Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon

[kpete]

Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon
Stephen Biddle
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006


THE GRAND DELUSION

Contentious as the current debate over Iraq is, all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again -- but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration. Pro-war commentators argue that Washington should switch to a defensive approach to counterinsurgency, which they feel might have worked wonders a generation ago. According to the antiwar movement, the struggle is already over, because, as it did in Vietnam, Washington has lost hearts and minds in Iraq, and so the United States should withdraw.

But if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist "people's war" of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.

Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces.

NOT AGAIN

rest of article at:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85201/stephen-biddle/seeing-baghdad-thinking-saigon.html

[tenasscity]

1. Yes!

Saigon is EXACTLY the example that should be used. Good call!:patriot:

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. The author is trying to figure out a way to "win" a lost war.

In much simpler terms than Biddle uses: The neo-cons have opened a large can of worms and are now trying to figure out how to sort them out and make them obey.

His "solution" is the same as the one (of many) tried in Vietnam. To make the different worms obey by "threatening" them with alliance with one group of worms or another. Much as the Americans did with the different groups in Vietnam (excluding the NLF). He minimalizes the "insurgency" much as the Americans tried to minimalize the NLF. He assumes the various groups are idiots who will magically not see through the obvious strategy that he proposes of "divide and conquer".

Didn't work in Vietnam, won't work in Iraq.

The only way to solve this problem is to admit that our latest attempt at Imperialism has failed..again, and get the hell out of their country.

[kenny blankenship]

3. I don't see many people on the antiwar side mistaking Iraq for VN

in the sense of viewing or misrepresenting the opposition to US hegemony as a monolithic nationalist movement, a united people's resistance against western colonialism. I think the author is misleading himself and his audience, probably in order to introduce a proposal to subdue Iraq under the rubric of some clear-eyed quest for a reasonable middle ground, which as a side benefit will happily allow us to continue the slaughter and plunder there.

On our antiwar side, I see primarily a widely shared perception that Iraq is a hornet's nest of ancient ethnic and religious antagonisms that we cannot hope to mediate and balance (certainly not at this late stage of our blundering). We say that we seek democracy in Iraq, however the natural majority constituency there is more interested in theology; or at least they accept democracy mostly insofar as the name of democracy legitimizes their monopolization of power, and over the oil wealth of the country. The American antiwar side in general, and correctly I think, sees what is happening in Baghdad as a travesty of democracy, and this side likewise rejects the idea that we, the "enlightened" west who (illegally) invaded Iraq, are somehow authorized and called on to "correct" the mistaken "natives" who can't get democracy right "without our help." East is East, West is West. If they want to join our world, great. If not, then we in the west have no authority to force them to do it, and to try would be both foolish and arrogant. Indeed, we are in no shape to export democracy, for at this moment democracy is in crisis here in the west, and we have more than enough work to do trying to save it right here in America. Oil grabs masquerading as democratization of foreign cultures are not the way to bring our democracy back from its deathbed.

What does "threaten to manipulate the balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds" actually mean? A balance of power generally rests on underlying a balance of military forces, if indeed the term, as used, isn't refering directly to the military balance which forces opposing sides to compromise on their differences.
If it means arming the Sunnis in order to bring the Shiites into a frame of mind more amenable to sharing political power with them, then the august and honorable Mr. Stephen Biddle is out of his honorable mind. Not only do the Sunnis hate us (virulently, and with cause) but the minute we begin to strengthen the Sunnis or threaten to do so, the Shiite leaders who've been tolerant of our occupation thus far (so long as it has meant mostly liquidating the Sunnis) will throw us out of Iraq before we can say "Saddam was a modern day Hitler."