No exit

The chaotic aftermath of the Iraq war is prompting comparisons to Vietnam--and no easy answers

By Andrew Kiraly

The V-word is out, and there's no getting it back into the bottle.

Since the Iraq-Vietnam parallel was aired earlier this month--by most accounts, by Sen. Ted Kennedy during a speech at the Brookings Institution--press and politicos alike have surged to this new intellectual front in the war of words over the war in Iraq. Some have vigorously sought to debunk the comparison, pointing out the obvious differences: that the Vietnam War spanned more than a decade and took 58,000 American lives, vs. the barely year-old Iraq war and its 700-plus casualties.

Others have pointed out similarities, highlighting the murky rationale behind both wars and the overriding sense that--whether you're backing Bush or not--well, we're going to be in Iraq for a while--easily past June 30.

But put aside for a moment the intellectual meat of the comparison. It's instructive to wonder why anyone was moved to make the comparison at all. It can't be solely Kennedy's coinage; surely the Vietnam comparison came to someone's mind as early as March 19, 2003, the day the shock and awe began.

One pop-psych theory is that in times of uncertainty, comparisons to the known give us comfort, a feeling of predictability--always a nice placebo for control. It's a take on the situation that only gains currency when you talk to those who know war, who know peace, who know history, who know the Middle East and who know Islam. Because at a virtual roundtable among Nevada intelligentsia, the only answer to "What should we do in Iraq?" seems to be a worried shrug.

Mehran Tamadonfar, chairman of UNLV's Political Science Department and a Middle East specialist: "We've boxed ourselves in."

John Alexander, retired Army colonel and author of several books on war and modern warfare: "The bad news is I don't know. I don't see a way out."

Leonard Weinberg, political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno specializing in political terrorism: "There is no magic solution. I can't imagine an exit scenario for the Bush administration, short of going, 'Hocus pocus' and turning the place into Switzerland."

But they and others know what not to do. As of this writing, 805 coalition soldiers have been killed in Iraq, 702 of them Americans, according to CNN.com. More than 3,600 American troops have been wounded in action. April is proving to be the deadliest month yet, with 101 troops killed.

So far, that is. And anyone with anything worthwhile to say about Iraq sees it getting worse before it gets better. They predict Shi'ite uprisings, mounting casualties and growing public distaste for the war. And come June 30, the arbitrary date for a handover of power? More of the same. They predict that, contrary to whatever rationale Bush is peddling for war these days, that war or "democracy" in Iraq won't do anything to quash terrorism. In fact, it'll do just the opposite: serve as a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Stuck

And yet, despite daily casualties and calls by some to pull out of Iraq, leaving is not seen as an option.

"If we walk out of Iraq, we have a big monster to deal with--Islamic fundamentalism taking over that part of the world," says Tamadonfar. "And if that happens, you'll see conservative Arab regimes like Egypt and Jordan all fall. They're already very vulnerable."

Tamadonfar envisions a domino effect scenario that would play out in a more real fashion than any specter of communism. "[Islamic fundamentalism] is a mass base movement that's different from communism," he says. Tamadonfar is keeping a concerned eye on recent Shi'ite Muslim activity in Iraq, a branch of Islam he characterizes as a sort of wasp's nest we've come much too close to. While Shi'ites make up only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, they're a majority in Iraq, long oppressed at the hands of Saddam Hussein and the Sunni minority. Distinct from Sunni Islam, Shi'ites embrace a different lineage from Mohammed. The schism, Tamadonfar points out, is political, not religious. And that age-old distinction figures into the motivations that drive the more military-minded wings of the Shi'ite faith. Tamadonfar warns that the most imminent threat is from a Shi'ite uprising led by radical Shi'ite' cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"The worst mistake to make is to attack, as the U.S. plans to do in Najaf," he says. "The end result would be a Shi'ite uprising. We cannot manage it. There are too many of them, they're too militant, they're too determined to win. And in an election year, we don't have the ability to see so many Americans being sacrificed in the process."

But even then, there's a good likelihood of such an uprising anyway. "One of the things that has helped us in the past year was that the Shi'ites sat on the sidelines," he says. "If U.S. policy confusion creates such a problem that the Shi'ites rise up, that's the end of the story for us. Compared to Vietnam, it will be a much bigger problem."

Why? Part of it has to do with the political-mindedness of Shi'aism. "They have a greater sensitivity about U.S. policy in the Middle East, and they also have a kind of political mentality of martyrdom, more so than Sunnis," Tamadonfar says. "In terms of nationalism, they won't stop at anything. Taking hostages, mutilating and burning them is not atypical of Shi'ites. Those are acceptable means to an end."

Others see us stuck there out of self-interest, pointing out America's infamous addiction to petrochemicals. "There's no way to pull out," says John Alexander. "The way we got out of Vietnam was Congress got together and cut funding. I don't believe that as long as we have a reliance on petrochemicals that we can just pull out."

Alexander says civil war would be almost inevitable; the only way to avoid future showdowns like this, he says, would be to change America's "energy paradigm," weaning ourselves off oil and shifting to a "hydrogen economy" and investing in "high-risk, high-payoff" alternatives like "zero point energy," a theoretical form of energy posited by quantum physics.

Tales of terror

And yet the longer we stay, the more the situation--to invoke a military term--gets FUBAR. Particularly in the long term: most agree that despite the war's partial rationale--that getting rid of Saddam would strike a blow against terror--the U.S. is only inflaming the grievances of terrorist groups.

"What's happened is that the replacement for Saddam Hussein and his Baathist dictators has become a lightning rod for terror organizations all over the Middle East," says UNR's Weinberg. "It's turning into a training ground, an opportunity for extremists to practice attacks on the U.S. Groups from all over the Middle East have been sucked into the conflict."

Which is terribly ironic, Weinberg says, since in the big picture, Saddam wasn't a major player when it came to international terrorism; sure, he'd keep his own people submissive with terror tactics, but he wouldn't venture much beyond that. "Generally, Iraq was not a major sponsor of terrorist groups outside of its own bailiwick," he says. "Now what's been a minor issue has been transformed into a major terrorist problem. To some extent, the war aims of the Bush administration have been self-defeating. It seems to provoke more [terrorism]."

Tamadonfar agrees, pointing out another irony: Saddam's reign actually put a damper on international terrorism in some ways. "This guy was so brutal, no one would dare do anything he didn't want them to do," he says. "This kind of Islamic fundamentalism, both ideologically and politically, did not have any root in Iraq [before the war]. Now it's becoming a breeding ground for terror--and, unfortunately, a testing ground."

Safe for 'democracy'

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry has been described as everything from a "flip-flopper" to having "nuanced views" when it comes to Iraq. Some see promise in his pitch to internationalize anew the war effort, with heavy involvement by the United Nations. Others see not promise, but politics.

"I'm a little disappointed in John Kerry," says Phil Hausknecht, a retired Lutheran minister and adjunct history professor at UNLV. Over the past year, Hausknecht has helped organized several anti-war rallies in Las Vegas. "His statements have started to run in opposition to the anti-war effort."

And underlying Kerry's stance is the dicey proposition--one invisible predicate of the war--that it's somehow possible to root out a brutal regime and surgically insert democracy. Hausknecht, who spent much of the Vietnam War in Japan working for the Lutheran church, says it won't be quite as successful as, say, building democracy in post-World War II Japan. The Middle East is a different animal altogether. "We're not going to be able to create democracy there in the next 50 to 100 years. We can push and use force, but that's not going to create a liking for our methodology."

John Alexander is more blunt: "The whole notion that we can go out and create democracy is bullshit," he says. "Democracy is a terribly complex form of government that you just cannot go out and bestow on people. We've been working on it for 300 years and we still have kinks. To go in there and say, 'Everyone's going to have a vote' and expect it to work reflects the simplistic understanding we have of the rest of the world." He should know; the former military man traveled to Afghanistan in 2003 as an adviser to the Aghan Ministry of Defense.

Furthermore, Alexander says part of the problem is conceptual: Thinking about the problem in terms of countries with borders is outmoded. "I like to blame the British for a lot of this," he says. "The reason is at the end of the Ottoman Empire, they and other European countries drew lines on maps and said, 'These are now countries.' They didn't take into account the various ethnologies there. They created these problems that have come back to haunt us. Most of these areas don't have the attributes of nation-states...and yet they're the building blocks for international relations.

"My view is that the larger organizational structures are going to be defined by belief system as opposed to geography. Today, you can create groups that that are physically separate, yet held together by common belief system, by the ability to pass information [regardless of borders]."

But whatever the new Iraq is bound by when it debuts June 30, it probably won't be democratic ideals.

"It's not going to be a handoff to a sovereign government," says Alan Balboni, professor of political science at CCSN. "The essence of sovereignty is the control over the use of violence. There's no sovereign nation in the world in which the government doesn't have control over the exercise of violence. We're saying [to Iraq], 'You're sovereign, but keep 100,000 of our troops here, like it or not, and CIA agents up your ass, and the biggest embassy you can imagine. Oh, and your Iraq army will report to an American general.'"

Which is about as un-Vietnam as you can get. Another difference Balboni sees between the two wars is not heartening, either.

"We put up with many more casualties for a much, much longer time in Vietnam because the administration was able to convince us this was a moral struggle between good and evil," Balboni says. "It took years for people to see behind that. Given the concentration of power in the media these days, I don't see most Americans waking up and questioning the moral fervor, the nonsense that's driving this war."