The Bush/Cheney administration seems hell-bent on making President Bush’s seemingly ludicrous analogy of Iraq and Vietnam into a reality.
A few weeks ago, the president drew hoots of derision from critics and pundits for claiming that the US lost the war in Indochina because it pulled out of Vietnam too early. His implication was that even though the country had killed several million Vietnamese and had lost 58,000 of its own troops in years of escalating fighting there, if we had only stayed on and killed and lost even more people, we would have eventually prevailed, and that thus, it would be a mistake to pull out of the quagmire in Iraq.
That analogy and its bloddy-minded “moral” were seriously flawed for two reasons. First of all, the U.S. couldn’t stay on and fight on in Vietnam even if it wanted to, because increasingly after 1968, the soldiers on the ground were refusing to fight, and in many cases were in passive or even open revolt against their officers, and besides, they were losing to the infinitely more motivated Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. And secondly, Iraq’s insurgents are not coming from another part of the country that is sheltered from attack by US troops, the way North Vietnamese regulars, free from attack in their home bases, were coming down to help their brothers and sisters in South Vietnam. Iranian troops aren’t fighting and dying, or even being captured, in Iraq. It is the Iraqi people who are living in and around the U.S. forces that are fighting them.
No matter. Bush, safely ensconced behind his mahogany desk in the Oval Office and his phalanx of Secret Service guards, is now trying to shoehorn Iraq into the model of the Vietnam War that he so famously ducked out of 40 years ago.
Claiming that all of the problems faced by American forces are the fault of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard forces, Bush and his sycophantic backers in the military like Gen. Peaches Petraeus are trying to suggest that, like North Vietnam in that earlier conflict, Iran is sending people and weapons to the fighters in Iraq, and that that’s why we’re losing.
It’s a bald-faced lie. Most of the attacks on American forces for the past four years in Iraq have come from Sunni forces who assuredly are getting no help from Shia Iran. If they are getting outside help, military or financial, it is coming primarily from Saudi Arabia, our ostensible ally! The Sunni militias, like the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army, both of which have leaders who spent long periods of exile in Iran during the Saddam Hussein era, no doubt forged relationships and likely even did receive training in Iran, and probably have also received some financial and other aid from Iranian allies, but for the most part they’ve steered clear of confrontations with American forces, preferring to target Sunni rivals. And given that the US has been trying mightily to prove a connection between the fragmented Iraqi resistance and Iran, the evidence of any significant flow of arms from Iran into Iraq has been pretty damned pathetic (and even what evidence has been shown looks trumped up). The much touted enhanced armor-piercing weapons allegedly captured from insurgents don't have to be imported from Iran — they can be readily made in any ordinary machine shop.
North Vietnam had the remarkable Ho Chi Minh Trail, a veritable
superhighway of jungle paths and dug-in hideouts and bomb shelters that
allowed the North Vietnamese to ferry weapons, soldiers and even
mechanized forces in large quantities southward into South Vietnam.
There is nothing even remotely approaching such a thing along the
Iran/Iraq border.
Yet just as Lyndon Johnson decided to make the disastrous decision to
expand the Vietnam War to North Vietnam by initiating a bombing
campaign that ended up dumping more tonnage on that little country than
was dropped on all of Europe and Japan during World War II, Bush is now
using this red herring of alleged arms shipments from Iran to build
support for a massive bombing campaign against Iran.
As Sy Hersh has written in the New Yorker
magazine, Bush and Cheney have failed to gain adequate support
internationally or even here in the U.S. for an air attack on Iran’s
nuclear facilities, but they are close to getting what they need to
bomb Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
According to Hersh, a plan to
make “limited” attacks on Iran’s military forces has been endorsed by
Britain’s new yes-man, Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
If such attacks are launched, let’s be clear. They will do nothing to
stem attacks against US forces inside Iraq, which are being conducted
by indigenous fighters. And they will not stay limited in scope. They
will inevitably expand to include most of Iran. A bombing campaign
would, moreover, be an act of war against a nation that poses no threat
to America—a monstrous war crime. As such it would set off a chain of
events which, like Johnson’s expansion of the Indochina War into North
Vietnam, will end up making things much worse for American soldiers and
marines in Iraq, just as Johnson’s expansion of the was to North
Vietnam made things much worse for American troops in South Vietnam.
If anything, an attack on Iran’s military will lead Iran to start a
serious program of aiding America’s enemies in Iraq, ferrying large
quantities of arms across a long common boarder that will be impossible
for the US to guard. For another, the Shia militias in Iraq will almost
certainly respond to an attack on Iran by turning their guns and IEDs
on American forces. It seems likely that Iran would also start becoming
more ecumenical in its aid to Iraqi fighters, so that Sunni fighters
could also benefit from their largesse.
That is to say, an attack by the US on Iran could well have the
perverse effect of uniting the fractious Iraqi resistance against a
common enemy: the U.S. It might even lead Iran to use asymetrical
tactics to launch bombing attacks inside the U.S. — which would be
their legal right if they were bombed by this country.
This is all so patently obvious that it is hard to believe the
administration doesn’t see it, but then, I’m not so sure they really
care. With the Bush/Cheney administration, the war’s the thing. War is
an absolute good in and of itself to these people. It keeps the
Congress to heel, it keeps the country waving the flag, and most
importantly it keeps Bush in the vaunted role of Commander in Chief.
It used to be said that “democracies don’t start wars.” That notion
always was absurd, or course. The US, one of the world’s leading
democracies, has started dozens of wars just since World War II,
including invasions of the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Cuba,
and of course, Iraq. Still, the scale of America’s wars of aggression
under the Bush/Cheney regime has been rising to the point that this
country has become the number one war-monger in the world, rivaling, in
its predations, the villains of the 1930s.
What makes it all particularly obscene is that instead of the Congress,
ostensibly in the hands of the opposition party, and ostensibly a
“people’s body” which the Founders thought and hoped would provide a
brake to war-mongers in the executive branch, is giving the
administration backing to bomb Iran’s military.
It’s increasingly looking like a done deal. If so, we’re into a long
war, and it will no longer be Bush’s war. It will be Bush’s and
Congress’s war.
And if we don’t prevent it, it will be our war, too. At least the
Germans, Japanese and Italians had the excuse that their countries went
to war under absolute dictators. We can’t say that.
Writings 
The Bush/Cheney administration seems hell-bent on making President Bush’s seemingly ludicrous analogy of Iraq and Vietnam into a reality.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
