The purposes, strategy, terrain and players in the Vietnam War were far different from those in Iraq, many experts say.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 25, 2004

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Are we back in Vietnam?

The question has drawn currency lately, as a rash of bloody setbacks in Iraq has raised alarms among supporters as well as opponents of the 13-month-old war.

As for the answer, an old political truism applies: where people stand depends heavily on where they sit.

"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy declared during a much-quoted Washington speech on April 5.

"This country needs a new president," the Massachusetts Democrat said in the same breath, underlining his dual status as a leader of antiwar liberals and a top supporter of Mr. Bush's challenger for the White House.

"I think the analogy is false," President Bush said during his nationally televised news conference eight days later. Mr. Bush then suggested that it is not right even to invoke the specter of Vietnam: "I also happen to think that analogy . . . sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."

Not surprisingly, foes of the war are more likely to embrace the Vietnam-Iraq analogy -- even to brandish it as a polemical weapon against the Bush administration and the architects of its campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.

Likewise, the war's backers tend to be most dismissive of any parallel with Vietnam.

THE TWO SIDES may only agree on this: Vietnam remains a powerful symbol, three decades after the fighting stopped.And if the U.S. mission in Iraq were to collapse, historians may still quibble over the demographic and tactical distinctions between Vietnam and Iraq. But the larger point would be that both wars would fall into the category of American military failures after World War II.

All the same, professional historians, soldiers and diplomats are hesitant to compare the two conflicts. The purposes, strategy, terrain and the players in the Vietnam War were all far different from those in Iraq, many such experts say.

Furthermore, they say it is far too early to draw hard conclusions about the war in Iraq. U.S. troop deaths are still well under 1,000 in the 13 months of the war. The Vietnam War, which cost 58,000 lives, dragged on for more than a decade, clouding the reputations of three presidents and forcing one president, Lyndon B. Johnson, from office.

"The nice thing about military history is I can go on to the Peloponnesian War, the reconstruction in the Civil War or the Crimea, and all of them will have some parallel," said Anthony Cordesman, a military expert and former diplomat, who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

But Cordesman said, "I really worry about the analogy" between Vietnam and Iraq where "we're not really fighting a foreign enemy." The Vietnam War was fought mostly on the soil of South Vietnam, in an effort to prevent communist North Vietnam from defeating an American ally.

A succession of Cold War presidents "oozed" into Southeast Asia, writes historian Stanley Karnow. They feared the loss of South Vietnam would send other nations falling like dominoes into the Soviet Union's sphere.

There were other unique characteristics of Vietnam where the historians say the United States was plagued from the start by:

The incursions of a skilled regular army from North Vietnam that outmatched its South Vietnamese counterpart.

An insurgency, allied with North Vietnam, that was deeply entrenched in the South.

The involvement of China and the Soviet Union on the other side.

The weakness of the South Vietnamese government that the United States meant to save.

The American calculation that it could not risk a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam, for fear of triggering a war with China or the Soviet Union, both nuclear-armed superpowers.

LAST YEAR'S invasion of Iraq, by contrast, was a clear military success against a single enemy.

What has followed has been guerrilla warfare of a much different sort than in Vietnam. As grim as the recent events in Iraq have been, said Cordesman, there is as yet no "massive insurgency" confronting U.S. coalition forces.

Further, he said, "We're not dealing with massive external powers supporting the insurgents. We do not have a situation where we have lost a majority of the population as we did in Vietnam when we lost the Buddhists. We are not attempting to get around the reality of a need to create a legitimate government, which we did after the fall" of South Vietnam's Diem regime.

Cordesman and others also say the United States today has "a far more professional and skilled and realistic military" than the U.S. forces in Vietnam, which contained a large contingent of draftees.

In Iraq, the Bush administration also planned at an early stage to launch massive public-works programs to rebuild the country after the war, something never undertaken on a large scale in Vietnam.

"THERE ARE MANY, many differences," said Sen. Jack Reed, a former Army officer who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and who voted against the congressional resolution to let Mr. Bush attack Iraq.

Reed, who did not fight in Vietnam but who has taught political and military history at West Point, stressed two important advantages that today's forces in Iraq have over their counterparts a generation ago.

First, Reed said, the anti-American forces in Iraq lack the ready sanctuary and the easily replenished lines of supply that the Vietnam guerrillas enjoyed in North Vietnam.

Second, Reed said the cultural homogeneity of the people of North and South Vietnam has no parallel in Iraq.

Essentially a construct of European negotiators early in the 20th century, Iraq has three large and distinct rival populations: the semiautonomous Kurds in the north, the minority Sunni Muslims who ruled under Saddam, and the majority Shiite Muslims.

Thus far, despite some reports of Sunni-Shiite collaboration in this month's uprisings, there is no united insurgency, Reed said.

But while Reed plays down the Vietnam analogy, he said he has seen evidence of deep problems. Iraqis, he said, are suspicious of the American occupation; there has been a failure to rally the people around the task of building a new government, and the continued violence threatens tens of billions worth of U.S. reconstruction work.

John Alterman, an expert on the Middle East at the CSIS think tank, said his recent visit to the region turned up "a sense that people have that the failure of reconstruction in Iraq is a sign of malevolent U.S. intent."

WHEN CRITICS of the war look at these problems, they see shades of Vietnam: a misplaced American confidence in its economic and military might and a refusal to take into account the cultural and political realities of a foreign country.

Further, the war's critics find echoes of Vietnam in the Bush administration's changing emphasis in its rationale for war. Before the invasion, Mr. Bush and his team stressed the "gathering" threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism.

Since the post-invasion failure to turn up evidence of such weapons, Mr. Bush has stressed the promise that Iraq holds "to change the world and make America more secure" by becoming a beacon of democracy.

"WE'RE FACING a quagmire in Iraq, just as we faced a quagmire in Vietnam," Kennedy said in a television interview after his April 5 speech. "We didn't understand what we were getting ourselves into in Vietnam. We didn't understand what we were doing in Iraq. We had misrepresentations about what we were able to do militarily in Vietnam. I think we are finding that out in Iraq as well. . . .

The U.S. failure in Vietnam was indeed a humbling episode for a superpower still locked in a Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. But Vietnam remained a minor, relatively isolated power after the U.S. withdrawal. No more "dominoes" in the region fell into the orbits of Moscow or Beijing.

Iraq, on the other hand, has large oil reserves and occupies a central place in a strategically central region. Just as a prosperous, democratic Iraq could be an invaluable influence upon neighboring Islamic nations, an Iraq in chaos would attract anti-Western jihadists from across the region.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a Delaware Democrat who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War. A senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden supported the war in Iraq, but is sharply critical of how Mr. Bush has conducted it.

Still, Biden finds the analogy to Vietnam fundamentally "misleading," in part because in this war, he sees much greater potential for common ground between the United States and the Iraqi people.

"The vast majority of Iraqis share our vision for a participatory, representative democracy," Biden said in a recent speech.

But Biden said, bad as the loss of Vietnam was for American prestige and interest around the world, the price of failure in Iraq would be "much larger."

"We have an overwhelming self-interest that this not end up in civil war," Biden said.

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in failure, Biden warned, "our geopolitical interests will have been badly damaged."