> But Iraq is far more important to the USG than Vietnam ever was.
> Vietnam was a demonstration war, and Indochina per se had little
> real value for the US. Nevertheless the US fielded an
> expeditionary force four times as large as the one in Iraq, for
> many more years, and murdered correspondingly many more people.
If Iraq is far more important to Washington than Viet Nam, why does it deploy in Iraq only one fourth the size of an army that it sent to Viet Nam? One reason is ideological: neocons want to fight this war with a lean and mean neoliberal military, captive to their own illusion that they can apply corporate management philosophy to war. Another is the fact that Washington lost the Vietnam War and with it also lost an ability to send conscripts to a long and bloody colonial war and that the Vietnam War helped to initiate the decline of US economic hegemony, making it difficult for Washington to spend on the Iraq war as freely as it did on the Vietnam War.
To be sure, Washington won't give up on its Iraq folly for another four to five years at least, due to the weaknesses of Iraqi guerrillas and the US anti-war movement. In those four to five years, though, the triad of US-Japanese-Chinese economies can deteriorate together (potentially precipitously), though it is difficult to say when, where, and how the chain reaction will start (if it does -- it sure looks like it can). What will come to a head first -- the US real estate bubble, Chinese over-investment, the towering Japanese government debt, or what?
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>