Iraq IS EXACTLY LIKE Vietnam

There has been a lot of talk about Iraq and Vietnam. It has been prompted by an interview slip up with his Royal Highness Bush last week when the mentally impaired one, in usual stupid fashion, over spat his words and agreed with a reporter that ‘something’ was similar to Vietnam. To be fair to his Royal Highness, Bush doesn’t have the imagination or frontal lobe strength to compare one thing to another, but the analogy and Bush’s reaction to the growing nightmare of Iraq is the very twin of Vietnam.

After his Majesty’s latest mangled comment, journalists rushed off to compare the two wars and concluded that because many more American’s died in the Vietnam War than had currently died in Iraq, then it wasn’t a real comparison at all and they could all relax for not being as active in opening a blind public’s eyes with the same courage displayed by the Vietnam War journalists a generation earlier. This was an enormous relief to the current embedded generation of self-censoring TV journalists. No one wants to be a defeatist downer, that’s unpatriotic and not good for ratings. We are after all at war.

However, I think some points were missed in the scurry to distance Vietnam from Iraq.

America installed a regime headed by Nguyen Vo Diem in South Vietnam, backing his boycott of elections required by the Geneva Accords and the CIA began a major program to develop a “comprehensive national police infrastructure in South Vietnam” in 1956. From that year on, US military expansion grew, from 2000 ‘military advisors’ to 16 300 in 1963, peaking at 536 000 troops in 1968, with the last American soldier fleeing in 1975. To compare the total cost of lives from the 19 year Vietnam engagement to the 3 year Iraq war and state because the total casualty rate isn’t up there yet and use that to distance the two conflicts is almost Bush like in its simplicity (have the media caught it from Bush? Is stupidity viral?). If we take all American Vietnam casualties from the ‘military advisors’ sent in 1956 to the 184 000 troops in 1965, the number of American deaths is 2264 over the 9 year period. In Iraq over a three year period with a force of 150 000, there has been (as of today) 2796 American deaths. It could be argued that Iraq has the potential to be much worse than Vietnam.

In one news story comparing Vietnam with Iraq it only used the casualty rates of American’s to deny the link – but what about if we looked at the casualty rates of the people we invade for democracy? In 19 years of engagement, some 2-4million Vietnamese died (we’re never exact about how many of ‘them’ ever die). In 3 years, 655 000 Iraqis died. If these casualty rates in Iraq stay the same and do not increase for the next 16 years (yeah right) the number of dead will be over 4 million Iraqis. But Iraq isn’t anything like Vietnam.

To see if Iraq and Vietnam are the same, I think it’s much more enlightening to examine the justifications for escalation of force and the justifications for continued occupation.

Vietnam’s escalation justification was the Gulf of Tonkin incident when two US naval ships, USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox, falsely claimed to have been attacked by the North Vietnamese. Iraq’s escalation justification was that Saddam Hussein (a former US client dictator) was linked to September 11 terrorists and that he had weapons of mass destruction he intended to use on the West. Both justifications were lies used to condone ideological foreign policy adventures that had already been decided by the high mandarin’s of the military industrial complex using flag blinded nationalism.

The real connection between Vietnam and Iraq though is in the justification for staying. In both cases the evidence was clear that America could not win militarily but because so much super power pride was on the line, retreat was simply never an option. This pig headed arrogance is what makes Iraq and Vietnam the same conflict, not the ill compared casualty figures and because America refused to learn the painful mistakes from Vietnam, they stumbled into riding the very same tiger with no idea of how to dismount without getting eaten.

Impeach the prick.

US 'cannot stay course' in Iraq
The US is not winning in Iraq and will not be able to stay the course in the long-term, a US state department insider has said.
Former intelligence official Wayne White told the BBC that violence in Iraq was "getting worse". A senior US state department official earlier said that the US has shown "arrogance and stupidity" in Iraq. But the department distanced itself from the comments, saying Mr Fernandez had been mistranslated.

'We're not winning'
Mr White was the head of the state department's Iraq intelligence section until last year. He told the BBC that the US position in Iraq was untenable. "The effort can't be sustained over the long haul, and so we can't stay a course, I think, that requires years and years more." He said: "We're not winning. It's apparent. "I checked with almost a dozen sources in Baghdad in just the last 24 hours," Mr White said. "Every single one of them answered the question as to whether the violence was lessening, or getting worse, with - 'worse'."

Change of tactics
His remarks came after state department official Alberto Fernandez told Qatar-based Arabic television channel al-Jazeera that "without doubt, there was arrogance and stupidity by the United States in Iraq". Mr Fernandez is an Arabic speaker who is director of public diplomacy in the state department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The BBC's James Westhead in Washington says that while there is no official change in US strategy, change is on everyone's lips.