OLEAN -- Columnists and commentators keep comparing our controversial "involvement" in Iraq with the military quicksand of Vietnam more than three decades ago. There are obvious parallels, and we're certainly plummeting in that direction, but I'm not quite sure we're there yet.
Consider: Our youths have yet to take to the streets in protest.
One of the reasons the Iraq-Vietnam comparison, valid or invalid, has been prompting recent headlines: President George W. Bush's unexpected observation last week in front of reporters that the increase in deadly violence in that chaotic nation -- 74 American military deaths in the first three weeks of this month -- could be "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive" in Vietnam.
Previously, Dubya and his administration's leaders had assiduously avoided any comparison to that painful scar on American history and complained vociferously whenever the jarring reference was made.
The Tet offensive in Vietnam -- a series of well-planned, coordinated major attacks in several cities, villages and hamlets -- occurred during three weeks in 1968, and the enemy killed 957 American soldiers. It is widely viewed by historians as a turning point in what seemed like American dominance in that conflict -- a time when we all learned we were in for a serious fight.
I believe one reason the general populace has not yet marched on the Pentagon and White House over our apparent failure in Iraq can be found in part in the wide disparity between the overall numbers concerning the different wars.
The nightmare in Vietnam lasted more than a decade and took 58,226 American lives in combat. As of Sunday, according to the administration, we have lost 2,792 American troops in Iraq, and another 340 in Afghanistan. Some think those numbers are actually higher. We have been fighting in Iraq for three years and seven months. It only seems like a decade.
The Pentagon's official total of Americans wounded in Iraq so far is 20,468 (a number widely disputed by some war opponents, who claim the real number is more like 48,000). Americans wounded in Vietnam totaled 304,000.
Another figure to consider is the number of civilians killed during the two conflicts. President Bush says it is approximately 30,000 in Iraq, but in mid-October, epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, writing in a respected British Medical Association journal, "The Lancet," pegged Iraqi civilian dead at an eye-popping 654,965 for the current war. This understandably triggered controversy and administration denials.
The number looks precise, but the researchers randomly interviewed about 1,850 Iraqi households, took down their anecdotal reports, then mathematically extrapolated the numbers to encompass the entire country. Only two years ago, the same researchers put the figure at 100,000. However, let's assume they were right. In Vietnam, 230,000 South Vietnamese civilians -- our putative allies -- lost their lives, and more than 1.1 million North Vietnamese civilians, the "enemy" side, lost theirs.
Current war opponents are fond of predicting the worst is yet to come in Iraq. They point out the U.S. death toll in Iraq actually surpassed the number of Americans killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War (392) way back in November of 2003. But this blurs the argument. In the previous war, the fighting picked up speed in 1968 and rarely diminished until the end. You have to remember, our involvement in Vietnam was not all that controversial at first, at least in the minds of the general public.
I recall sitting in a Shea Stadium crowd in early August of 1964, watching a New York Mets night game, when the public-address announcer read a news bulletin that Congress had just passed a joint resolution supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in his request for greater involvement in the Vietnam War as a response to a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to our open, acknowledged involvement in that war, passed 416-0 in the House and drew only two nay votes in the Senate. The crowd stood up and cheered. On the field, so did some of the ballplayers.
It was only the drip-drip-drip of constant bad news from Vietnam, the daily pictures of body bags returning (images so powerful the Bush administration has banned them during this war), the interruption of your TV-tray supper with footage of some South Vietnamese colonel from "our" side blowing the brains out of a suspected traitor on the evening news, the daily angst over a period of several years, that finally caused the American public to say "no more" and the 93rd Congress to cut off war funds, which led to eventual capitulation and withdrawal.
But what are we to make of a claimed civilian death toll of 654,965 already -- the demise so soon of so many individuals we are supposedly helping achieve freedom and democracy? Columnist Christopher Hitchens -- the best writer in this era to switch from raving liberal to staunch conservative -- notes that even if the huge number is correct, it is an act of "moral idiocy" to use the assertion as an argument for American withdrawal, because the vacuum created by our departure might trigger the slaughter of twice that number.
My perception is that most Americans don't really care how many Iraqis die. In our current dismal culture of seeming ignorance of current affairs and blithe devotion to mindless computer games, "survivor" contests and TV gossip about who's sleeping with whom as the foremost non-work entities in our lives, we apparently care only if Americans die. The recent polls show 66 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "going badly." We could make a parking lot for Iran out of Iraq and that figure would drop precipitously, no matter how many perished.
The nonchalance over the true causes of the insurgency that's leading to all the killings -- both civilian and military -- was fortified by a piece in The New York Times two Sundays ago in which the writer asked several top-level Bush administration officials tasked with anti-terrorism duties to explain the differences between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims.
They couldn't. Most of them didn't even know which sect dominates Iran (Shiite), which one Osama bin Laden belonged to (Sunni), or which one is larger (about 85 percent of all Muslims are Sunni). This certainly violates the ancient "Know thine enemy" advice handed down by various military strategists and philosophers over the centuries. We don't have a clue, nor do we seem to care.
The entire subject of apparent failure in Iraq demands more than just a statistical romp. It demands knowledge of why we are there, what we hope to achieve and who the people are we are trying to help.
In terms of failed tactics and military obstacles, one must admit, there are undeniable parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.
The more troops we send, the worse it gets. In the last three months, we have sent an additional 12,000 troops into Baghdad, and the attacks upon them have increased 22 percent -- and more and more, those attacks are coordinated.
The deaths are coming not in set-piece battles, but one by one: deaths from small-arms fire and sniper attacks, and from IEDs -- improvised explosive devices or homemade bombs, set off at roadside.
In the capital and other big cities, insurgents hide in crowded neighborhoods and shoot out of windows at passing American patrols. Our troops cannot tell friend from enemy. The foe blends with civilians. There are no uniforms on the bad guys.
The information that would help us is not to be trusted. Most of our soldiers cannot speak the Arabic language. Intelligence breaks down, is used against us. False tips lead to deadly traps. The generals are becoming doubtful, and are saying so. "The violence is, indeed, disheartening," lamented Maj. Gen. William Caldwell last week.
Our government, beyond the body-bag ban, seems to be stepping up its efforts to limit bad news from Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, just before the weekend, instructed his country's health ministry to stop providing mortality numbers to the United Nations, thus jeopardizing further a clear picture of civilian deaths. You think he would have done that without at least tacit approval from Washington?
In the end, it must be said the current president's father grasped the key factor of being a successful commander in chief much more tightly than his son Dubya. Bush the Elder, during the first Gulf War, recognized his ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait had at least the trappings of a "conventional" war -- us against them, bad guys in uniforms, things to bomb, borders to be crossed, etc. Once the real dirty work was finished, he declared victory and brought us home.
Maybe the most cogent argument against Iraq-Vietnam parallelism was delineated by "National Review" writer James S. Robbins. In this war, he wrote, "there is no North Vietnam, no PAVN (Peoples Army of North Vietnam), and no chance of an escalation to conventional warfare under current conditions. The enemy force that came crashing through the gates of our embassy in Saigon was not a guerrilla army wearing black pajamas, but a conventional force riding Soviet tanks. The war in Iraq cannot be lost that way. But perhaps it can another way."
Maybe. Maybe Iraq isn't another Vietnam. But it's sure starting to feel like it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 24 2006 |