some who act like that is just a minor detail The coalition is now in the process of helping Iraqi’s build a democratic Iraq. Every day more is done. If we continue eventually Iraq’s new government will be capable of dealing with its own security.
Taoist Way, No, we are not morally superior to the rest of the world, however I have no problem saying the US was morally superior to Iraq under Sadaam Hussein, or North Korea under its dictator. I know your post was not directed at me, so I apologize if I'm budding in.
Fritz Hollins, the Senator from South Carolina sees a lot of similarities with Vietnam. ******* My Cambodian Moment I Was Misled on Iraq By Senator ERNEST "FRITZ" HOLLINGS Floor Speech on the War in Iraq, Its Parallels to Vietnam and Congress' Unwillingness to Pay for It, November 3, 2003 Mr. President, I come to acknowledge my "Cambodian moment" in the Iraq war. I refer to the Cambodian moment that Senator Mansfield experienced after years and years of opposing the war in Vietnam. He had a practice of taking written memoranda time and again to both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, supporting the President openly on the floor of the Senate, but finally at the time Cambodia was invaded under President Nixon, he could not take it any longer and spoke out. He went on national TV and said: This war was a mistake from the get go. The next day, he got a letter from an admirer who had just lost her son. She said: I just buried my son and came home and watched you on this program. You said it was a mistake from the get go. Why didn't you speak out sooner? She said: My regret is that you did not speak out sooner or loudly enough for me to hear. It is time we speak out, because unless we put in 100,000 or 150,000 more United States troops and get law and order in Iraq, in Baghdad, we are going to have operation meat grinder continue, and it is our meat. In conscience, I cannot stand silent any longer. What happens if we had invaded the city of Atlanta, let's say. We had landed at Hartsfield Airport, and then we had gone on to an aircraft carrier and said: Whoopee, mission accomplished; when the truth of the matter is, two divisions of Republican Guards have blended into the environs of Atlanta with all kind of ammunition dumps, and all they do day in and day out is raid the dumps, set traps, blow us up, kill more Americans, and we talk about schools opening and hospitals working, and that we have a water system. This cannot go on. It has to stop. Let me start by saying I believe, unlike most of my colleagues, that the intelligence we had on Iraq was sound. We knew from the outset a lot about Iraq in the sense we had conquered it and we had two overflights, one in the north and one in the south. We could look down and see in the middle of Iraq. For 10 years we knew exactly what was going on. If we had any doubts, we could check with the Israeli intelligence. Don't tell me Israel didn't have good intelligence on nuclear weapons because she went in there back in the eighties -- she is a small country and can't play games and can't wait around for the United Nations and conferences. She had to knock that nuclear facility out. What else did we know about Iraq? We knew they didn't have terrorists there at the time. Oh, yes, while we are trying to internationalize a defense effort, what we find is, our effort is more or less internationalizing terrorism. The most ridiculous thing on the TV last night was to hear the President say foreigners are in Iraq killing our soldiers. Can you imagine us, thousands of miles away, talking about foreigners killing our soldiers? Come on. What happened was, Iraq did not have terrorists at the time we went in. They tried to connect al-Qaida to Iraq, but now the President himself has acknowledged you couldn't connect al-Qaida. They didn't have nuclear capability. And, of course, there was no democracy. There weren't people yearning for it, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz said, meeting us in the streets waving: Whoopee, we finally got democracy. Anybody who knows the history of the Mideast knows that is a bunch of nonsense. They don't have democracy in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Libya -- or go right around the Mideast. Where does somebody think they are going to meet us in the streets and say: Whoopee for democracy? I wish the distinguished Chair would pay attention to this one. What did George Herbert Walker Bush, the former President, say in his book, "A World Transformed"? I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad....To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter day Arab hero...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. That is what President George Herbert Walker Bush, the President's daddy, said. We all knew that about Iraq. But why did we go in and why did the Senator from South Carolina vote for the resolution last October? Why? I can tell my colleagues why. On August 7, Vice President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein: What we know now from various sources is that he continues to pursue a nuclear weapon. Then on September 8: We do know with absolute certainty that he is attempting to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon. Then the President of the United States himself said, in his weekly address on September 14, before we voted in October: Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Then on September 24, Prime Minister Blair said that the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons. On September 8 of last year, Condoleezza Rice said that we do not want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. On October 7, President Bush said: Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Now, any reasonable, sober, mature, experienced individual listening to that litany knows to vote against that resolution would have been pure folly. One has to back the President. I am not on the Intelligence Committee. I was not privy to any kind of intelligence but I knew we had a lot of intelligence. The truth is, I thought the Israeli intelligence was really furnishing all of this information and that we were going in this time for our little friend Israel. Instead of them being blamed, we could finish up what Desert Storm had left undone; namely, getting rid of Saddam and getting rid of nuclear at the same time. I voted for the resolution. I was misled. Now we hear that this is not Vietnam. I read my friends Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. They say this is not a Vietnam. The heck it is not. This crowd has got historical amnesia. There is no education in the second kick of a mule. This was a bad mistake. We were mislead. We are in there now, and I am hearing the same things that the Senator heard in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 right on through 1973. At the time I was a young politician, having just come to the Senate, listening to those who knew. I knew Leader Mansfield would know about Vietnam. I knew my friend Senator Dick Russell was against the war in Vietnam from the get-go. Now, if Senator Mansfield had spoken up, he could have saved 10,000 lives. We would have followed him in the Senate. But he was trying to follow the mistake and the misread of Maddox and the Turner joy that brought about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. There are similarities. There are the misleading statements that I have just given, the litany by the President telling us all there was reconstituted nuclear. Here again we are in a guerilla war. It is an urban guerilla war, not in the bushes of Vietnam but we still again are trying to win the hearts and minds. We were trying to victimize Vietnam. In this one we are trying to Iraqi Iraq. We are trying to do our best doing the same things over and over again. In fact, in this particular war we received the Pentagon papers a lot earlier. I ask unanimous consent that this article in USA Today entitled "Defense Memo: A Grim Outlook," by Secretary Rumsfeld, be printed in the Record at this particular point. Mr. President, I do not know how many more similarities we are going to get. Iraq is Vietnam all over for the Senator from South Carolina. Now we have to either put the troops in there or else get out as soon as we can. I take it the present plan is to Iraqi Iraq; namely, train up a bunch of folks together, give them high pay. They have 70-percent unemployment so they will all grab and get a uniform and act as if they are security, but that will give us a cover and face to leave and leave as soon as we can, unless we are going to put the troops in there and get law and order. What we have done is come into Iraq against the military requirements of taking the city. We just stopped at the airport and declared mission accomplished, and look around and wonder and say this is part of the war on terror. This is not and was not a part of the war on terror. Yes, there are terrorists in there now, but Iraq was not a part of the war on terror. It was quiet. It was not bothering anybody. They did not have al-Qaida. They did not have nuclear capabilities. They were not connected in any way to 9/11. We went in there under a mislead. We learned in World War II that no matter how well the gun was aimed, if the recoil is going to kill the guncrew one does not fire the gun. Yes, it was a good aim to get Saddam but now look at the headline. I ask unanimous consent to include this particular article from the Financial Times, "Al-Qaida Exploits Insecurity in Iraq to Acquire Weapons and Swell Its Ranks." I thank the distinguished Chair. We now have more terrorism than less terrorism. That is the fact. We have the entire world turned against us. When we cannot get Mexico and Canada to go along with us, we are in trouble. I am hopeful the United States will win back the hearts and minds of the world's people, because we were always loved, respected, and looked up to for leadership. In this particular venture what we have done is exactly what President George Herbert Walker Bush warned against. He said to watch out; do not go into that place. I quote again, now that my distinguished friend is here. I want that particular quote to appear in the Record again. He said in his book "A World Transformed": I firmly believe that we should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. Iraq is Vietnam all over again. I know the distinguished Senator from Alaska revered our friend Senator Mansfield. I will never forget when Senator Mansfield said all Senators are equal, and when they rolled the Senator from Alaska on a particular matter he was concerned with, he, himself -- that is Leader Mansfield -- got up, took the floor, and put Alaska's amendments up and we passed them. So Senator Mansfield took some 5 years and 17 memos to Presidents before he finally changed his mind and spoke. That is exactly where I am today as I enter this particular debate with respect to the supplemental. I would oppose the supplemental on one score, namely we will not pay for it. We tell that poor GI, downtown in Baghdad, we hope you don't get killed, and the reason we hope you don't get killed is because we want you to hurry back. We want you to hurry back so we can give you the bill because we are not going to pay for it. We in the Congress, my generation, we need a tax cut so we can get reelected next year. We are not going to pay for it. This is the first war in the history of the United States where there is no sacrifice on the homefront. They all run around the mulberry bush here saying "it's not Vietnam" and that we have to stay. We either have to get in or get out. We can't stand for operation meat grinder to continue day in and day out. In a war on terror, I just want the administration to know that might does not make right. On the contrary, right makes might. Winning the hearts and minds of the world's peoples, I can tell you here and now, we have to get right on our policy in the Mideast. We all back Israel, but we don't back the taking over of these settlements. If you have been a conquered people -- and I read where the distinguished Senator from Alaska went down into those areas for the first time in Israel -- for 35 years you have looked not only for your light and water but your jobs up in Israel. Anybody with any get-up-and-go has gotten up and gone, after 35 years. You have the disenchanted. They don't have an army or anything else like that. So don't be amazed. You have to play it with an even hand. Might makes right in this terror war. We got onto this Iraqi venture, which was a bad mistake from the very beginning. There is not any question about it. If I went to a funeral this afternoon of a fallen soldier in Iraq, what would I say? Did they fall there for democracy? They are not going to have a democracy. It is going to be the Shiite democracy, like they have in Iran -- at best. That is exactly what Secretary Rumsfeld said we were not going to have. Was it for nuclear? No. Was it for terrorists? No, they didn't have terrorists there. Your son gave his life for what? As their Senator, I am embarrassed. It wasn't for any of those things. Why we went in, the administration has yet to tell us. They keep changing the rules and the goalposts every time. But somehow, somewhere they have to really put the force in there, quit trying to do it on the cheap, put the force in there and clean out that city, so they will quit killing them, or otherwise get out as fast as we can. I thank the distinguished Chair. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, Democrat, is the senior senator from South Carolina.
Very good point. Only difference is your definition of similarity vs other people's definition. To me, the Iraq's problem is much smaller than VN's but I am afraid our resolve/ tolerance for casualties/ cost is also smaller. I agree. I voted against the war but once we are in, we have to finish the job. Problem is the general populace is already turning against the war and that is very sad. The Iraqis can not win this but we can lose it!
"Fritz Hollins, the Senator from South Carolina sees a lot of similarities with Vietnam." I really didn't notice Senator Hollins pointing out similarities between the two wars, other then the fact he feels mislead by the administration. Given that he would probably oppose the President on anything the President does it does not suprise me that he would say he was mislead. Other than this statement he lists no real similarites. The charge that Bush openly mislead or lied to congress, the world, and the American people for some alterior motive is very weak. In fact I would say Hollins is misleading in his statements. Yes, there were Terrorist links to Hussein. Yes, There were Al Queda in Iraq. Yes, there was viable intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that the majority of the world's intelligence agencies agreed on. No, the administration did not focus on a Iraqi nuclear threat as the main reason for the war. No, the administration did not say that Iraq was an immenent threat. Bush wished to prempt the threat before it was immenent. The comments by Bush's dad were a defense of not going to Baghdad at the end of Desert Storm. In addition, we are not creating more terroists by what we did in Iraq. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that we have liberated far more Afgani's, and Iraqi's than we have turned peace into terrorists. On an interesting side note, one of the reasons we have had a slow time gaining the Iraqi's trust is because we did not take out Hussein at the end of Desert Storm. Instead we encouraged the Shia and others to rebel without supporting them. It resulted in a massacre. I also find it strange that the policies many of the President's critics wisht to follow echo those the US did follow during the Clinton administration. The end result was 9/11. I have no problem in hearing an opposing view to the present policy of the US. Debate is welcome, most especially in a time of war because the costs are so high. I have no time, however, for political opportunism which I beleive Hollins is engaging in. Just out of curiosity when Clinton was President what were the Senator's views on Sadam and Iraq?
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation. A Reuters analysis of Defense Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000. By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20031114/ts_nm/iraq_usa_vietnam_dc_4
A Tale of Two Wars http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/27/AR2005082700035_pf.html In Baghdad, I Hear Echoes of Saigon in '67 By Lewis M. Simons Sunday, August 28, 2005; B01 I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq. In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we'll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy. Today's cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we're winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they're doing it now. My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won. What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out. Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out. Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation. The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares? This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe. What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq. I've returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the Tourism Ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travelers.) Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won. Today, Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists are our Viet Cong. We can bring 'em on, smoke 'em out and hunt 'em down from now until doomsday, but the line of committed volunteers seems only to grow longer. The world -- not just the Middle East, but South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America -- is being populated with more and more alienated and bitter young Muslims who feel that they have nothing to lose. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq and across the Middle East doesn't intimidate them; it just stokes their fury. That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. The last time I'd made such a landing was in April 1975, on a flight into Phnom Penh as a correspondent for The Washington Post. Two weeks later, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge. I was bound this time for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned. (This -- along with Internet availability, 30-minute-guaranteed to-your-tent-door Pizza Hut delivery, Cuban cigars at the PX, fresh meals and regularly sanitized portable toilets -- is one of the gains the U.S. military has achieved since Vietnam.) We weren't told our departure time. At 3 a.m. a chipper sergeant with a bullhorn voice flicked on the tent lights and told us to get up and put on body armor and helmets. Three Rhino Runner buses, painted desert-tan and heavily steel-plated, were lined up and 90 of us, mostly GIs and civilian contractors, boarded. Three armed Humvees preceded us; three followed. Overhead clattered three Blackhawk helicopters. Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it's the roads -- where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don't control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don't control much of anything. The next day, a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy's "final desperation." (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. Yet by and large they're loyal, and most told me that they believe in the mission -- at least until they're ordered back for their second or third tours. These "stop loss" soldiers are most bitter about their perception that the administration's effort to wage the war on the cheap applies only to them, while private contractors grow rich. On the green plastic wall of a portable toilet at Baghdad military airport, I read the following graffiti, scrawled by a civilian contract employee: "14 months. $200,000. I'm out of here. [Expletive] you Iraq." Beneath it was a response from the ranks: "12 months. $20,000. What the [expletive] is going on here?" Speaking of money, the administration has never come clean about the massive debt it's piling up for us and our descendants. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Vietnam War cost the United States $600 billion in today's dollars. Iraq, according to the center, is costing between $5 billion and $8 billion a month -- $218 billion to date. That would mean $700 billion if the guns fall silent six years from now, a modest timetable according to numerous military analysts. Other estimates predict an eventual bottom line of over $1 trillion. So, do we cut our losses -- human and financial -- and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbors, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it's beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see "Vietnamization") and leave the mess to his successor. Then what? If the bulk of the 130,000 U.S. troops are kept in Iraq for the rump of the Bush presidency and into the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the insurgency will go on. The tax dollars we'll be spending on that military presence might be better spent on helping educate new generations of Iraqis, and millions of other young Muslims around the world, on the basics of running a country.They need it: "Democracy is wonderful," exclaimed a mother of two teenagers whom I met in the southern city of Basra. "It means you're free to do whatever you want." While that may be an understandable interpretation from a people who weren't free to do anything under Saddam Hussein's 35-year dictatorship, surely it's not what Americans are fighting and dying for. The ultimate lesson of Vietnam -- one that is applicable to Iraq -- has been that once Americans declared victory and returned home, the Vietnamese went through the inevitable, sometimes brutal, shakeout that we had merely delayed. Eventually, the realities of the marketplace and the appeal of capitalism resulted in a nominally communist but vibrant nation. Today, Americans feast on low-cost Vietnamese shrimp and wear inexpensive Vietnamese T-shirts. Two month ago, President Bush welcomed Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House and promised him increased trade and military cooperation. So, what happens if we don't apply that lesson to our Iraq adventure? One of the most senior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad told me that what he and his colleagues believed, and what kept them awake at night, was that if the United States is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, and attempts to do so under current policies, it would take two generations of our soldiers fighting there. That's 40 years. You may want to pass that along to your grandchildren.
