I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.
In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we’ll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy.
Today’s cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we’re winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they’re doing it now.
My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won.
What would “winning’’ in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at US taxpayers’ expense? Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I’m afraid there’s no good way to get out. Americans didn’t know what “winning’’ meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn’t understand the enemy, its objective or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain it. We had a fuzzy notion of communist “world domination,’’ and the “domino theory’’ and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, South and North, was independence. They didn’t want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn’t want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.
Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth — that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we’re making it into one today — has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.
The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon’s daily “5 o’clock follies” — as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps — has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson’s vision of “light at the end of the tunnel’’ has evolved into Dick Cheney’s embarrassing “last throes.’’ Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the US withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war’s end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed “shock and awe.’’ Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?
This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn’t have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.
What we failed to understand in Vietnam — that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes — we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.
That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. I was bound for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned.
We weren’t told our departure time.
At 3 a.m. a chipper sergeant with a bullhorn voice flicked on the tent lights and told us to get up and put on body armor and helmets. Three Rhino Runner buses, painted desert-tan and heavily steel-plated, were lined up and 90 of us, mostly GIs and civilian contractors, boarded. Three armed Humvees preceded us; three followed. Overhead clattered three Blackhawk helicopters.
Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it’s the roads — where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don’t control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don’t control much of anything.
The next day, a US Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy’s “final desperation.’’ (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. So, do we cut our losses — human and financial — and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbors, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: A kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it’s beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see “Vietnamization’’) and leave the mess to his successor.
