Opinion - Andrew Sullivan
The Sunday Times October 22, 2006
Iraq is no Vietnam – it's far worse than thatAndrew Sullivan
V, it turns out, is not for vendetta. It’s for Vietnam. In the long, bitter debate before the Iraq war it was always war opponents who brought the V-word up. Many of us who never lived through that nightmare shrugged it off. It was another baby-boomer neurosis, we thought. America had fought and won wars since then, notably the first Gulf war. America had liberated Afghan Muslims and protected Bosnian Muslims, without the “quagmire” so many warned about. It became a point of pride for war supporters to deny outright any Vietnam comparison as preposterous.
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And so the Iraqi civilian casualties mount to something like 3,500 a month. We can argue about numbers but it remains indisputable that the number of deaths in Iraq is now surpassing the murderous levels of the previous dictatorship. The Americans look on, fighting hard in some places, resigned to stalemate elsewhere.
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In other respects the analogy is flawed because the situation in Iraq is worse than Vietnam. When South Vietnam fell, the consequences were largely restricted to the region. They were awful — as the toll of communism culled hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Vietnam. But they ended at the ocean.
In Iraq the consequences of American withdrawal could be a full-scale civil war, widespread ethnic cleansing, and the involvement of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Egypt in a potentially catastrophic Sunni-Shi’ite conflagration. Add to that the possibility of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and you could have the region with a chokehold on the world’s energy supplies turning into a corpse-ridden, Balkan desert.
Worse, withdrawal could allow for a failed state — or even region, like Anbar province — to become a training camp for jihadists to wage war on the West from a safe haven in the Middle East. Unlike Vietnam, this could bring the war home to America’s own cities. Or to London. Or Paris or Madrid or Tel Aviv.
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