The Communists were genuinely popular in Vietnam, which wasn't exactly a secret among those who had firsthand or scholarly knowledge about the Vietnamese affairs. Even Eisenhower admitted it: "I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai" (Dwight D. Eisenhower, _Mandate for Change, 1953-56_, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963, p. 372, <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/ddeho.htm>). Probably, a larger number of Americans came to realize that later, seeing how well the Vietnamese Communists fought and understanding that the Communist fighters couldn't have fought well without massive loyal support among the ordinary Vietnamese who made untold sacrifices to support them.
Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party never achieved the level of popularity enjoyed by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party. One good measure of popularity is the level of repression necessary to maintain hegemony. Americans are right to see a large difference.
That said, it is also true that both the U.S. government and most leftists in the West (including yours truly) overestimated unpopularity of Hussein and the Ba'ath Party; the level of Iraqi resistance demonstrates that they were probably never as unpopular among all Iraqis as we imagined them to be. Most leftists have simply condemned Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, without offering a nuanced analysis of their base of support, what the Iraqi state actually offered the Iraqi masses to win consent, etc. No dictatorship can maintain power for long by harsh repression alone. We have to empirically analyze how the Ba'ath Party has done so. US leftists have done a disservice to Americans, be they new activists or apolitical individuals. Our ignorance prevented us from offering them knowledge of the history of Iraq and its current social structures. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>