Iraq Isn’t Vietnam…Yet
Think Tankers has more commentary on the whole Tet Offensive/Iraq thing the media/blogosphere has been talking about the last couple of days.
Tet was not the end. South Vietnam didn’t fall until well after we left. After we defunded them and did nothing to stop the North from moving in. We began drawing down troop levels in ‘72, left in’73 and didn’t provide as much air support as we promised in Paris. In 1974, a Democratic congress defunded our support entirely, overriding a veto to do so. In March 1975, North Vietnam – still funded and supported by the USSR – invaded and took over by April.
The Iraq-Vietnam comparison will ultimately be determined by whether we cut and run again, by whether the job is done when we do leave, not by what’s happening on the ground there now.
Quite right.
Iraq is not Vietnam, but it could become another Vietnam if we allow the terrorists – through their manipulation of the media – to demoralize us to the extent that we end our mission in Iraq before it is complete.
Or, to put it more bluntly, Iraq will become another Vietnam if the Democrats get their way and we withdraw our forces prematurely. Which would be just fine with the Democrats. The current crop of liberals in charge of that party define their foreign policy in terms of the war in Vietnam. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of them are probably still re-living their glory days as counter-culture, anti-war activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Which is exactly why we can’t trust them on national security matters. They were wrong on Vietnam then, and they’re wrong on Iraq now.
This is a simple-minded view of Iraq. Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than Vietnam. At this point, there is no “our side vs their side” in Iraq. It is “their side vs their side” (eg, Sunnis vs Shiites and Kurds). Ethnic cleansing is a major problem in Baghdad. We’re no longer simply fighting an insurgency; we’re caught between various factions in a simmering civil war.
The Bush administration has made a mess of Iraq. We need a fresh start with new leadership (dump Rummy!).
one parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is how mediocre the local leaders we’re depending on are (e.g. al-Maliki). ..most of the violence occuring in Iraq today is carried out by either an armed wing of a political party (e.g. Badr Brigade) or an armed group closely affiliated with a political party (e.g. Sadr’s Mehdy Army and many of the Sunni insurgency)
Take the following article in todays Wall Street Journal as an example:
Sadr’s Mahdi Army Seizes Iraqi City in Clash of Militias
Don’t they favor the partitioning of Iraq along ethnic lines, sharing the oil revenue?
Does anyone want to speculate what the Baker commission will recommend? He’s sure dropping a lot of hints.