Iraq is the new Vietnam - YaleOnLine

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-7-2003_pg3_5


Is Iraq becoming a new Vietnam?

Orville Schell

We know that Saddam Hussein is a student of Stalin, but it now looks as if he and Tariq Aziz had also been reading a little Mao on the side. The Bush administration did not understand that Saddam, his supporters, and anti-American Muslims would inevitably turn to guerrilla warfare to defend Arab dignity

While the preparation for the American invasion of Iraq was going on, there was a tendency to dismiss those few voices who warned against getting bogged down in a quagmire. The swift conclusion of the ‘shock and awe’ campaign, fortified by symbolic events like the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statues in Baghdad, seemed to leave sceptics of an early and complete military victory tarred as irredeemably false prophets.

However, two months after the official ‘end’ of the Iraq war, with the loss of nearly 180 Coalition troops and a large number of wounded, these once discounted prophets of gloom now suddenly seem far more sage in their predictions than they were made to appear when they first annunciated their cautionary warnings. Talk of guerrilla warfare, body counts, and escalations of troop force has now replaced gloating about the success of our initial invasion and the wonders of precision-guided munitions. By all accounts it now seems that Iraq may be witnessing the beginning of a people’s war that is hauntingly reminiscent of the genre perfected by Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh during the middle of the last century.

more......................


Orville Schell is the author of numerous books on China, covered the war in Indochina and is now Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. This article appeared in YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu), a publication of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and is reprinted by permission.

2003 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

[Submariner]

1. Vietnamization didn't work back in my day

and it won't work in Arab nations either. Maybe if AWOL-boy went to Nam, instead of deserting his stateside NG unit, he would have experienced a character building exercise that would not have resulted in the invasion of a small defenseless country like Vietnam, er...I mean Iraq, later in his life.

[FoxNewsIsTheDevil]

2. I'll wait before I thow "Vietnam" bombs around

We aren't losing the lives we lost in Vietnam, yet. And hopefully we won't.

edit: Freudian slip