McClatchy: America's last `long war' offers lessons for Iraq, experts say

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America's last `long war' offers lessons for Iraq, experts say

By Ron Hutcheson
McClatchy Newspapers

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Previous presidents, they note, made many of the same arguments about Vietnam that Bush and his aides are making about Iraq: The war there was part of a larger struggle against a monolithic enemy, and Vietnam's neighbors would fall to communism like dominoes if the U.S. were defeated.
That turned out not to be true: The U.S. lost the battle in Vietnam but won the war against communism anyway.

Indeed, critics argue that Bush is making some of the same mistakes in Iraq that his predecessors made in Vietnam, seeing a monolithic enemy where none exists, backing questionable allies, overlooking some of the causes of the conflict and believing that victory is essential to America's future.

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American troops remained in Vietnam long after hopes for victory had faded, in part because U.S. officials feared that withdrawal would hasten the spread of communism. In hindsight, many scholars think that the communist takeover of Vietnam backfired by prompting the Soviet Union to become overly ambitious.

The disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 put the brakes on communist expansion, exposed the limits of Soviet power and contributed to the Soviet Union's dissolution.
"The U.S. loss in Vietnam emboldened the Russians to become more aggressive, and then they overreached. The irony is, our defeat in Vietnam contributed to our victory in the Cold War," Carafano said.

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"If Iraq was really as important as President Bush says it is, and we believed it, then we should be able to send 100,000 or 200,000 additional troops. But we don't believe it," said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University. "If indeed we are serious about the long struggle, then it makes sense to cut our losses and staunch the bleeding."

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16502413.htm

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