At the moment, Saddam Hussein has the Bush administration in a box. By agreeing to allow UN inspectors to return to Iraq, the foxy dictator has, at the very least, slowed the Bush hawks from their apparent relentless march to war. At the same time, Scott Ritter, former United Nations inspection chief in Iraq, continues to rattle the administration by opposing any United States military action, arguing that the President and his advisors have failed to make their case that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction. Bush, Ritter has said, is acting as though he is “the imperial executive of the world.” Meanwhile, multiple voices warn of the political and military costs of a new war against Iraq, particularly if it lacks support from America’s allies, the UN Security Council, and results in backlash fury in the Arab world.
Secretary of State James Baker of the first Bush administration earlier proclaimed that such a war “cannot be done on the cheap,” while Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, declared that “an all out attack on Iraq will entail a level of risk and sacrifice that the U.S. has not assumed since Vietnam.”
Whether these claims are true or not, it might be tempting to compare America’s longest war in Southeast Asia to possible hostilities against Iraq. Differences in fact would outweigh similarities, but assumptions about U.S. interests and power in the world and presumptive goals underlying United States war-making occupy common ground in both cases.
In Southeast Asia intervention into what was a revolutionary civil war was undertaken to preserve an artificially constructed regime largely created and maintained by the United States during America’s global war of containment against communism. The Bush administration’s stated goal in Iraq is “a change of regime,” the removal of one of the members of the “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea) targeted in the President’s declaration of war on terrorism a year ago.
The incremental, escalating U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia over a 20-year period was never sanctioned by the United Nations and no declaration of war was ever voted upon by the Congress. In August 1964, nearly a decade after U.S. intervention in Vietnam had begun, President Lyndon Johnson obtained near unanimous legislative approval of a resolution to wage unlimited war in defense of U.S. forces in the region. Thereafter, two presidential administrations escalated military actions by land, sea, and air. Except for obliging client governments in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines, America stood alone. Most of its European allies thought the United States was behaving irrationally. Much of the rest of the world condemned America’s conduct as imperial arrogance.
In the end, after more than 58,000 Americans and between two and three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians had died in the conflict, the United States withdrew in defeat. By then Congress had reversed its support of the war. Public backing had been steadily shrinking for some time.
In the wake of insistent demands, including from within his own party and from members of his father’s administration, President George W. Bush agreed to seek Congressional approval for military action against Iraq. He will almost certainly get it, though not unanimously and not without considerable debate. Bush also agreed to present the case for removing Saddam Hussein before the United Nations. Whether the administration will wait for a further UN weapons inspection in Iraq before acting remains to be seen. Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has publicly pledged support to Bush, but numerous European countries oppose a unilateral, pre-emptive strike by the United States against Iraq. Germany and France oppose it openly and loudly.
Recent public opinion polls suggest wary and reduced endorsement for a war against Iraq and only if voted by Congress and supported by U.S. allies. The reluctance is greater when the poll question includes the phrase, “if U.S. casualties will be significant.” Public backing for the war in Vietnam prior to the 1968 Tet offensive was greater, but that was after the United States became engaged, not before, reflecting a “support our troops at war” mentality. Since the Vietnam War, however, Americans have insisted that their wars must be short, as casualty-free as possible, and victorious, outcomes unachieved in Southeast Asia and by no means assured in a war with Iraq.
In any event, President Bush has yet to make his case for such a conflict. By repeatedly intoning the mantra “Saddam Must Go” all spring and summer long, without convincingly demonstrating why and why now, the President found himself exposed to criticism and on the defensive. He has since been trying to make up lost time without retreating from his core demand that Iraq’s dictator must be removed.