What do you think the results to the Iraq war are? Comparing it to the Vietnam war. (The two are similar)?

Question

The two wars Iraq War and Vietnam War have things that are very alike, what are you views on it? And does the war change your view of President Bush?

Answer 1

Because the Bush administration, almost from the start, has eschewed any comparison of Iraq with Vietnam, officials apparently never read the history of the nation’s heretofore worst war and have made the same 10 major mistakes:

1. Underestimating the enemy. As in Vietnam, the superpower’s potent military has been astounded by the tenacity and competence of a nationalist rebellion attempting to throw a foreign occupier from its soil. For example, the U.S. military, a hierarchical organization, views the Sunni insurgency as disorganized and without a central command structure. Yet the insurgents are using this decentralized structure very effectively and are not threatened by any U.S. decapitation strike to severely wound the rebellion by killing its leaders.

2. Deceiving the American public about how badly the war is going. President Bush continues to talk of victory, and his chief military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, argued that the United States was making “very, very good progress” just two days before the more credible U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that a civil war was possible in Iraq. President Lyndon Johnson painted an excessively rosy picture of U.S. involvement in Vietnam until the massive communist Tet offensive against the south in 1968 created a “credibility gap” in the public mind. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries successfully beat back the offensive, but the war was lost politically because the U.S. government lost the confidence of its own citizens. The Bush administration has fallen into the same trap by trying to “spin” away bad news from Iraq. Polls ominously indicate that Bush’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the American public has plummeted more than 20 points since September of 2003 to 40 percent.

3. The Bush administration, like the Johnson and Nixon administrations, blames the media’s negative coverage for plunging popular support of the war. Yet the nature of the press is that it would rather cover extraordinary negative events, such as fires and plane crashes, than more mundane positive developments. Vietnam demonstrated that normal media coverage of mistakes in war could undermine the war effort. The Bush administration should have expected such predictable media coverage.

4. Artificial government statistics cannot be used to measure progress in a counterinsurgency war. In Vietnam, the body counts of North Vietnamese/Viet Cong were always much greater than U.S./South Vietnamese deaths. Lately, the Bush administration has touted that fewer U.S. personnel are dying in Iraq. But U.S. forces have been pulled back from the fight to reduce U.S. casualties and to train Iraqi forces. In guerilla warfare, despite unfavorable statistics, as long as the insurgents keep an army in the field, they can win as the foreign invader tires of the occupation.

5. The initial excessive use of force in counterinsurgency warfare instead of a plan to win hearts and minds. The U.S. military, since the days of U.S. Grant, has used superior firepower to win wars of attrition against its enemies. In Vietnam, the U.S. military used such tactics initially, but later adopted a softer counterinsurgency strategy only after it was too late. The Bush administration initially blasted towns like Falluja into rubble and only now, in an attempt to reduce support for the guerillas among the already angry population, is converting to a strategy aimed at winning Iraqi hearts and minds.

6. Failed “search and destroy” tactics belatedly gave way to the “inkblot” approach of clearing and holding ground. In both Vietnam and Iraq, after search and destroy missions, enemy fighters merely returned to areas when “victorious” U.S. forces left. But not enough U.S. forces are in Iraq to make the “clear and hold” method work.

7. “Iraqization” of the war parallels the unsuccessful “Vietnamization” in the 1970s. The Nixon administration never fully explained how the less capable South Vietnamese military could defeat the insurgency when the powerful U.S. military had failed. The same problem exists in Iraq.

8. As in Vietnam, there has been no “date certain” for withdrawal of U.S. forces. President Bush recently implied that U.S. forces would be in Iraq when the next president takes office. Such an indefinite commitment of U.S. forces convinces more Iraqis that the United States is an occupier that needs to be resisted.

9. Retention of incompetent policymakers. Lyndon Johnson retained Robert McNamara, the inept architect of the Vietnam strategy, as Secretary of Defense until McNamara himself turned against his own war. Bush has kept the bungling Donald Rumsfeld on too long in the same position.

10. Most important of all, starting a war with another country for concocted reasons, which did not hold up under scrutiny. Lyndon Johnson used a questionable alleged attack by Vietnamese patrol boats on a U.S. destroyer to escalate U.S. involvement in a backwater country that was hardly strategic to the United States. Bush exaggerated the dangers from Iraqi weapons programs and implied an invented link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. In a republic, the lack of a compelling rationale for sending men to die in a distant war can be corrosive for the morale of the troops and public support back home.

Answer 2

Seeing as the Iraq war is not over yet we do not have any results yet. Vietnam was run by politicians. Perhaps if we had let the military run it we would have had a different result. The two wars are not similar the politicians decided we could not win and cut and ran. Unlike the president we have today who is not doing that. Because of Vietnam we got a bad reputation that we would give up when the going got tough.

Answer 3

There is NO similarity to the two wars.
Vietnam never attacked us.
Vietnam was about fighting against communism and was started by the French. A Democrat president got us into that war (Kennedy and Johnson) A Republican got us out (Nixon)

Iraq is a nest of vermin that must be eradicated. Why can't anyone understand that they want to annihilate us. Don't you people understand that the Islamic facists want to kill everyone one of us? It's a world war now. It's us or them.

For you liberals that think things were better in Afghanistan before we liberated the people, do you know that Al-Quaida STONES homosexuals? Women and children are beheaded.

In Iraq, under Sadaam, people were tortured, murdered, mutiliated in horrible ways.

This is what the fanatics want, total facist control for thier Muslim/Islamic "faith"

Answer 4

The results are that Saddam Hussein no longer makes Iraq a state sponsor of terrorism. Now it's just a haven for terrorists who want to make it into one kind of Islamic dictatorship or another, and thus transform it into a terrorist sponsor again. The only comparison to the Vietnam War is that both wars had enemy sympathizers who sided with the enemy, and blamed the US instead of the people who are actually RESPONSIBLE for the murders that take place(South Vietnam=NVA/Viet Cong. Iraq=Saddam Loyalists/Iranian-backed Mehdi Army/Al-Qaida created Ansar al-Islam)

Answer 5

Well, let's see. We had men in Vietnam for 16 years and didn't win.

We won the war in Iraq in less than 16 days. I don't think there is much similarity.

Answer 6

I think that it is more like the war with Japan. Today we have suicide bombers and they had Kamakazies. Take a look at this site I found it talks more about it.
lastdayswarning.clearwire.net
Nuclear war was the answer then. This site talks about how it could be the answer now by Sep. 12th, 2006.

Answer 7

well thanks to the media the vietnam and iraq war are not being handled right.since the iraq war started ive liked bush more and more.

Answer 8

not really... beyond they fact that people are dying... I mean the Viet Cong were a much more galvanized fighting force....