Iraq War: "Who lost Iraq to Iran?"

Gen. William Odom, who has been a critic of the Iraq War from the start, has a worthwhile comparison of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War at the Nieman Watchdog site:  Iraq through the prism of Vietnam 03/08/06.  This is a meaningful comparison of the problems experienced in the two wars.  He makes an excellent point that in the years after the "Americanizing" of the Vietnam War in 1965, domestic criticism tended to focus on the tactical "how's" of the war rather than on the larger strategy question of "why", to which the real answer ultimately was, "no good reason".

He writes:

This obsession with tactical issues made it easier to ignore the strategic error. As time passed, costs went up, casualties increased, and public support fell. We could not afford to “cut and run,” it was argued. “The Viet Cong would carry out an awful blood-letting.” Supporters of the war expected no honest answer when they asked “How can we get out?” Eventually Senator Aiken of Vermont gave them one: “In boats.”

And he draws a very apt parallel to today:

Since 2003, public discourse has focused on how the war is being fought. Reconstruction is inadequate. Not enough troops are available. We should not have dismantled the Iraqi military. Elections will save the day. The insurgency is in its “last throes.” And so on. Some of these criticisms are valid, but they fail to address the fundamental issue, the validity of U.S. strategic purpose.

As al Qaeda marched into a country where it had not dared to tread before, the White House refused to admit that its war allowed them in. As Iran’s influence with Iraqi Shiite clerics and militias quietly expands, the administration refuses to confess its own culpability. As Shiite politicians appear headed to dominate the U.S.-created “democracy” in Iraq, no one is asking “Who lost Iraq to Iran?”

Instead, after each election and referendum in Iraq, hope surges in the media. The New York Times’s reporting on the elections in February of last year was eerily reminiscent of its reporting from Saigon on the 1968 elections.  (my emphasis)

He also makes a great point about the ultimate end of Bush's grand Mesopotamian adventure:

Will [the final phase of the war] in Iraq end with helicopters flying out of the “green zone” in Baghdad? It all sounds so familiar.

The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having. On this point, those who deny the Vietnam-Iraq analogy are probably right. They are wrong, however, in believing that “staying the course” will have any result other than making the damage to U.S. power far greater than changing course and withdrawing sooner in as orderly a fashion as possible.

But even in its differences, Vietnam can be instructive about Iraq. Once the U.S. position in Vietnam collapsed, Washington was free to reverse the negative trends it faced in NATO and U.S.-Soviet military balance, in the world economy, in its international image, and in other areas. Only by getting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficient international support to design a new strategy for limiting the burgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.