About fourteen months before he was killed in Iraq, Michael Kelly wrote a column for the Washington Post satirizing the critics of the anti-terrorist war in Afghanistan.
In it he imagined a radio program jointly produced by National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation and called “All Is Lost.”
In this program, as Kelly describes it, the Fabled Newsman character is asked for the inside-the-Beltway view, and he replies, “Been there. Best and brightest. Tet. Vietnamization. No light at the end of the tunnel.” And when he is asked to go on, the Fabled Newsman adds, “Yes. Absolutely: Quagmire. Quagmire. Quagmire. Quagmire. Waist deep in the Big Muddy. Quagmire.”
Now it is the Iraq War’s time to be compared to Vietnam and the word quagmire is coming up again. It might not be the most appropriate word, given Iraq’s arid climate, but it is very much in use.
And, certainly, the violence and terrorism in Iraq is right out of the Viet Cong song book: kill the doctors, the professors, the teachers, anyone educated enough to see through the hate-based propaganda; kill the police; kill anyone cooperating with the government as it tries to stabilize the country and move it forward. If you can’t find any of these targets, kill anyone, just to remind people that you can. Destroy the infrastructure and apparatus of industry; destroy any enterprise that threatens to bring employment and prosperity to the country.
But if we attempt to draw a parallel between the fighting in Iraq and in Vietnam, we run into a major obstacle. There is an enormous difference between the two situations caused by a single factor: economics.
Historians, politicians, and military analysts are not yet finished sorting out the Vietnam War, but whatever the merits of our intervention there, economics played no role in it beyond the “guns vs. butter” issue of how we planned to pay for its costs. Vietnam was not a rich country and had no practical means of laying its hands on any significant amounts of cash. Much of its own pursuit of the war was, in fact, financed by China and the Soviet Union.
The defeat of the U.S.-backed government of Vietnam, then, left Vietnam’s new rulers with not much, in terms of economics, to feel victorious about. And while they might have felt triumphant about achieving a victory for communism, that turned out to be not so much of a lasting thing. When the Soviet Union collapsed and China chilled out, Vietnam, like Cuba, was left wearing an ideology as outdated as a raccoon coat, smelling more than vaguely like mothballs and trying to understand a world that had moved on without them.
What the U.S. did not have to worry about, even in defeat, was that Vietnam would export its terrorism to our shores. There was no credible scenario by which Vietnam would attempt to bring capitalism and Western Civilization to its knees. It simply didn’t have the resources for that.
Iraq is a very different situation. Iraq has access to billions of dollars worth of oil, leaving it able to dream very different dreams. One of those dreams would bring a level of peace and prosperity to Iraq’s people, using shared economic aims to tie its disparate religious and cultural groups together. Another dream, a nightmare, has the country in protracted conflict and chaos, eventually defaulting control to radical Islamists who would then have the means to finance their terrorism on a global, confrontational scale.
The matter of weapons of mass destruction that precipitated the Iraq War has now entered the one-way street of politics, but this issue aside there is no question that Saddam Hussein’s access to oil money transformed him from annoying nuisance into bona fide threat. Money is a powerful tool to get one’s way. Even after the United Nations imposed an embargo on Iraqi oil, for example, Saddam Hussein apparently used oil money from the “Oil for Food” program to corrupt U.N. and other officials so that funds could be diverted to his own purposes.
Critics of the Iraq War are quite correct when they make some comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. War is a brutal, ugly business, requiring an enormous sacrifice of human life in an enterprise that, especially up close, sometimes seems futile and pointless. But those comparisons can be made with any war. In those ways all wars are the same.
But there is a fundamental difference between Vietnam and Iraq. As painful as it might be to think of it in such a way, the harsh truth is that we could afford to lose in Vietnam. The economics this time are different, and have raised the stakes. We cannot afford to lose in Iraq.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101,” which appears monthly in The Snohomish County Business Journal.
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