April 2, 2003

By Rupert Cornwell

WASHINGTON, D.C. – "It's a bit early for history to be written," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the other day, dismissing in that testy, imperious manner of his the accusations that the Pentagon had badly miscalculated the resistance American and British forces would encounter in Iraq, and the size of the invading force that would be needed to overcome that resistance. But if the history of this war is not yet being written, history's shades from other wars are already abroad.

They are not mentioned very often. After all, an uneasy America is seeking to convince itself that the 2003 campaign in Iraq is going according to the plan conceived by Rumsfeld. But on the fringes of polite conversation, in those quiet moments when ordinary people wonder about the relentless optimism of those in charge here, the question gnaws at the corner of the mind. Could this be, will this be, another Vietnam?

The answer, in some respects, is simple: Of course not. The Vietnam War, from a U.S. point of view, lasted 9 or 10 years. The campaign to remove Saddam Hussein has barely been in progress 9 or 10 days. Whether it lasts 9 or 10 weeks (perfectly possible) or 9 or 10 months (rather unlikely), it surely will not last 9 or 10 years.

Unlike Vietnam, and for all today's second-guessing, the purely military outcome is certain. Saddam Hussein will be driven from power.

But the fond belief in Washington – and the one on which this war was largely sold – that the advancing G.I.s would be greeted as liberators, as they were in occupied France in 1944, has already been shown to be an illusion.

Hearts and minds

Never, surely in a modern war, has not victory itself, but the manner of victory, been so important. Yet the pictures are not of garlands of flowers thrown by a grateful local citizenry upon the invaders' tanks. They are of shattered buildings and weeping civilians. They tell not of spontaneous uprisings in Basra and elsewhere against Saddam's detested henchmen, but of errant bombs or missiles killing scores of civilians in a Baghdad market. At that point, it scarcely matters who fired them.

And if the resistance continues, President George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, and the rest will have to decide whether to cast aside all efforts to pursue their "gentleman's war," of aiming only at regime targets, and aim at vital civilian infrastructure in order to hasten victory.

The United States has never been a patient country. Already, calls can be heard to "stop messing about" and to flatten the regime by flattening Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriya, and anywhere else the Americans are getting bogged down.

But that would be to exhume the dreadful mantra that sums up American good intentions gone wrong in Vietnam, that "to save this village, it must be destroyed."

Saddam's tactics, too, are driving the course of the war in this direction. U.S. military power is such that no foe on earth can engage it on its own terms, in conventional "symmetrical" warfare. The taxi bomb that killed four U.S. servicemen at Najaf on Saturday is unlikely to be the last such incident as the invaders draw closer to Baghdad.

Yes, these are vile means. They enable Bush to rally public opinion by denouncing enemy atrocities. But they are as old as fighting itself, especially when a country is being invaded. Similar tactics were used by the Vietcong and by the Russians in 1941 against the Germans. They were used by the mujahideen in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded their country in 1979. And invariably, whether from fear or vindictiveness, the other side starts to behave the same way.

Already U.S. and British troops are being forced to mount house-to-house searches, in the knowledge that the apparently welcoming and innocent civilian may be a suicide bomber in disguise. It would be extraordinary if, sooner or later, some panicky coalition commander, afraid he or she walking into an ambush, does not tell his or her unit to do "whatever it takes" to ensure their safety.

The real Vietnam

The Dick Cheneys, the Richard Perles, and the others who believed (on the basis of what information, it is not clear) that Saddam's Iraq would collapse like a card castle once serious military pressure was applied, and who insist that democracy will flourish in Baghdad once the "evildoer" is gone, might revisit the pages of Graham Greene's The Quiet American.

That book describes the Vietnam of the mid 1950s, a decade before the real war, when the Americans were arriving to help the French resist the advance of Communism and build "democracy." At one point, Fowler, the jaundiced, world-weary correspondent who is the hero of the book, remarks of the Vietnamese that "They want enough rice. They don't want to be shot at. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." One suspects the same is true of ordinary Iraqis now, whatever their feelings for their regime.

And that is why the real Vietnam might start when the formal war has finished. The battlefield will not be Iraq, but the whole Arab world and beyond, even the mainland United States.

In Vietnam, American journalists were not "embedded" as today in Iraq. But they had the run of the battlefield, hitching rides on U.S. army helicopters to visit the front line. The reality they saw on the ground and that they reported – so different from the optimistic fare on offer at the daily "Five O'clock Follies" military briefings in Saigon – was crucial in hardening American opinion against an unwinnable war.

Today everything happens faster, including the coverage of war. The "embeds" with the U.S. and British forces beam back their TV pictures in real time; a campaign under way for barely 10 days feels like it's been in progress for 10 weeks. But this time there is one other vital difference. There are embeds on the other side: al-Jazeera and other Arabic cable-TV stations operating out of Baghdad and portraying the same conflict in quite another fashion.

These images, focusing on human suffering, have made a mockery of what was never a very impressive effort by Washington to use public diplomacy to convince the Arab world of the justness of this war.

Once the war is over, the slog may get tougher still: continuing guerrilla operations inside Iraq against the U.S. liberators turned occupiers, and increased terrorist attacks against U.S. targets around the world, fueled by an anti-Americanism that truly is a recruiting service for Osama bin Laden and his ilk. In that sense this may be an unwinnable war – just as that other failed war of which no American wants to be reminded, for hearts and minds in Vietnam.