Jack Torry and Joe Hallett: Military Historians Who See Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam? Yep.

Jack Torry and Joe Hallett, in the Columbus Dispatch (4-29-05):

Building a government that enjoys popular support. Creating a modern army willing to fight a powerful insurgency. Maintaining widespread support on the home front.

The United States fell short of those goals in Vietnam. Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, the country is giving them another go, in Iraq.

Americans have not suffered anything like the casualties they endured in Vietnam, but the war in Iraq bears eerie similarities to the one that ended so long ago in Southeast Asia.

"I happen to believe there are more parallels between Iraq and Vietnam than not," said retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a military historian who served in Vietnam. "In both cases, you have a government that hopes to be democratic struggling for legitimacy in the midst of an insurgency that would topple it. The bulk of the population, which has never lived under democracy, is the prize between the emerging government and the insurgency."

Critics of both wars see even more ominous parallels. They argue that, in both conflicts, U.S. policymakers dispatched troops to fight for causes not necessarily in the strategic interests of the United States. And they contend that America risked a rupture with its European allies, many of whom opposed both conflicts.

"In Vietnam, we put our whole relationship with Europe increasingly at risk," said Gen. William Odom, a retired head of the National Security Agency and professor at Yale University. "The Europeans didn't like what we were doing. Right now, the central question is whether we swapped Europe for Iraq."

Critics also say the American presidents of the 1960s and President Bush today didn't have coherent strategies to remove the U.S. forces. Instead, in Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. became entangled in a bitter insurgency that cost America lives and money.

"Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon had a way out of Vietnam, and clearly the Bush administration has no way out of Iraq," said Duncan Jamieson, a professor of history at Ashland University.

Yet for all the similarities, there are striking differences, not the least of which is geography. In the thick jungles of South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies had vast areas to hide from American firepower. The sandy terrain of Iraq provides no such advantage to the insurgents, who repeatedly expose themselves to U.S. air power.

In addition, North Vietnam had a ready supply of modern tanks, artillery and surface-to-air missiles from China and the Soviet Union, who were only too willing to oblige their communist allies in Hanoi. The North Vietnamese built an elaborate series of supply lines through Laos and Cambodia -- dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- that allowed them to attack American forces across the western frontier of South Vietnam.

By contrast, the Iraqi insurgents, who include a blend of old Saddam Hussein loyalists and terrorists with links to Osama bin Laden, have no superpower willing to help. U.S. intelligence has concluded that Syria and Iran are providing some assistance to the insurgents, but nothing on the scale of the sophisticated war material the Soviets shipped into North Vietnam.

"Any state that has a contiguous border with China, it is going to be very difficult to fight that war," said Adrian Lewis, a professor of history at the University of North Texas. "They had an outside source of manpower and supplies that made it difficult for the U.S. to be successful unless the U.S. was willing to fight a total war."

Scholars also disagree on exactly who the Americans were fighting in Vietnam. While some analysts would dispute Jamieson's contention that North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh "was regarded as the George Washington of Vietnam and we ended up on the wrong side of the conflict," there is little doubt that Ho commanded more of a following throughout Southeast Asia than Saddam ever did in Iraq....