This Is a War for Credibility

So, Bush has finally used the V-word. He has drawn the parallel he has in the past refused to draw between Iraq and Vietnam. His avoidance of it had two obvious causes, personal and political: a bystander in the first war and the instigator of the second, he did not want to remind Americans that he was a man who sent others to fight but had never fought himself. And he has not wanted, until now, to suggest that the US faces a disaster in Iraq as big as that represented by defeat in Vietnam.

Why has he invoked Vietnam in this way? Desperation is one answer. Bush paints the spectacle of national humiliation, tragic results for allies and friends, and the emboldening of America's enemies in order to strengthen his weak hold on the allegiance and attention of the American people. Alibi is another: if the war is to be lost, he wants to be on the record that he warned of the consequences if defeatists had their way. That way, Republicans could return to power at some future point claiming that the decline in American influence in the world, to which Iraq will almost certainly lead, came about because Democrats ran out on the war.

Belief is a third answer. The political school to which Bush and his key advisers on Iraq belong believe the Vietnam war was lost because America did not persevere, not because the war was unwinnable. The rift between them and those in their generation who came to see the Vietnam war as a terrible mistake or even as an act of imperialist folly has persisted through the years. This is the longstanding argument that shaped the minds of those who took the decision to invade Iraq.

But what of the parallel itself? America truly did occupy South Vietnam in a way it never has occupied Iraq, bringing in more than three times as many troops as are in the latter country now. It helped raise and train local forces of some quality, certainly higher than that of the Iraqi army and police now. It faced a strongly organised and centralised enemy equipped with advanced weapons and assisted by the two communist big powers, not the multiple and rivalrous insurgencies that characterise Iraq, with their relatively weak support from the outside.

In Cambodia, too, there was only one opponent. As to the outcome of defeat for local people, Khmer Rouge barbarities bear comparison with those of the jihadists, but Vietnamese postwar actions, although often cruel and unnecessary, do not.

There are great differences but one essential similarity: America went to war in Vietnam and Iraq to preserve its credibility and to restore a dominance that events had challenged.

In 1965, US air power had failed to halt the North Vietnamese drive to unite the country under communist authority. The US had stopped the communists in Korea and in Taiwan, and it felt it had to stop them in south-east Asia. The bombs had not worked, so the boots on the ground followed. In 2003, the US went to war in Iraq to show that after 9/11 it was still the world's greatest power, that it could prevail and that enemies and friends alike should take note.

As it turned out, defeat in south-east Asia did not seriously damage American prestige and did not lead to further communist advances; Bush is quite right to say, or to imply, that defeat in Iraq could have far worse consequences. Can some of those consequences still be avoided, or limited? That is the debate in which America ought to be engaged now, but Bush is not the man to lead it.