America's
Nightmare:
Is Iraq The New Vietnam?
By Gwynne Dyer
The Age
20 June, 2003
When US president John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, American military deaths
in Vietnam had just passed 50. At the present loss rate, US military
deaths in Iraq since the war "ended" two months ago will pass
that total before the end of June. Is this the start of an anti-American
guerilla war in Iraq?
Not yet, but it isn't looking
good. In the early days a lot of American soldiers' deaths were due
to vehicle accidents and the like, but recently most US casualties have
been caused by Iraqi resistance fighters, and they aren't just sniping
at isolated checkpoints. They are ambushing US tank patrols with rocket-propelled
grenades, making mortar attacks on command posts - even shooting down
a helicopter.
So is Iraq the new Vietnam?
Maybe, but one big difference is that so far US casualties are concentrated
in the so-called "Sunni triangle" extending north and west
from Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party had the deepest
roots. Sunni Muslims account for only about 20 per cent of Iraq's population.
American deaths in this region have been running at five a week, which
is bad but perhaps not unbearable.
Run that average forwards
for 16 months, and George Bush would have a further 350 American combat
deaths to account for at next year's US presidential election.
That would be awkward, but
he might get away with it if he could persuade Americans that it was
all part of the "war on terrorism". The bad news for Bush
is that the fighting may well worsen in the "Sunni triangle"
- and that the Shiite majority may start resisting the occupation too.
During the next three months,
Iraq is too hot even for the Iraqis, but in much of the American-occupied
zone there is still not reliable water or other public services. US
viceroy Paul Bremer disbanded the entire Iraqi army last month with
one month's severance pay, ensuring that many tens of thousands of experienced
officers and NCOs, most of them Sunni Muslims, will have nothing to
do this summer but nurse their resentment.
By last Saturday the two-week
gun amnesty ended and every Iraqi possessing a gun without a permit
can be arrested - but all rural Iraqis own guns, and by now, thanks
to the rampant insecurity, so do three-quarters of urban Iraqi households.
Add to the mix an occupation
force that is still starved of troops by Pentagon policy, and nervous
American soldiers who use massive firepower whenever they feel threatened,
and it may be a very long, hot summer.
By the end of it, Sunnis
and US troops could be in the sort of worsening confrontation that has
no exit - and it is a delusion to imagine that the Shiite majority are
America's allies. They are waiting to see if they can win political
power without fighting the US, but if they conclude that the Pentagon
is determined to impose its pet Iraqi exiles on the country then they
will fight too.
Iraq is not bound to become
America's second Vietnam, but it is drifting rapidly that way.
This was always possible,
given the vast gulf between Washington's declared motives for the invasion
and what most Iraqis think America's real motives are, but it has been
made more likely by the monumental incompetence of the postwar administration
of Iraq.
Two months after his catastrophic
Gulf War defeat in 1991, Saddam had done more to restore public order
and public services in Iraq than the US occupation regime has achieved
so far. The Shiites are still holding their fire, but it's hardly surprising
that the Baathists, members of a communist-style organisation suited
to guerilla warfare, are resurfacing in the Sunni parts of the country.
Which explains what's happening now in the Baghdad suburb of Mansoor,
where American missiles struck a restaurant where US intelligence thought
Saddam was eating on the next-to-last night of the war. From that night
until last week, long after the neighbourhood's families had retrieved
the bodies of their dead, the site went unvisited and unguarded by US
troops.
Is Saddam dead? Who cares?
But now the site is sealed
off and American investigators are digging frantically in the rubble,
hoping to find evidence that Saddam is really dead. As though that would
change anything.
(Gwynne Dyer is a London-based
journalist, author and filmmaker)
© Copyright 2003 The
Age