Could Iraq End Up Like Vietnam? We Should Be So Lucky

-- Our culture fixates on the sixties and early seventies. It's our fetish, our tic, like a thrilling and doomed love affair we can't quite get over. (Thus we have another much-anticipated Truman Capote biopic coming out this fall.) And so when it comes to thinking about Iraq, the Vietnam template inevitably hovers: Media memories of Saigon flicker like pentimento ghost images behind the dispatches and videos from Baghdad. IEDs are the new claymore mines, and the battle for Fallujah was the battle for Hue redux. A Google search for Iraq and quagmire results in several million returns—more than twice as many as Vietnam and quagmire.

Yet during the first couple of years of the war, respectable opinion considered any suggestions of real equivalency outré—glib and sloppy and, even more, tendentious: Because Vietnam is the shorthand for slow, mortifying national debacle, even mentioning parallels seemed defeatist. Tom Friedman brought up Vietnam analogies five times in his Times columns during the first two years of the Iraq war, always to dismiss the very idea—"this notion being peddled by Europeans, the Arab press and the antiwar left."

But he hasn't mentioned it at all for the past sixteen months. And since then, Chuck Hagel—not an Arab journalist or antiwar leftist but a Republican senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam veteran—pretty much single-handedly opened the Establishment closet and dragged the V-word out. "We are locked into a bogged-down problem not un-similar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," he said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities are going to come together." --