We skipped Vietnam -- we shouldn't skip Iraq

About halfway through the Vietnam War, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that the damage from incorrect application of the Munich analogy -- if we don't stop them now, we'll have to stop them later -- might eventually outweigh the damage from Neville Chamberlain's decision to appease Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia in 1938. Schlesinger exaggerated. It will be a long time before anything out-costs the Second World War. But in analyzing what's going on in Iraq, the world in general and Canadians in particular are at similar risk of incorrectly applying the Vietnam analogy.

In retrospect, Canadians are happy with having sat out Vietnam, which they regard as the Americans' greatest Cold War folly. That satisfaction is now conditioning our approach to the reconstruction of Iraq. It shouldn't. Apart from the superficial similarity that Baghdad's suicide bombers are probably as terrifying to the troops on duty there as the Viet Cong's land mines were to the grunts who patrolled Mekong Delta jungles, in most ways Iraq is not at all like Vietnam.

Backward dominoes. Vietnam was about the domino theory. If we didn't fight them in Vietnam, we'd have to fight them in California. That turned out to be wrong. The communists did take Vietnam, but they never made it to California. In the current war, the biggest dominoes fell in the first two hours, in New York and Washington on Sept. 11. The rest of the war is about working backward down the domino path to find the people who set it up. That they prefer invisibility means many paths have to be worked at once. But this time round the dominoes are real.

The bad guys are really bad. We may have understood intellectually that Ho Chi Minh was no angel, but in those days, local despots' totalitarian ambitions were OK so long as they were cloaked in nationalism and anti-capitalism. In some circles, Saddam may once have been a romantic figure, but now that we've all done TV tours of his torture chambers and charnel pits, not even this generation's Jane Fondas can be duped. Many fewer people on the left (give credit where credit is due) tolerate totalitarians and growing numbers are willing to do something about it.

We're in it, too. As in Vietnam, the Australians sent troops and we stayed home. No wonder they get to visit the President's Texas ranch, which this time round is in Crawford, not Johnson City, where the LBJ Ranch was. But we fool ourselves if we think we're not in it, too. It may not be a clash of civilizations, but it's a clash of some members of Muslim civilization against ours (assuming "civilization" isn't too grand for what we all live in these days). And our self-declared enemies don't make fine distinctions. Canadians. Americans. Mr. Bin Laden, apparently unaware of our superior health care system and more caring welfare state, has decreed us a target too.

When Vietnam fell we got boat people, which was tough on the boat people but good for us. If we lose Iraq -- if it descends into anarchy or, even worse, suffers Saddam's return -- serious dominoes will be threatened here. Maybe things would have been better had the United States not invaded. Maybe in some parallel universe they didn't and things are better, even with Uday and Qusay still in charge. But in our universe that option has expired. Life is too dangerous for the self-indulgent satisfaction of "we told you so." To exercise our world-famous-in-Canada altruism, but also to protect our own national interest, we should be deploying every soft-power battalion we have to help the Iraqis.

58,000 is still far off. Iraq is a desert, not a jungle, in danger of becoming a swamp. But it's no Vietnam. In Vietnam the United States lost 58,000 service men and women. In 1968 alone, the death toll was 16,589. Sixteen thousand. That's 319 a week. So far the entire American loss for the second Iraq war is 332 combat and non-combat deaths.

The observances for our own Sgt. Short and Cpl. Beerenfenger were entirely appropriate. They were heroes. They should be honoured. But in wartime a certain callousness is required. If a few hundred or even a few thousand military deaths can prevent more World Trade Centers or worse, a responsible leader has no choice but to act.

Winning matters. The biggest difference between now and then, of course, is that we know how then ended. The Americans lost. Badly. But now Ho's heirs want into the WTO. They've got the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia and they're hungry for foreign investment. They're no Jeffersonians, but after three decades they're coming over to our side. Which makes the war all the more tragic. Losing evidently didn't matter.

But if we lose in Iraq, if Saddam does come back, if democracy and capitalism fail and the country sinks into permanent civil war, can we really be sure that 25 years from now all will have turned out for the best? And even if it has, what kind of 25 years will we have had getting there?

Terror risk in Canada real: Experts
Country facing `persistent, evolving threats'
Intelligence panel ponders grim scenarios

BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH
OTTAWA BUREAU

VANCOUVER—Doug Ross' stock in trade is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

A terrorist group detonates a nuclear device to pressure the United States to get out of the Middle East. But the attack happens not in the U.S., where it would spark an all-out retaliation from the Americans, but here in Canada where the terrorists can just as easily make their point.

A remote possibility? Perhaps. But a possibility all the same, says Ross, an expert in arms control and a political science professor at Simon Fraser University.

"All we need is one or a few rogue organizations with financial resources and possible state support and we're going to have a major calamity on our hands," he said.

If that's not enough to keep you awake at night, here's another terrifying thought: Radioactive material — discarded and since gone missing from industrial or medical uses — is wrapped around a bundle of dynamite and detonated in the core of a major city.

The resulting radioactive cloud causes tens of thousands of casualties and exacts an economic toll in the billions of dollars. "This isn't theoretical. This is real. This is a risk," Ross said.

That was just one of the grim scenarios discussed in recent days as experts from Canada's intelligence community — academics, analysts and top-level officials — gathered here at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.

They talked of "super-terrorism," the remote chance that some group will find the means to use nuclear weapons, the worst forms of biological or chemical agents, or radiological dispersal devices.

They talked of intelligence failures and hinted at their successes in the shadowy fight against terror.

And the country's top intelligence officials, whose stock in trade are secrets and classified chatter, made no secret of one sobering fact: Canada faces a real risk of being attacked.

The conference heard:

Ward Elcock, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), warn that despite "some successes," Canada continues to face "persistent and evolving threats.''

"The lessons of the recent years lead us to conclude that they are not going to go away soon and that we and our allies therefore need to retain the focus on those issues," Elcock said in a keynote address to the forum on Friday night.

"Now is not the time to declare victory and rest on our laurels."

Paul Kennedy, senior assistant deputy solicitor-general, says there's a possibility that chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons could be used by terrorist groups.

"We're facing international terrorist networks, ones which are more sophisticated than maybe people thought they were, and ones which obviously have significant, ambitious agendas," said Kennedy, who has the job of overseeing national security.

Government experts who talked about the threat of a biological outbreak or an attack on the country's food supply.

A top federal official involved in intelligence gathering downplayed the chances that Canada could face the most horrific scenarios contemplated at the forum.

He noted that biological weapons are not easily manufactured in the quantities needed to inflict mass casualties. Nor is it all that easy to develop nuclear weapons, he said.

"The danger is always there that Canada will be attacked, that U.S. interests here will be attacked or that Canada will be used as a staging ground for an attack elsewhere," the official said in an interview.

Academics say there's good reason for these normally circumspect people to engage in such blunt talk. Their goal is to put Canadians on notice that the risk is real.

"We're not at the centre of the bull's eye but we are indeed at the inner ring of the target," Ross said.

Vietnam was about the domino theory.

No it wasn't. It was about keeping South Vietnam out of communist hands until Lyndon Johnson could be reelected to a second term in 1968. Yes, I know LBJ declined to run in '68, but that's only because he knew Vietnam was too far gone politically, for him to be reelected.

The lesson of a president loosing a war, whether he started it or not, should not be lost on those who were politically aware during the Ford administration and the 1975 "Fall of Saigon". In the '76 election, Carter didn't beat Gerald Ford for president, the fall of Saigon on the six o'clock news did. Those that believe otherwise are unaware.

The comparison of Vietnam and Iraq is apples and oranges, both politically and strategically. Bush is putting his 2nd. term on the line to engage Arab terrorism. The Canadians, if they don't give up the Jones they have for Bush and join the anti-terror movement with the US, will render "Oh Canada" to be played as a lament, rather than an anthem.

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