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Iraq Is Not Vietnam, but...

By W. D. Ehrhart

In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson dramatically announced that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked U.S. destroyers without provocation in international waters. In response, Congress passed a resolution giving Johnson authority to wage war in Vietnam by executive fiat. We learned only years later that the president knowingly lied about what had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin and why. In the meantime, the American people were told repeatedly that the United States would stay the course in Vietnam, that victory was slowly but surely being achieved, that we would prevail. Long after the war ended in American defeat and with 58,000 American dead, we learned that as early as March 1965, when there were still fewer than 300 American soldiers dead in Vietnam, Johnson was telling Senator Mike Mansfield that we could not win the war in Vietnam. Only in 1995 did former defense secretary Robert McNamara finally admit that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" in Vietnam, though we now know he had reservations about the wisdom of the war as early as 1966, the year I enlisted in the Marine Corps believing my government would neither lie to me nor ask for my life if it was not absolutely necessary.

In Vietnam, however, I found a military dictatorship rife with corruption, venality and repression, and devoid of popular support. I found the forced removal of thousands of people from their ancestral homelands to poverty-stricken, misery-laden shantytowns. I witnessed and participated in the reckless and sometimes deliberate destruction of men, women, children, crops, livestock, homes, and whole villages. I saw the terrible consequences of sending tens of thousands of young Americans—armed to the teeth, scared to death, and trusting no one but each other—into the midst of an alien world we had no chance of understanding or winning over. I found that the people we were supposedly defending hated us because we burned their fields and destroyed their forests, and called them gooks, chinks, slopes and zipperheads, turning their sons into shoeshine boys and their daughters into whores. What any of this had to do with preserving freedom, ours or that of the Vietnamese, was exactly nothing.

A war begun under false pretenses by a government that insists it is fighting for freedom, slowly but surely winning, and determined to stay the course no matter what: does that sound familiar?

I'm not a believer in historical analogies. Iraq is not Vietnam, no matter how many similarities we might identify. But I should think my fellow citizens would have learned enough from the Vietnam War to be more skeptical of the present course of events than many of them seem to be.

Consider that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabians. None of them was Iraqi. But the United States remains a staunch ally of Saudi Arabia while invading Iraq. We had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to us. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the whole world we had the evidence. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he knew where those weapons of mass destruction were. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice said Saddam could have a nuclear bomb within a year. Vice President Dick Cheney insisted there was overwhelming evidence of close ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Now thousands of young Americans once again find themselves armed to the teeth, scared to death, and trusting no one but each other in the midst of an alien world they do not understand and aren't likely to win over, because armed, frightened youngsters don't win hearts and minds any more effectively in 2005 than they did in 1965. They've replaced gook, slope and dink with raghead, towelhead and sand nigger, but I doubt that the swagger, the contempt for what is different, the fear masquerading as bravado have changed at all.

And with each death of a comrade, the anger grows, the bitterness, the desire to strike back at somebody, anybody. So far, over 1,500 Americans have died in Iraq, and there is no end in sight. Meanwhile, the newly elected Iraqi parliament is off to a rocky start, and Osama bin Laden, whom George W. Bush vowed to bring in "dead or alive," is still out there somewhere, planning God only knows what next.

I hope I'm wrong about all this. I hope we'll be able to look back thirty years from now and feel that this war was worth it after all, that the sacrifices of the dead and the maimed and the broken-in-spirit will not have been made for the wrong reasons and the wrong people. But I'm not betting on it.