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Charles Glass: There are so many echoes of Vietnam in IraqIt took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam. It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq
The author was ABC News Chief Mideast correspondent, 1983-1993
The US armed forces launched their first air raid against post-war Iraq last week, when F-16 fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs on Tikrit. The new campaign against Iraq's resistance fighters, dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone, recalls President Lyndon Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder over Vietnam in 1965. That campaign of bombing Vietnam would eventually see Indochina devastated by 7 million tons of aerial explosives.
These are early days in Iraq, where the conflict between a growing percentage of the native population and the occupying forces is escalating far more rapidly than it did in Vietnam. It took two years, from 1963 to the end of 1964, for American combat deaths to reach 324. The US has surpassed that figure in only seven months in Iraq, where 398 American soldiers have died already. In the last 12 days, 38 have been killed. As for the Iraqi dead, the US does not count them with similar precision. Vietnam offers examples to the US, but it is learning the wrong lessons.
Parallels with Vietnam are asserting themselves again and again in Iraq. They start with the justification for committing American troops to battle. In both cases, politicians lied to persuade Congress and the public to go along. In 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson officially upgraded the US military role from advisory to combat, the secretaries of state and defence accused North Vietnam of attacking the USS Maddox.
Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in a bravura performance emulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN last February, announced: "While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." The only phrase corresponding to reality was that the Maddox was a destroyer. Otherwise, the routine patrol was in fact an attack on North Vietnam's shore installations. The international waters were really North Vietnam's. And the unprovoked attack was not only provoked, it did not take place at all.
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Don't forget -- the politicians and journalists, then as now, were saying the same reasons we couldn't end the damage sooner -- 'can't cut and run', 'what would it look like', 'what message would that send', etc.
:mad: