The Iraq and Vietnam Wars

So many historical comparisons that we see in the press are little more than vapid propaganda. But it is possible to learn something from past conflicts. And the Vietnam War is one that the military has studied carefully, even if they decided that their main lesson was, don't get into a counterinsurgency war again. Not an entirely wrong conclusion, by any means.

Gen. William Odom (ret.) has been a strong critic of the Iraq War since before it began. He has a useful comparison of the stages of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars at the Nieman Watchdog site: Iraq through the prism of Vietnam 03/08/06. Noting that one of the main justifications for the Vietnam War came to be the containment of China, which by the early 1960s was something the USSR wanted to do and something Vietnam has always wanted to do, including Ho Chi Minh, he notes one parallel to the present war:

Iran had serious scores to settle with Iraq. In 1980, Saddam Hussein launched a bloody war that dragged on until 1988 without a decisive end. That President Bush would destroy Saddam's regime, saving Iran the trouble, was probably beyond its clerics’ wildest dreams.

He did the same for al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden must have been ecstatic. The U.S. invasion opened the way for al Qaeda cadres to enter Iraq by the scores. Killing Americans in Iraq is much easier than killing them in the United States after 9/11. Moreover, toppling secular Arab leaders – including Saddam – was, and remains, Osama bin Laden’s highest priority aim. America is farther down his list, seen as an intermediate objective in the long struggle to bring his version of radical Islamic rule to all Arab countries.

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