There’s no question that the violence in Iraq this past week has rattled Washington — and indeed ordinary Americans. A war that seems to pit US marines against the people they are supposed to be liberating is not a narrative that most Americans want to follow. Senator Ted Kennedy used the V-word: “We’re facing a quagmire in Iraq, just as we faced a quagmire in Vietnam.” Even Bill O’Reilly, the conservative television host, opined of the silent majority of Shi’ites: “If these people won’t help us, we need to get out in an orderly matter.”
So is this indeed Vietnam? Has the script already been written? In one sense, yes it has. The Vietnam analogy is precisely and entirely the point of the recent uprisings by displaced Sunnis and the Iranian-backed militia of Moqtada al-Sadr.
Everything the insurgents in Iraq are doing hinges on what they believe the American response will be. First they tried a replay of Mogadishu, finding a handful of Americans, killing them, mutilating their bodies and parading them in public. But that did not work. President George W Bush is no Bill Clinton, and Iraq is no Somalia. Then they tried the Vietnam tactic of a broader rebellion. Then they attempted a repeat of the 1970s hostage-style device, blindfolding foreigners in a ploy designed to intimidate troops out of the country.
The message of all these gambits is a simple one directed straight at the American public: the price of liberation will be made too high for you. Even though polls show a majority of Iraqis glad to be liberated, the extremist minority will make this Vietnam with crazy Islamic terrorists thrown in. So get out now.
However, if the insurgents’ intended analogy is Vietnam, they have once again misread American history. People too easily forget that Americans supported the Vietnam war long into its duration. They backed it despite the fact that it was costing tens of thousands of American lives compared with the hundreds lost in Iraq. They backed it through three presidencies — Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. They backed it when there was a general draft in America compared with the all-volunteer army today.
People forget that Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 at the height of the anti-war movement and was re-elected in a landslide in 1972. And people forget that, unlike Vietnam, the war in Iraq takes place only 2Å years after Americans permanently lost their belief that withdrawal to the homeland could guarantee them safety.
Indeed, if Vietnam is the analogy then nobody should expect American withdrawal. On the contrary. The president last week gave the US military a free hand to fight back with all the might it possesses.
Americans have learnt the lessons of Vietnam. Has Vietnam veteran John Kerry pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq as the anti-war candidates demanded in 1968? No, he has promised to increase the number of troops and do what he can to broaden the coalition and bring in more foreign troops.
In fact, one of the more common Vietnam analogies cited so far in Washington is the Tet offensive. That occurred when the Vietcong launched a major campaign against America, were militarily defeated but were portrayed in the largely liberal media as winning. Once the national will was broken, the Vietcong were able to win politically what they had lost militarily. Nobody wants to repeat that cycle.
This leaves, however, a fascinating dilemma for Kerry. So far his campaign has been dedicated to criticising how Bush got us into the Iraq war. Last Wednesday he described the Iraq war as “one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I’ve been in public life”.
But what would he do if he were elected? So far he has dismissed the notion that he would cut and run. And you can see why: if he were to echo Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Socialist leader who called for the withdrawal of his country’s troops from Iraq, he would be destroyed in the election. But Kerry has yet to articulate a compelling alternative to Bush’s call for resolve.
Again, when asked last week what his own policy would be, he responded: “Right now what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I’m not the president and I didn’t create this mess so I don’t want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven’t made.” That’s a non-answer. But a non-answer tells you a lot about what a real answer might be.
So let me suggest one. It would go something like this: “Thank you, Mr President, for your leadership in difficult times. You took some tough decisions in good faith. I disagree with you but I will not let our troops down and I will not abandon Iraq. But you, Mr President, are now part of the problem.
“You are too polarising a figure to bring real peace to Iraq and have bungled the post-liberation too badly. Your failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has undermined your credibility as a war leader. You are too unpopular to allow European governments and the United Nations to co-operate in the war.
“One of the advantages of a democracy is that we can pursue the same goals over time with different leaders and different strategies. I intend to win the war in Iraq because we cannot afford to lose it. But I also intend to bring our allies centre stage into the task, to increase troop levels in the country, to appoint Richard Holbrooke (the sole exponent of diplomacy with a mailed fist in the Clinton administration) to oversee our co-operation with the incoming Iraqi government, and ask former president Clinton to reopen peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. I will be tough on terror and tough on the causes of terror. I can complete what you started. In fact, I alone can complete what you started.”
Can Kerry say such a thing? Well, history shows he can say almost anything if it’s to his political advantage. Last week he junked his entire primary season promises and pledged to enact steep spending controls in office. He has kept his options open on Iraq while being lacerating about how we got where we are.
To outflank Bush as a super-hawk is therefore a perfect electoral gambit. After all, what lies ahead in Iraq is not a very Republican project. It’s classic nation-building — the kind of thing that Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore once favoured and Bush once resolutely opposed. Were Kerry to take this tack it would of course be a turning point rich in irony, especially when viewed through the prism of Vietnam.
Whereas Nixon inherited a Democratic war, Kerry, the man who found his first fame in anti-Vietnam protests, would inherit a Republican war. Whereas Nixon was doing all he could to find a way out with honour, Kerry would be doing all he could to find a way to win for the sake of democracy.
Yes, we may be seeing a strange replay of Vietnam. But in reverse. And quite possibly with an entirely different ending.
