Sunday Times: "Iraq Is No Vietnam - It's Far Worse Than That"

[Hissyspit]

Opinion - Andrew Sullivan

The Sunday Times October 22, 2006

Iraq is no Vietnam – it's far worse than that
Andrew Sullivan

V, it turns out, is not for vendetta. It’s for Vietnam. In the long, bitter debate before the Iraq war it was always war opponents who brought the V-word up. Many of us who never lived through that nightmare shrugged it off. It was another baby-boomer neurosis, we thought. America had fought and won wars since then, notably the first Gulf war. America had liberated Afghan Muslims and protected Bosnian Muslims, without the “quagmire” so many warned about. It became a point of pride for war supporters to deny outright any Vietnam comparison as preposterous.

- snip -

And so the Iraqi civilian casualties mount to something like 3,500 a month. We can argue about numbers but it remains indisputable that the number of deaths in Iraq is now surpassing the murderous levels of the previous dictatorship. The Americans look on, fighting hard in some places, resigned to stalemate elsewhere.

- snip -

In other respects the analogy is flawed because the situation in Iraq is worse than Vietnam. When South Vietnam fell, the consequences were largely restricted to the region. They were awful — as the toll of communism culled hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Vietnam. But they ended at the ocean.

In Iraq the consequences of American withdrawal could be a full-scale civil war, widespread ethnic cleansing, and the involvement of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Egypt in a potentially catastrophic Sunni-Shi’ite conflagration. Add to that the possibility of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and you could have the region with a chokehold on the world’s energy supplies turning into a corpse-ridden, Balkan desert.

Worse, withdrawal could allow for a failed state — or even region, like Anbar province — to become a training camp for jihadists to wage war on the West from a safe haven in the Middle East. Unlike Vietnam, this could bring the war home to America’s own cities. Or to London. Or Paris or Madrid or Tel Aviv.

MORE

[Erika]

1. George H W Bush stopped at toppling Iraq

because of the destabilization it would have on the region.

W said "who cares". We need their oil and to place corporatists in charge of their country's profits. We will destroy the Iraqis and their government and who cares if U.S. troops pay the price. Profits to the world corporatists is our sole goal.

[jwirr]

2. And, of course, since he knows God is coming any time he would

not have to face the future mess he was making.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. More here at link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29449-2415267,00.html

[Raine]

4. Thanks chimp

for fucking us all! :mad:

[Toots]

5. These right wingers still don't get it

The mission was a failure from the inception because they just don't understand the thousands of years of history involved. America with it's two hundred year history of a mixed ethnicity and cultures is hard enough to maintain a Democracy in but the Mesopotamian area with over five thousand years of tribal history is a bit more complex. We will never bring Democracy at the point of a gun nor bully these people into anything. They have a history and that is something the Cabal knows nothing about..