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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (100725)	6/12/2003 1:49:53 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

(1) The Iraqi people are nutcase Moslem fanatics, the Vietnamese people were peaceful Bhuddists The Vietnamese communists where pretty fanatic in many cases, inspired by both an intense nationalism and for some of them communist ideology. (2) The Iraqi people are armed to the teeth with modern weapons, the Vietnamese people had to use bamboo "punji" sticks. (3) Iraq in 2003, has twice as many people as South Vietnam in 1975, meaning that our troops are that much more outnumbered We were fighting the North not just a native insurrection in the south. Even many of the local guerillas had infiltrated from the North. And because of more difficult terrain and the fact that we never went after their base in the North we had to keep fighting an army (rather then just scattered uncoordinated guerilla units) for a long time. The locals in Iraq come pre-trained to hate us They don't seem to hate us more then the Vietnamese did. (6) The Vietnamese couldn't delude themselves into thinking that we were stealing their oil. No, they thought we where motivated by different sinister plots against them. (7) In Vietnam we had the assistance of the Catholic minority to do the fighting. They filled most of the body bags, but in Iraq, most of the troops are ours. Here you have something of a point but in Vietnam we faced organized resistance and an enemy capable of large coordinated attacks. We faced a national army that the political situation wouldn't enable us to defeat decisively. We also faced an enemy that had tons of outside help including help from a rival superpower. All in a country that was proud of its tradition of fighting off foreign powers that sought to impose their will, and had much more rugged and difficult terrain. In Iraq we face, looting and crime, a few small scattered bands of guerilla enemies (and to the extent that some are Bathist and some are Islamic fundamentalists they are also each other's enemy), and an occasional small terrorist attack. There is no large scale organization, no ability to mount something like the attack at Khe Shan, or the Tet offensive, or to stage an armed resistance as strong as that in the Ia Drang Valley. Tim