Worse than Vietnam

[Barrett808]

Worse than Vietnam
The war has descended into chaos, says Julian Manyon. And whereas in Vietnam there was strong local support for the Americans, there is none in Iraq
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec293.html

Baghdad

As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as ours are expected to link its outpourings to London so that reassuring messages from American officials and their Iraqi allies can be pumped directly on to British television screens. It could be called ‘Good news from the bunker’.

In truth, after the most disastrous month since the invasion, good news is hard to come by. Though Bremer’s headquarters, and our own fortified compound directly across the river, remain impregnable, the Americans have, astonishingly, lost control of many of the country’s major highways, with checkpoints of the previously ballyhooed Iraqi police simply melting away. Reconstruction work, the manna of billions of dollars which was supposed to reconcile Iraqis to the occupation, has virtually come to a halt, with one major American contractor, Kellogg, Brown and Root, the sticky-fingered subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, said to have lost 34 of its employees dead in the last 40 days. Roughly half of all foreign workers have left Iraq either temporarily or for good, and those who remain appear to be mainly security men who ride up and down in the lifts of our hotel clad in flak jackets and nursing submachine-guns. Ominously, work to improve Baghdad’s power supply before the punishing heat of the Iraqi summer sets in has, apparently, stalled.

American military casualties have risen sharply. The Pentagon refuses to disclose the number of wounded, but the best estimate (based on the announced figure of 137 dead) is that in the month of April some 850 soldiers were killed or injured, the equivalent of an entire battalion being put out of action. The numbers are still too low to affect the capabilities of the occupation force, and the casualties are being suffered by a professional army rather than by the draftees of Vietnam, but they are alarming in an election year and are certainly one of the main reasons that the Americans chose humiliating retreat in Fallujah rather than the decisive street battle they had repeatedly threatened. Fallujans, who had grown used to airdrops of American leaflets carrying such boastful messages as ‘Terrorists: your last day on earth was yesterday’, are now celebrating what they see as victory.

The Fallujah debacle has fully illustrated the lacunae in American tactical and strategic thinking, and is likely to cost them dear. They launched Operation Vigilant Resolve in an unconcealed thirst for revenge for the slaying and public mutilation of their four contractors and were then blinded by their own propaganda. Their mantra has always been that foreign terrorists, inspired by bin Laden and his Jordanian sub-contractor Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, are at the root of the Iraqi insurgency. Fallujah was portrayed as a town which had been hijacked by alien fanatics. All that was needed were a few precise air strikes to take out the villains and the honest burghers of Fallujah would welcome the Americans and the millions of investment dollars they brought with them. As frustration mounted in the face of dogged resistance, Brigadier General Mark Kimmit, whose blue eyes increasingly have a true-believer glint, declared Fallujah to be a town that ‘doesn’t get it’. But it was the Americans who had failed to understand. All evidence now suggests that the Fallujah insurgency is essentially home-grown in a town long known for its strength of Islamic, even Wahabite, belief and renowned for insular hard-headedness. It appears that the fighters, who now call themselves mujahedin, or holy warriors, are being advised, even commanded, by former Saddam-era army officers of whom there is no shortage locally and who were abruptly thrown on the scrapheap by the American decision to disband the old army soon after last year’s apparent victory.

(more)

http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec293.html

[LittleApple81]

1. In "This is Hell" today a correspondent from Iraq said the same thing.Here

Dahr Jamail (http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches /), Baghdad correspondent for the Internet journal The NewStandard, Jamail was in Fallujah last month and reported live from Baghdad.

He had a scathing review of the United States actions in Iraq. The Iraqis want us out. Even the Shiites are saying the prefer Saddam to the US because Saddam was not a hypocrite, provided safe streets, and he was an Iraqi. Essentially, why would the want to have another torturer who is not even one of them.

[squidbro]

2. Iraq is much worse than Vietnam

It isn't only because of the Iraqi feelings against us that this war is worse than Vietnam.

World opinion is strongly against the U.S. this time. During Vietnam, the U.S. generally was viewed positively.

U.S. policy has been exposed as truly hypocritical and we no longer have any moral standing.

In Vietnam, the Mai Lai massacre was truly the work of individuals. In Iraq, the Abu Gharib abuses were encouraged and sanctioned at the highest levels of government leadership.

In Vietnam, the U.S. truly was attempting to attain a noble, albeit futile, cause of containing communism. In Iraq, the Bush neocon imperialists were mostly concerned about how the U.S. and specifically, their interests, would benefit from that nation's wealth. Democracy and higher ideals were promoted only in order to sell the idea to the U.S. public.

Hopefully, Kerry will be able to restore some modicum of good will. The U.S. will be attempting to live this one down for a long time.