How useful is the Vietnam analogy for understanding the Iraq War?

Résumé du document

The Vietnam War, in which the US participated between 1964 and 1973, and the fights in Iraq that have begun in 2003 are two of the greatest conflicts that the American nation had to face in the last half-century. At first sight, they are worlds apart: their nature, the international and domestic political context, their size and scope, and even the region in which they take place are totally different. However, it is truly relevant to analyze the similarities between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, since studying the former deeply can tremendously help to understand the fundamental issues raised by the latter. Hence, the purpose, the sequence of events and the conditions of withdrawal of both conflicts seem to have much in common. This has led many scholars to draw a strong parallel between the two wars, and to consequently forecast that the outcome and consequences of both conflicts will also be similar.

Extraits

[...] While Nixon set the policy of Vietnamization, leaving the Vietnamese to settle themselves their scores with each other, today's “strategy in Iraq is remarkably similar”. Indeed, Bush, who “hopes one day to turn over a majority of military and security operations to the New Iraqi Army while withdrawing U.S. ground forces”[10], is emulating Nixon by trying to enforce “Iraqization”. Many scholars, particularly the anti-war ones, inferred from all these similarities that the outcome and consequences of both wars were also the same. In Iraq as in Vietnam, Americans suddenly realized that U.S. [...]

[...] Campbell, A tale of two quagmires, Boulder: Paradigm p.84 Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq another Vietnam?, New York: PublicAffairs p.105 Ibid., p.104 Ibid., p.103 Ibid., p.85 Lloyd C. Gardner, Marilyn B. [...]

[...] Indeed, Campbell denounces another aspect of massive deception on behalf of the U.S. administration, in addition to the concealment of the real purpose of the wars, in the sense that it lessened the extent of U.S. military defeats. Thus, in November 1967 General Westmoreland told reporters that he was very encouraged” because the U.S. army was “making real progress”. Almost forty years later, in 2005, Condoleezza Rice adopted the same discourse about Iraq, claiming that the U.S. troops had made “significant progress”. [...]

[...] That's how John McCain, for example, asserted that the U.S. administration could have won the Vietnam War if it had been more patient and if it had increased the U.S. military presence. These errors wouldn't, according to him, be repeated in the Iraq war. For him, therefore, it is rather the differentiation with Vietnam than its analogy that explains the Iraq war and its future consequences. To conclude, it is commonly admitted that there are numerous similarities between the Vietnam and the Iraq wars. [...]

[...] Whilst the Vietnam War was triggered by a so-called Vietnamese attack on the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in 1964, the American intervention in Iraq was set off by the supposed presence of weapons of massive destruction and the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Yet, both later proved to be erroneous! As Brigham evokes it, “this grim assessment of the (Iraq) War and its false pretexts ( ) raise the kind of mistakes, misjudgments, and myths that led to U.S. [...]