Not quite 38 years ago, enmeshed in a drawn-out war whose ultimate outcome was deeply in doubt, then US President Lyndon Johnson met on Guam with the fractious generals who were contending for leadership of South Vietnam and told them: "My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election."
George W. Bush's birthday is in early July, but his broad goals for the Iraqi elections on Sunday are parallel to those of the Johnson administration in 1967: to confer political legitimacy and credibility on a government that Iraqis themselves will be willing and able to fight to defend, and that American and world public opinion will agree to help nurture.
But the difficulties of achieving such objectives, then and now, have led a range of military experts, historians and politicians to consider the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to warn of potential pitfalls ahead. Nearly two years after the US invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the fore.
"We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning," Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of this war's most vocal opponents, warned in a speech Thursday. "We thought the skill and courage of our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would lead to victory in war and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam. In the name of a misguided cause, we continued in a war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve."
Kennedy said that there would be "costs to staying and costs to leaving" Iraq, but that at least 12,000 US troops should leave immediately to signal that the US has a clear exit strategy.
Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air Force's Air War College in Alabama, said he seldom provoked controversy when he warned his audiences of military commanders about the potential parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.
"The issue of creating a legitimate government in Iraq, and the domestic political sustainability of our policy in Iraq, are the two major areas of interface with our experience in Vietnam, where we failed," Record said.
But, he added, "the challenge of Vietnamization" -- the Nixon administration's policy, begun in 1969, of phasing out US forces and turning war responsibilities over to the South Vietnamese, "is akin to Iraqicization." In Vietnam, unlike in Iraq, the US "already had in place a rather large South Vietnamese army and security force" on which it could rely, instead of having to create one from scratch.
Stanley Karnow, a journalist who wrote the exhaustive Vietnam: A History, said, "You are beginning to see the public turning off on Iraq. The same was true in Vietnam."
Anthony Lake, who teaches a graduate course at Georgetown University on Vietnam, said, "In Iraq, at the beginning, there was simply an assumption that in terms of a political goal, there would be immaculate democracy and rose petals," Lake said. Now, he said, `the paradox is that as long as we're there, we're fueling the very insurgency, or the very conflict which we say has to end before we can depart."
While Bush has taken pains not to spell out any timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, military commanders have said that after the elections today, their principal mission will become the training of Iraqi forces. The prevailing view among even conservatives who supported the war from the start is that such a handover must begin.
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