Thursday, May 27, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Local View: The Iraq-Vietnam balance sheet

By Chuck Gardner

Sen. Edward Kennedy recently compared Bush's war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. Right-wing pundits and members of Congress compared Kennedy to Hanoi Jane. The "V" word has finally entered the discussion, but no one has composed a comprehensive balance sheet of the differences and similarities.

Despite my best efforts and contrary to my initial inclinations, while I could find 33 differences, I could come up with only 24 similarities between American involvement in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. I'm therefore forced to concede that the differences prevail.

Differences

1. Vietnam produces only fish oil.

2. Vietnam was mostly jungle; Iraq is mostly desert.

3. In Vietnam we were supposedly protecting the world from the communists; now we're allegedly fighting the terrorists.

4. There really were communists in Vietnam before we got there.

5. Last time the president from Texas escalated the war; this time the president from Texas started it.

6. This time the people we're trying to control will fight us on our own territory and will kill us wherever they can find us around the world.

7. This time the conflict implicates and exacerbates--if it doesn't also emanate from--the seemingly insolvable and highly dangerous Arab-Jewish enmities in the Middle East.

8. We have better helicopters and night-vision instruments now, and this time at least our bombs are smart.

9. We now have an all-volunteer army, although the poor and minorities still predominate.

10. The old men at the Pentagon are sending an awful lot of young women into combat.

11. Our leadership learned from Vietnam to protect the American people from brutal scenes of killing and dying on their TV screens by protecting the battlefields from journalists.

12. Last time it was a bunch of arrogant "whiz kids" who got us into it; this time it's a bunch of arrogant neocons.

13. The "fair and balanced" Fox News network wasn't invented in time for Vietnam.

14. Bill O'Reilly was an arrogant young man; now he's an arrogant old fool.

15. Buddhist monks set themselves on fire in Vietnam to demonstrate the depth of their conviction that the U.S. should go home; suicide this time has a different edge.

16. In Iraq we're allegedly trying to save the world from chemical warfare; in Vietnam we tried to save the world with chemical warfare.

17. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor Nixon heard God tell them to kill Vietnamese to spread the American way of life.

18. CIA agents play a much bigger role today in combat operations.

19. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later confessed that the Vietnam War was a huge mistake and apologized for his role in it; don't expect to hear anything like this from Donald Rumsfeld.

20. It's hard to find anything to rhyme with Bush to rival the old "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today."

21. The president of the United States this time spends more time at his Texas ranch than in Washington, D.C., doesn't like to read much, takes long vacations, and is heavily protected from voices contrary to those from on high.

22. While prosecuting the war in Vietnam, the president from Texas did much good for his country domestically, empowering the poor and increasing the rights of the people with his Civil Rights Act; while prosecuting the war in Iraq, the president from Texas has given away the store to his friends and curtailed civil liberties with his PATRIOT Act.

23. At no time did the United States ever assist Ho Chi Minh with weapons, military intelligence and chemical agents to fight a war with his neighbors.

24. At no time did any president during the Vietnam conflict declare victory by flying onto an aircraft carrier in a Top Gun costume.

25. No one suggested back then to invade Vietnam because of what someone else did to us.

26. The king of Jordan at a joint press conference showed that he has a better command of the English language than the president of the United States.

27. The presidents who prosecuted the Vietnam war were elected by majority vote.

28. Robert McNamara never allowed himself to be photographed shaking hands with Ho Chi Minh.

29. Prisoner of war issues this time are all about the prisoners we take.

30. The Vietnamese belong to a fairly homogenous culture, while Iraqis are a disunited hodgepodge of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds--at least until we descended upon them.

31. This time we had our experience in Vietnam to learn from.

32. The U.S. invasion of Iraq squandered and reversed in one day worldwide once-in-a-lifetime sympathy for America never seen before and that now will never be seen again.

33. It's unlikely that Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon believed in his own lies.

Similarities

1. We win the battles, but lose the war.

2. Neither Iraq nor Vietnam had the means or intent to inflict harm on our territory.

3. We misunderstood the extent to which the people in each place would resist our technologically superior military force.

4. We misunderstood the extent to which our actions in each place would stir deep nationalist anti-colonial feelings.

5. We acted each time against the advice and without the support of most of the rest of the world.

6. We tried to achieve military victory in each place at first with a small force, believing in the power of military technology to beat down the will of human beings to resist an invading army; or fearing that the American people would not support the effort if they knew up front what it would cost.

7. In each war we used high-flying airplanes to reduce our casualties while accepting increased civilian carnage because "gooks" and "ragheads" don't matter much to us.

8. We were afraid each time that internationally supervised elections would result in a loss for our puppets. (Two million dead Vietnamese and 58,000 dead Americans were the price for supporting Diem after he violated the Geneva accords and refused to hold nationwide elections because our dictator was sure to lose.)

9. As in southeast Asia, we are stepping into the shoes in southwest Asia of French and British colonialists of an earlier era.

10. We failed to understand the deep hatred in each place of Western colonialism and the will of the people there to finally shape their own destinies.

11. The war crimes at the top inspire the war crimes at the bottom.

12. Once mired in a cruel war, even opponents argue that we must support our troops and continue to victory to save our prestige in the world. Now, as then, Americans are bizarrely slow to catch on to the idea of supporting the troops by bringing them home; even slower to the idea that there can be no victory for despised foreign invaders and no prestige from bombing a country into the stone age. Especially when much of it was already there.

13. When all other arguments fail, it is said that we can't pull out now because that would leave the country to the mercy of those who hate us--especially after what we've done there.

14. The war becomes a focus of a national election, but the candidates just use different words to say the same thing.

15. The Charlton Heston-is- my-president gonzos rabidly denounce those who speak against the war as anti-American traitors.

16. The American mainstream media are totally out of step with the rest of the world, leaving most Americans ignorant of the real reasons why they fight us.

17. Our leadership lies to us about the cost of the war.

18. Our leadership lies to us about what we're doing there and why.

19. Our troops frequently can't tell the difference between civilians and fighters because there's not really much difference between them.

20. Each time the only solution anyone can come up with is to train some of them to continue the war, even though this will only prolong the agony and bloodshed.

21. Those who complain that they were misled as to how easy this was supposed to be sound a lot like all those people in Germany who blamed Hitler for losing.

22. Both episodes demonstrate that no one can harm us more than we harm ourselves.

23. We united the Vietnamese against us then and we unite the Iraqis against us now.

24. Absent unintended consequences, nothing good can ever come of this.

Chuck Gardner lives in Las Vegas.