Is Iraq the new Vietnam? by Brendan O'Neill
> ...Is Iraq really the new Vietnam - another disastrous and humiliating
> third world venture for America's political and military elite? The
> coalition's war has certainly made a mess of Iraq, creating a political
> and societal vacuum and giving rise to new forms of nihilistic terrorism.
> But objectively, on the ground, there is little comparison between the
> bloody confusion of postwar Iraq and the all-out 10-year war between the
> US military machine and Vietnamese communists in the 1960s and early 70s.
> The Vietnam venture was an imperialist war launched by the USA to assert
> its domination over part of the third world, against a national
> liberation army that wanted to create an independent nation state; the
> war in Iraq was launched by a confused coalition to protect the world
> from evil Saddam and his elusive WMD, where the enemies are disparate
> nihilistic terrorists with no name or mission. The widespread talk of
> 'another Vietnam' reveals more about the state of mind in Washington than
> it does about the state of affairs in Iraq.
America's war in Vietnam lasted from 1964 to 1973. Vietnam had earlier been a French colony, but as part of the postwar anti-colonial movement across much of the third world, Vietnamese forces defeated the French in 1954. France's response to its defeat was to partition Vietnam between North and South. The North became the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, governed by communist forces - who launched a war of national liberation to end partition and reunite Vietnam as an independent nation. US forces intervened in the mid-1960s to prop up the stooge government of South Vietnam, against the North. The strength of the communist-led national liberation armies, supported by the Soviet Union and China, caused America's eventual withdrawal, bringing victory to the North in 1975.
Comparing Vietnam and Iraq, Charles Glass claims that 'old words come howling out of the past: body count, kill ratio' (3). Others have written of Iraq's Vietnam-like 'body bag syndrome', where, once again, rising numbers of casualties abroad are causing deep upset at home. Yet the numbers killed in Iraq, however tragic, do not compare to the numbers killed in Vietnam. Since Gulf War II started in March 2003, 397 Americans have been killed - 271 of them in combat situations and 126 in accidents, friendly fire incidents or by natural causes. A further 75 coalition troops have been killed, including 53 Britons and the 17 Italian military policeman killed in Nasiriyah this week. That brings the number of coalition deaths to date to 472.
The Vietnam War killed two million people - out of a population of 18million During the more protracted war in Vietnam - from 1964 to 1973 - 47,244 Americans were killed in action; a further 10,446 were killed in accidents or by disease. Among America's allies, the Southern Vietnamese forces lost 223,748 men; South Korea lost 4,407; Australia and New Zealand lost 469; and Thailand lost 351 (4). In total, America and its allies suffered around 286,665 deaths in Vietnam. The number of American wounded in present-day Iraq stands at 1,956. The number of Americans hospitalised for wounds in Vietnam was 153,329, and the number of Americans wounded without needing to be hospitalised was 150,375. Among Southern Vietnamese forces, 570,600 were wounded (5).
Some commentators claim that America's attitude towards Iraqi civilians is similar to the way it treated the Vietnamese. One writer says America is starting to use Vietnam-learned tactics, including the ethos of 'destroying the village to save it' (6). In fact, America has attempted to exercise caution in its treatment of Iraqis; it made avoiding civilian casualties a central part of its war strategy, and, during the war, promised to 'go round cities, even if the main road goes through [them]' (7). Of course, such strategies did little to spare civilians; America's war from on high - all 'shock and awe' rather than battles on the ground - visited terrible destruction on the people of Iraq. Estimates of civilian casualties vary from 7,800 to 9,600.
But the Vietnam War killed approximately two million people - out of a population of 18million. From 1964 to 1969, an estimated 666,000 communist forces (including North Vietnamese forces and their Viet Cong allies in the South) were killed, alongside hundreds of thousands of civilians. According to Gabriel Kolko's Vietnam: Anatomy of a War 1940-1975, the USA in Vietnam 'unleashed the greatest flood of firepower against a nation known in history' (8). US planes dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, or one 500lb bomb for every man, woman and child in the country - twice the total that was dropped on both Europe and Asia during the whole of the Second World War. America also sprayed Vietnam with defoliants, a form of chemical warfare that caused widespread famine.
In 1969, under President Richard Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the US military expanded the war in south-east Asia to Cambodia. On the premise of targeting North Vietnamese communist bases in eastern Cambodia, America launched Operation Menu, a bombing campaign over Cambodia that lasted from March 1969 to August 1973. During this period, 16,527 sorties dropped 383,851 tons of explosives on Cambodia - killing tens of thousands of civilians.
There's another difference between Vietnam and Iraq - in Vietnam, America fought a real war and faced a real enemy. The communist North Vietnamese Army was 570,000-strong by the early 1970s, organised into 18 infantry divisions, two training divisions and 10 regiments of artillery. In addition, it had 30,000 Viet Cong guerrillas in Southern Vietnam. They got financial and military backing from the Soviet Union and China, allowing them to build up an impressive array of weaponry - including T-59 medium tanks (9). The communist forces displayed their strength in January 1968, when they launched the Tet Offensive - a series of surprise attacks on targets across Vietnam, including on the US Embassy in Saigon, which left over 1,000 American troops dead and was a turning point in the war.
By contrast, Saddam's wretched regime simply collapsed when coalition troops rolled over its borders in late March 2003. There were no major clashes between American or British troops and Iraqi forces that could seriously be called a battle. In Baghdad and Basra resistance faded away, and Saddam's last stand, widely predicted in the media and political worlds, failed to materialise. In postwar Iraq, coalition forces face sporadic attacks by an enemy that doesn't even show its face or declare its interests, much less launch offensives or declare war.
In Vietnam, America fought a real war and faced a real enemy These are chancer terrorists who feed off coalition uncertainty for the impact of their squalid suicide attacks, nihilistic groups that merely lash out blindly - a million miles from the anti-imperialist guerrillas of the Viet Cong. In contrast to Vietnam's national liberation movement - which had aims, a mission, weapons and the backing of the Soviet Union and China -
America's enemies in Iraq are invisible bin Ladenites, whom no one supports.
Nor can today's anti-war protests over Iraq be seriously compared to the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s. Then, there was a militant opposition to America's war in south-east Asia, as part of broader movements for change in society; anti-war protesters demanded that American forces withdraw from Vietnam and 'bring our boys back home'. The demos against the coalition's war in Iraq, by contrast, have been lame and confused, not so much a militant campaign against Western intervention in Iraq as an expression of frustration and isolation from mainstream politics (see The Sixties, and the cynics, by Jennie Bristow). http://www.spiked- online.com/Articles/00000006DD21.htm <SNIP>