IRAQ: SHADOWS OF VIETNAM GEORGE W. BUSH NEVER LEARNED THE LIGHT'S OUT AT THE END OF TUNNEL.

Byline: Kevin O'Leary 

VIETNAM and Iraq are vastly different places. One is in Southeast Asia, the other at the crossroads of the Middle East. One is jungle and rice paddies, the other desert and densely packed cities. Like many Americans, I have resisted making a comparison between the two wars. Vietnam was a painful time and a futile, dreadful war, which we lost. Yet it is increasingly clear that there are eerie and depressing parallels between the two conflicts.

As in Vietnam, a Texan with little experience in foreign affairs has plunged the American superpower into a war where the enemy, vastly outgunned by U.S. military power, is mounting an increasingly deadly guerrilla war. Then it was Lyndon B. Johnson; now it is President George W. Bush.

As in Vietnam, the president says we are the force of liberty, justice and good while the enemy is evil and that freedom will prevail because all people love freedom.

As in Vietnam, the president has sent American troops into battle in an area of the Third World where the history and culture are so vastly different from Middle America that a clash of civilizations is precisely the situation. Foreign correspondent David Lamb, who reported from Vietnam and Africa before covering the Middle East, says the Arab nations are the most autonomous, most foreign and most strongly resistant to Western influence.

As in Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy that engages in sensational attacks aimed at the American public. Militarily, the Viet Cong lost the Tet Offensive. Psychologically, it was a body blow to America. Today, radicals in Iraq kidnap and behead westerners - and then provide videotapes of the dreadful deed. Call it barbarism with a purpose.

As in Vietnam, the Bush administration appears trapped by European experience, mistaking Baghdad for Budapest. If Eastern Europe can be liberated from tyranny, the thinking goes, so too can Iraq.

But soon-to-be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are not Middle East experts. Instead, they are all veterans of the Cold War against the Soviet Empire. Similarly, in the 1960s, then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other Europe experts equated Vietnamese communism with Hitler's aggression against Czechoslovakia. Because we underestimated the importance of Vietnamese nationalism, 58,000 Americans died in a losing cause. Battling American troops for more than 10 years, the Vietnamese won despite taking more than 20-1 casualties.

The lesson? In the Third World, the hatred of foreign occupation is a unifying passion that we ignore at our peril.

As in Vietnam, arrogance and righteousness blinded this president and his advisers to the difficult task they were assigning the U.S. military. In Vietnam, Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers told Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that the United States could prevail given our military superiority. The tagline ``the best and the brightest'' has rarely been applied to the Bush strategists, yet the neoconservatives who spent a decade planning for Saddam's downfall are guilty of similar hubris.

Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz developed a theory for why planting democracy in Iraq would spread the seeds of freedom across the Arab world. Yet, for all their brash talk, these neoconservatives began with paltry knowledge of the complex history and tortured politics of the Middle East.

In Vietnam, we were making a stand against the communists to prevent the spread of Marxist Leninism. If Vietnam fell, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines would be next, according to the domino theory. In the Middle East, by Bush's logic, we can influence the political culture of Syria, Iran and the rest of the dictatorial Arab world by building a stable democracy in Iraq. An ambitious goal - and one that is quite possibly secondary to our strategic desire to control Iraqi oil given the instability of the Saudi royals and the intransigence of Iran. But, taking Bush at his word, there is still the question of whether democracy can be installed by military force in a postcolonial world.

As in Vietnam, a president's rhetorical insistence that democracy and freedom will triumph does not make it so. Combining the insights of Thomas Hobbes and Abraham Maslow, we know that physical safety and basic needs are the first essentials. Democracy is a higher-level good. In certain areas of Iraq it will be difficult, if not impossible, to hold elections in January. When lawlessness is rampant and the economy is in ruins, it is hard for town halls and civility to carry the day.

And like Vietnam, the war in Iraq is fundamentally a war of choice. We did not have to invade Iraq; Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction. We did not have to intervene in Vietnam; we could have picked another, more hospitable, place to make a stand against the communists.

In Vietnam, the State Department was without its top Asia experts, who were purged during the McCarthy era for saying the communists were going to win China's civil war. As a result, American foreign policy was blind to the actual realities on the ground in Indochina. Similarly, in Iraq, Rumsfeld and Bush ignored warnings by the State Department, Army War College and the CIA that post-invasion Iraq would require a great many boots on the ground to establish civil order and a true international effort so that Americans would not be seen as imperialist occupiers.

The price of folly can be high.

In this case, Rumsfeld's insistence that a relatively small American military force could both topple Saddam and pacify Iraq proved disastrous. Post-``victory'' civil unrest destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, and American troops have never been able to secure the country. Insurgents control a number of cities and American troops are blown up daily as roadside bombs rip through vehicles lacking armor underbellies.

Having said all this, the possibility of modest success in Iraq - not an instant full-fledged democracy, but civil stability and economic recovery allowing people to emerge from the brutality and constant fear of living under tyranny - was probably much higher on the day Saddam's statue fell than were our chances for victory in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we could never invade North Vietnam for fear of antagonizing China and the Soviet Union. In Iraq, by contrast, the world's sole superpower could dictate the situation, especially if the American president were skilled at diplomacy and cloaked the operation in the legitimacy of the United Nations, NATO or some new umbrella organization. That is what Bush 41 adroitly accomplished in the first Gulf War. His son, unfortunately, has demonstrated neither similar interest nor skill.

Speaking to the United Nations three months ago, Bush insisted on describing Iraq as a success. Few Americans at home and few troops on the ground in Iraq would agree with him. During the Vietnam debacle, as the number of American dead and wounded steadily increased, Johnson famously said there was ``light at the end of the tunnel.''

Bush says the way to win the war in Iraq is to keep going down the same path we been following. Given the chaos in Iraq, and the anger our occupation has unleashed in the Arab world, it is not clear that the situation is going to improve.

Sadly, as in Vietnam, sometimes a failed policy is just that - a failed policy.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) A U.S. military helicopter lands in Baghdad's heavily secured Green Zone at sunset.

Dusan Vranic/Associated Press

(2 -- color) U.S. Marines of the 1st Division advance on Nov. 14 in Fallujah, Iraq, now a city reduced mainly to rubble.

Anja Niedringhaus/Associated Press