Limits of American power
THE LONG shadow of Vietnam has a way of falling across the path America has chosen for itself in Iraq, blotting out the sunshine forecasts, and painting over optimistic progress reports in dark hues of déjà vu.
Nothing incenses the Bush administration more than the comparison.
"Quagmire" was never going to apply to Donald Rumsfeld's "shock-and-awe" warfare.
Thus it was amusing to watch the reaction of the White House apparatchiks last week when President Bush himself said it "may be true" that the events in Iraq this month were similar to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam .
The president was responding to a column by Tom Friedman of the
But no sooner had the president spoken than the president's aides began spinning backward , denying that the president saw any comparison between his war and that other great American failure. It reminded one of the classic Saigon briefing when a senior officer wandered too close to the truth. There was often a more propaganda-minded underling to leap up and say: "What the colonel meant was. . ."
Of course, there is absolutely no comparison between the Vietnam War and Iraq, except in the essentials. Iraq has deserts, Vietnam green jungles. One was in Southeast Asia, the other in the Middle East. And so on and so on. But the essentials -- the misreading of the country, the deliberate ignoring of its history and culture, the arrogance of what David Halberstam would come to call the "Best and the Brightest," and the deceit used to sell the war -- were the same in Washington in 2003 as they had been four decades before.
The motives, however, were the reverse of each other. Lyndon Johnson believed in the "domino theory," that if Vietnam were to fall to the Communists, so would the rest of Southeast Asia. It turned out not to be true.
Thirty years after the fall of Saigon , Bush bought into a radical neo conservative reverse domino theory: That invading Iraq and implanting a democracy would cause the dominos of Middle Eastern autocracy to fall, and that the region would be transformed in America's favor. Powerful, impatient men such as Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, intoxicated by America's sole super power status, believed that if they whacked Iraq, it would demonstrate our power to the whole world and others would be less likely to defy us.
But today, three years into the Iraq war, quagmire has become the operative word. If there is transformation it is likely to be the enhancement of Iranian power, the retention of tyranny, and the rise of radical Islam. The limits of American power have been exposed, as they were in Vietnam, and our adversaries now see new opportunities to oppose us. The consequences, however, are likely to hurt America more than did failure in Vietnam.
In both wars lies were used to bring the American public along. Johnson's Tonkin Gulf incident, his casus beli, was as phony as the faked and cherry -picked intelligence used to bring us into Iraq. As could have been predicted, the support on the home front is dissolving as it did with Vietnam.
For those of us who lived through the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Iraq gives the impression of being a never-ending Tet. I can remember sitting on my balcony in Baghdad during the last Ramadan, listening to the explosions and gunfire in the night, and wondering, not if, but how and when the jihadis were going to attack. my downtown hotel.
I thought, then, of how Tet had affected Saigon and Vietnam for only a few weeks, while Baghdad was never secure and was unlikely to be so any time soon. I was right about the attack on the hotel, by the way, but it didn't come until after I had left.
I hear the same tired slogans now as I did in Vietnam: We are battling them there so that we don't have to fight them at home. In Iraq's case, however, as American intelligence agencies agree, the American presence in Iraq is making it more likely that we will be attacked at home, because, Iraq is radicalizing young Muslims across the world.
The Bush administration talks a lot about freedom and democracy. But I suspect what most Iraqis want is what Graham Greene wrote about the Vietnamese. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want."
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
