Analysis: Growing echo of Vietnam in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The silhouettes that roar through the Baghdad twilight are sleeker than the helicopters of an earlier time. The wind brings dust, not drenching monsoons. The river snaking seaward is called Tigris, not Mekong. And this war's not fought to the wail of Jimi Hendrix's guitar.

But half a world away from Vietnam and half a lifetime later, a long shadow from a long-ago conflict hangs over the U.S. war in Iraq — in its "body counts" and "turning points," its Claymore mines and Kalashnikovs, its "hearts and minds" and "search and destroy," its antiwar voices rising back home.

Steve Budnick felt the "déjà vu" when mortar rounds fell as he settled into a civilian job with the U.S. reconstruction agency here. "But these Iraqis can't aim worth a damn!"

"These guys are nothing compared with the North Vietnamese," said Jack Holley, now a U.S. logistics chief, then a young Marine officer.

Unlike the single-minded foe in Vietnam, the anti-U.S. resistance here is fragmented, without a political program. That war was bigger — 543,000 U.S. troops in 1969, facing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fighters, compared with 130,000 Americans here, versus perhaps 20,000 insurgents.

It was a disgruntled, draftee U.S. Army then, unlike today's all-volunteer force. And U.S. casualty rates were much higher: an average 19 Americans killed a day over eight years in Vietnam, compared with two a day here.

But for all the contrasts in scale, this U.S. military operation — far from American shores, bent on shaping the political future of another land, facing a resourceful resistance, trying to hand off the fight to local allies and fast losing support at home — shows important parallels to Vietnam, the last counterinsurgency war fought by U.S. forces.

Faulty intelligence helped to justify both wars — the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, during which two U.S. warships off Vietnam mistakenly reported that they'd been fired upon, and Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Even a mirror image of the old "domino theory" is at work in Iraq. In Vietnam, U.S. leaders warned that other Southeast Asian states would fall, one by one, to communism if Vietnam was lost. The Bush administration now presents Iraq as the first in a series of Arab dominoes that will fall.

Now comes the alleged killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in an incident some American media compare to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam when U.S. soldiers slaughtered up to 500 villagers.

As with Vietnam, approval for the Iraq operation has plunged as U.S. casualties mount. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in early May, three years after the Iraq invasion, found that 59 percent of Americans now view it as a mistake.

It took six years after the major U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam before a similar majority — 61 percent in 1971 — called that war a mistake.

What the Americans are trying to do is "Iraqization," training a new Iraqi army to move into the front line against the largely Sunni Arab insurgents, so that U.S. troops can pull back.

"As the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down," Bush says.

It's an eerie refrain of another presidential voice. "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater," Richard Nixon said in announcing "Vietnamization" in 1969. Four years later, the American withdrawal was complete, and in 1975, triumphant communist forces rolled into Saigon.

A dwindling number of upbeat observers see a potential turning point for Iraq, if the new, elected government and growing army begin pacifying the country. But Stephen Biddle, a national-security specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, says "Iraqization" is one lesson that shouldn't be taken from Vietnam.

"In a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire," he writes in the journal Foreign Affairs.

In the worsening civil conflict among Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds, the new army is viewed by Sunni Arabs as a Shiite and Kurdish force and its deployment deepens their hostility. Biddle's solution: Maintain a strong U.S. military presence while Iraq's factions work out a balanced, durable constitutional accord.

The United States, more and more, is in a Vietnam-like bind in Iraq, many commentators say. It cannot stay; it cannot go.

"The most tragic comparison is becoming more real: In for a dime, in for a dollar," says Gordon Adams, a veteran defense scholar at George Washington University.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who was wounded as an Army sergeant in Vietnam, once favored a further U.S. buildup here. But last year he concluded: "We're locked into a bogged-down problem not dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."