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November 18, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part I
By Richard Miniter
The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what were doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.
George Lucas, Star Wars creator
Thundering South from Baghdad in a Black Hawk helicopter in November 2003, I was strapped into the rear seat closest to the door.
There was nothing to do except watch the brightly lit landscape speed by. As we approached the landing zone near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the helicopter passed over a boy herding goats. He looked upand waved.
Belted in to my left was a reporter from a major American daily. He leaned over to shout into my ear. Vietnam!
With the helicopter engine at full throttle and wind roaring in, conversation was impossible. I couldnt ask him what about Iraq reminded him of Vietnam. So I searched the ground for some sign of Vietnamese terrain. I had been in Vietnam only a few years earlier and was instinctively looking for a broad, muddy river crowded with boats, a thick canopy of trees whose trunks were hidden in shade even at noon, or the colossal red-brick ruins of French colonialism. I saw none of that. Instead, there were flat-roofed, single-story buildings sprouting new satellite dishes, dots of green vegetation carefully fed by irrigation, and a hot expanse of boulder-strewn sand. Even the crewman at the machine gun, just forward of me, was in desert camouflage, not Vietnam-era jungle fatigues. Perhaps the reporter meant that the shadow of the helicopter, now undulating over the parched croplands and silvery irrigation ditches, was reminiscent of Vietnam. But there were no Black Hawks in the skies of Vietnam.
On the ground, the reporter told me that he had no real memory of Vietnam. (In fact, he had graduated from Yale in 1994.) All that he knew of the Vietnam War was Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and a series of television documentaries featuring helicopters, rice paddies, and the music of the Rolling Stones. Now, in Iraq, he said he felt like he was living inside a movie.
[...]
Perhaps the definitive side-by-side comparison of the Vietnam and Iraq wars appears in a monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), a Defense Department think tank. In Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights, Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air Forces Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and W. Andrew Terrill, a former Army officer and Middle East specialist at SSI, made an exhaustive study of the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
The two authors are uniquely qualified. Record served as an assistant province adviser in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and as a national security adviser to Democratic senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen. He is the author of six books and a dozen monographs, including Why We Lost in Vietnam. Terrill was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve in the Middle East and is an acknowledged expert on the Iran-Iraq War and terrorism.
Drawing historical comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq is tricky, as Record and Terrill note:
Summarizing by historical analogy is an inherently risky business because no two historical events are completely alike and because policymakers knowledge and use of history are often distorted by ignorance and political bias. In the case of Iraq and Vietnam, extreme caution should be exercised in comparing two wars so far apart in time, locus, and historical circumstances. In fact, a careful examination of the evidence reveals that the differences between the two conflicts greatly outnumber the similarities. This is especially true in the strategic and military dimensions of the wars. There is simply no comparison between the strategic environment, the scale of military operations, the scale of losses incurred, the quality of enemy resistance, the role of enemy allies, and the duration of combat.
Drawing on their monograph and an array of published material, as well as a recent trip of my own to Iraq, lets investigate whether Iraq is really another Vietnam.
[...]
November 20, 2005
The Iraq War is Not Another Vietnam - Part II
By Richard Miniter
[...]Without conscription, there is no debate about who serves and who does not. No one resents privileged college students lolling in gothic quadrangles while unfortunates are sent to serve in humid fields of fire. Service is voluntary and simply one of a set of choices in a free society.
Nor is there a debate about those who shirked national service or fled to Canada or about the injustice of the draft, an issue that still burns among some baby boomers.
In September 2004, television host George Stephanopoulos asked then secretary of state Colin Powell about a passage in his memoirs, where he reveals that he was angry at the preferential treatment given some draft dodgers, while disadvantaged young men were pressed into uniform. That system was disturbing to me. Thats why I was such a supporter of the voluntary army when it came, said Powell.
And when it came, the voluntary army looked more like America. National Journal noted in May 2004 that the U.S. population was 69 percent white, 12 percent black, and 11 percent Hispanic. Deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were 71 percent white, 12 percent black, and 11 percent Hispanic. (The balance was Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, foreigners who volunteered, and others.) Unlike Vietnam, it is hard to argue that some racial groups are suffering casualties disproportionately.
Another difference between the Vietnam and Iraq war deaths is that soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan were, on average, four years older than those killed in Vietnam (aged twenty-six vs. twentytwo). This removes another staple of the Vietnam era: soldiers dying before they could vote.
[...]
