Monthly Archives: June 2005

How is the Iraq War like the Vietnam war? Let us count the ways. Oh, wait, the Cunning Realist has done it for us, riffing off a Mark Twain line that “History doesn't repeat itself; at best it sometimes rhymes”:

S/he finds fifteen similarities between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, and then issues a challenge:

If someone—-perhaps a supporter of this war—-can come up with fifteen ways in which the two conflicts differ materially, I look forward to reading your list in the comments section:

Well, let's see. I'm no supporter of the war, but I like a challenge.

1. It was wet in Vietnam, it's dry in Iraq.

2. There's much more oil in Iraq and more money to be made there.

3. In the case of Vietnam, the US government made up or exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in order to spook Congress and justify its actions. In the case of Iraq, the US government latched on to a real but irrelevant attack on the US to spook Congress and justify its actions.

4. In Vietnam the US fought against nationalists and a political ideology (Communism). In Iraq, the US fights against nationalism and a religious ideology (radical Islam). The Islamicists have more allies with less to lose who are thus more willing to help them.

5. I give up.

I was going to fulminate about the trial balloon launched regarding promoting Gen. Sanchez. But Billion already did the job. So go see Whiskey Bar: Rewarding Failure.

One tiny footnote: as I understand it, Gen. Sanchez technically may not have perjured himself in front of Congress as he said he hadn't authorized highly coercive interrogation methods in the past year. It may have been just over twelve months since he'd done it.

That's very misleading, and certainly prevarication, but I'm not sure if it's technically perjury.

Newsday has the AP story: Newsday.com: Memos show U.S. push for war, describing another six unvarnished pre-invasion memos now leaked from the UK.

Money quote is from Toby Dodge, identified as an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London:

Dodge said the memos also confirm that “soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq.”

Even though, as UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw then wrote, “there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL [Osama bin Laden] and al-Qaida.”

I frequently run into this rumor that the Pentagon is trying to keep down the US casualty count by not including deaths which happen outside Iraq (e.g. wounded who die on the evac plane). And, alas, I don't have much any faith in the integrity of the Rumsfeldian spinmeisters. So it's nice to have an authoritative debunking from a neutral source: 9,000 dead and the Reality-Based Community:

For two solid years now, Michael White and I have followed the deaths in Iraq literally on a daily basis. We haunt the CENTCOM, MNF-Iraq and DOD websites … as well as all of the major news feeds. In fact, the two of us have grown adept at finding death notices in the news media prior to the military issuing them. For about the past year and a half, Michael and I have been joined in the research by Evan D., an historian in the Washington D.C. area, and by Lynn L., another researcher whose husband is in the 4th ID. So that makes 4 of us searching the news media and the military sites, each and every day mind you, for deaths.

And after all this time, we all four of us concur. Yes, there are a few unreported deaths, which I'll explain in a minute. But not thousands. We'd have found them if there were.

[…] there's no truth to the rumor that if you die outside of Iraq, the DOD automatically ignores you. Yes, occasionally it does … especially if the death happens months after the soldier gets back from Iraq (Lynn's husband knows of 5 men that this applies to). And I am told that occasionally Special Forces deaths may be hush-hush. But as a rule, no. It's just a wild rumor.

Settles that.