American soldiers are dying daily, killed by fervent, faceless, loosely organized foes who wear no uniforms and melt into the landscape, or the cityscape, after they attack. American helicopters are being shot out of the sky by shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles. Back home, the American public begins to grow disenchanted with a military enterprise it initially supported. No wonder anti-war commentators are saying that the U.S. occupation of Iraq threatens to turn into a quagmire like Vietnam. But the commentators don’t have it quite right. They have the wrong quagmire.
The more appropriate historical analogy for what the U.S. faces in Iraq is a different war: the one the Soviet Union tried to fight in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
The similarities between the current U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Soviet-Afghan war are uncanny. Consider:
A superpower, in defiance of most world opinion, invades an Islamic Middle Eastern nation. The superpower is hoping to effect regime change and, citing an “imminent threat,” declares the invasion “an international duty.” Initially, the invasion goes well. Within weeks, all organized military opposition in the invaded nation appears to evaporate, and the invading superpower basks in its success, praised by its domestic media for its military prowess. The superpower imposes its own government on the invaded nation and settles in to oversee a comfortable, presumably temporary occupation.
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I write this on a day when 15 American troops were killed when their Chinook helicopter was shot down over a field in Iraq. It is a day when the world press is not on America’s side, when many Iraqis are losing faith in America’s ability to reconstruct their nation, and when the American people--and more and more American soldiers--are growing demoralized with a war whose justification seems flimsier by the week. I hope George W. Bush--or whoever does his reading for him--is studying the analyses of the Soviet -Afghan war. I wonder if he and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz possess a “national will” and a “moral commitment” that goes beyond the election of 2004. And I wonder if our soldiers will still be fighting and dying in Baghdad in 2013.
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