When Iraq War II first started, many of of us pantywaist liberals intoned, "it's going to be another Vietnam." Now, there were two problems with that: 1.) Seeing as how we're "pantywaist liberals," we're not credible on matters of war, and 2.) Many of those same people said, "What's so bad about Vietnam?."
Well, we're now around a-year-and-a-half into this war, and so far there's nothing to convince me that this isn't another Vietnam. In all honesty, when I warned of the dire consequences of war in Iraq, comparing it to Vietnam, I was doing my haughty best to conjure up a negative reaction to a war that everyone seemed to deem totally necessary.
For the most part, I was probably like many in the Bush administration; I figured we'd breeze into Iraq and vanquish Saddam Hussein quite easily, regardless of whether I thought it was a justifiable military action or not. For me, a mere citizen of middle America, to make that mistake is forgivable; for those in charge of this country to make that mistake is reprehensible and possibly treasonous.
The thing is, we did vanquish Hussein quite easily, but no one prepared for "what next?". And that is exactly why this war is looking like more and more like Vietnam.
I'm no expert on Vietnam (it was a little before my time, to say the least), but my understanding is that one of our main problems was that we had no clear military objective. Unlike the World Wars before it, when it was a matter of capturing/recapturing lands, Vietnam was a cat-and-mouse game where we would take an area one day, then have to abandon it the next. With an enemy that didn't march at us in rows with muskets thrust before them, we never could win a decisive battle, and in the end, we just slowly pulled out.
That's why these so-called "no-go" zones in Iraq should send shivers up our spines. Didn't we liberate the whole country? Wasn't "Mission Accomplished"? Why did we have to have an all-out offensive to re-take Fallujah? And now that we're "re-taken" Fallujah, do we have the troops to occupy it constantly and make sure it stays a "go" zone? Can we trust Iraqis to police it? Or will we hear in two years of another major offensive to re-liberate Fallujah?
The population of Iraq is over 25 million. If one out of every 100 people in the country becomes part of the insurgency, then that's 250,000 fighters. And that's not a stagnant number; the young of Iraq are going to become ready combatants as they watch this war drag on. Fighters will come from other countries to battle what they see as an invading force against Islam. They'll outnumber our forces, but more importantly, they'll have the advantage of surprise, using terrorist techniques (what used to be called guerrilla warfare). We'll be engaging the enemy incessantly.
In Vietnam, the enemy was Communism. Of course, Vietnam was in some ways a war against the Soviet Union, an effort to try to stop the spread of its ideology. When the United States left Vietnam, it fell to Communism and came under the influence of the Soviet Union. But we knew who that enemy was, and we knew where to fire our ICBMs should they fire theirs at us.
Iraq is much different. To leave Iraq anytime before it is completely stable could destabilize our future for the next century (if it hasn't already). To leave Iraq in chaos would be to invite every terrorist in the hemisphere to set up boot camps and train for the jihad against America (if they're not there already). To leave Iraq before the job is finished -- whatever that is -- could destabilize the entire Middle East. Civil war could break out in Iraq and spread to other countries, or those countries could try to head that off (or decide to make a land grab) and invade Iraq.
There was no exit strategy because there can be no exit strategy; we broke it, and it's not a matter of gluing it back together. We may have to hold the pieces together for the next century.
And we'll be much less safe for the doing.
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