Burnt Orange Report

Yeah, Chris Hitchens is also the slobbering drunk who ratted out his best friend to Ken Starr, only to be proven an out-and-out liar.

But the point of saying that this is "Vietnam" is not that it's identical, but that this is in many ways a supposedly "easy war" that has slowly turned into a protracted nightmare.

In focusing on the details, Hitchens is missing the big picture.

Now, as for the details:

(1) Half of the essay essentially boils down to "communists good, baathists bad." Which I find to be a bit reductionist.

(2) Hitchens says:

"American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi 'insurgents' are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of 'people's war' and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi 'insurgents' are dismal riff-raff by comparison.

Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi 'insurgency' is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front. "

I have three comments which spring to mind from these grafs:

(a) The first is that in Vietnam, we were fighting a proxy war against the Soviets and, to a lesser extent, China.

In other words, we had an actual reason for being there apart from soaring rhetoric about liberty, etc. The Soviet Union was the single biggest threat to American national security at that time. Confronting what was perceived to be Soviet expansionism (even if it was in the guise of "national liberation") was therefore a logical defense of America's vital interests in southeast Asia.

As for Iraq... is there any national security justification for our continued presence there?

(b) If the Iraqi insurgents are such unpopular riff-raff, then why do we need to tie down much of the world's premier military in fighting them?

(c) While the insurgency may have started off as dead-enders, isn't our continued presence transforming it into a de facto struggle for national liberation from perceived American imperialism?

(3) You're final comment:

"We're going to win this one, and it'll be something we can all be proud of."

Let me respond by saying that if this gets won, it'll be the Iraqi people who will win it, and they'll be the ones to be proud of it.

Why it is our business and why "we" should give a damn is beyond me.

"One name we honor is Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood of Pflugerville, Texas, who was killed during the assault on Fallujah. His mom, Janet, sent me a letter and told me how much Byron loved being a Marine, and how proud he was to be on the front line against terror. She wrote, “When Byron was home the last time, I said that I wanted to protect him like I had since he was born. He just hugged me and said: ‘You've done your job, mom. Now it’s my turn to protect you.’” Ladies and gentlemen, with grateful hearts, we honor freedom’s defenders, and our military families, represented here this evening by Sergeant Norwood’s mom and dad, Janet and Bill Norwood."

Our President honors a fellow Texan.

THat's just bizarre. My name is Byron, and my mom's name is Janet. Screwy. It would nice to see the president honor those who have fallen by actually attending a funeral though.

Jim D already explained how Hitchens has confused the big picture (Iraq is in the Middle East! Vietnam has jungles!) with the real comparisons (US fighting protracted war against guerrillas/insurgents) so I wont go into a lengthy post of Hitchens fallacies. However, this the following sentences were just too good to pass up:

"Insurgencies only win when they convince a sizeable portion of the population to support them, when they have steady sources of arms and other resources and territorial bases to launch their campaign from."

I agree with you about support, arms and resources. Not sure about the territorial base part.

"The Baathist/Sunni Supremacist axis in Iraq has none of these,"

Wow. Amazing what they have been able to accomplish in the last year and a half without popular support (covert or overt), weapons and resources. Hate to see what they can do when they DO get any one of those 3.

"and with the successful conduct of elections this past weekend the people of Iraq have an outlet for their concerns that is far more peaceful and infinitely more effective than the insurgency."

Since this is obvious, especially to those actually in the insurgency, we should see an immediate decline in the number of attacks and support for the insurgency, correct? Over the next few weeks the "soft support" of insurgents should dwindle down to almost nothing, leaving just the very small minority of hard core
"Saddamists", who should then be easily captured/destroyed by the US and Iraqi forces.

"It is just a matter of time before they run out of fighters, out of weapons, out of money, out of patience and out of time.

Ah, the old "if we can just kill enough of them" attrition argument. Never mind the "hearts and minds" stuff. I seem to remember some conservative bloggers triumphantly talking about this after the taking of Fallujah. Apparantly there were about 15,000 estimated "terrorists" and we know that we captured/killed about 8000 (maybe 12000, I can't remember exactly) of them in that battle, so we just wiped out over 50% of them! Game over!

"We're going to win this one, and it'll be something we can all be proud of."

I really hope that the next several months go well. The constitution gets written, the major ethnic/religious groups sign off on it, and the next more significant elections take place without violence. However, the post invasion decisions by the CPA and Pentagon have been so appalling, so counter-productive, I am not too optimistic.