No, Iraq Is Not Vietnam

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Sure, just as in Vietnam, the U.S. is fighting an unwinnable war in Iraq. But in Vietnam, the U.S. faced a single challenger, who won because America did not. In Iraq, the U.S. can't win — but nor can anyone else. To imagine, as Bush and Friedman do, that this is a war between the U.S. and "jihadists" ignores the reality that there are multiple armed conflicts under way in Iraq, and many of those fighting the U.S. are also fighting each other.

The Sunni insurgency has successfully prevented the U.S. and its allies from stabilizing even Baghdad beyond the Green Zone, but it can never hope to restore the control that Saddam Hussein once had over the whole country. The Shi'ites are the dominant force in the elected government and have more men under arms (in their militias and in the government security forces) than do the Sunnis, but the Shi'ites are not really aligned with the U.S. (If anything, they're closer to Iran.) And as the U.S. has pushed back against the Shi'ites in the hope of dimming the appeal of the insurgency — by expanding Sunni power and cracking down on the Shi'ite militias terrorizing Sunni communities — U.S. forces find themselves fighting on two fronts. Mounting tension between Arabs and Kurds over the fate of the northern city of Kirkuk, the oil town coveted by the Kurds for the de facto state they're creating in the north, suggests that this could still get even more complicated.

That's why Washington is so desperately seeking a new strategy for Iraq. The present one clearly isn't working, and each of the alternatives — from "cut and run" through partition, finding a new strongman regime or bringing in the neighbors to sort things out — carries more peril than prospect. The Tet Offensive analogy offers a false choice between an ignominious retreat and a dogged determination to stay the course.

The reality of Iraq is quite different from Vietnam, more complex, and in its geopolitical implications, quite possibly much worse. The options reportedly being weighed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group eschew both "cut and run" and "stay the course," and instead seek formulae for damage control under headings such as "containment" and "stabilization." That terminology is instructive, because from a strategic perspective, Iraq is less like Vietnam and more like Chernobyl, a nuclear reactor in meltdown, whose fallout may be even more dangerous than the fires that burn at its core.