ANOTHER VIETNAM?

Soon after the fall of Baghdad, a triumphant President Bush appeared in an air force flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” But after the fall of Hussein, everything seemed to go wrong. Rather than parades welcoming American liberators, looting and chaos followed the fall of the Iraqi regime. With too few American troops to establish order, mobs promptly sacked libraries, museums, government offices, and businesses, and seized caches of weapons. An insurgency quickly developed that targeted American soldiers and Iraqis cooperating with them. Sectarian violence soon swept throughout Iraq, with militias of Shiite and Sunni Muslims fighting each other. (Under Hussein, Sunnis, a minority of Iraq’s population, had dominated the government and army; now, the Shiite majority sought to exercise power and exact revenge.) Despite holding a number of elections in Iraq, the United States found it impossible to create an Iraqi government strong enough to impose order on the country. By 2006, American intelligence agencies concluded, Iraq had become what it had not been before—a haven for terrorists bent on attacking Americans.

Since World War ll, the United States has become more and more deeply involved in the affairs of the Middle East, whose countries are together the world’s largest exporter of oil.

Fewer than 200 American soldiers died in the initial phase of the Iraq War. But by the end of 2006, Iraq stood at the brink of civil war. American deaths had reached nearly 3,000, with 20,000 or more wounded. According to the estimates of U.S. and Iraqi scientists, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them civilians, had also died, and tens of thousands more had fled to neighboring countries seeking safety. Initially, the Bush administration had estimated that the war would cost $60 billion, to be paid for largely by Iraq’s own oil revenues. By early 2006, expenditures had reached $200 billion and were climbing fast, and the insurgency prevented Iraq from resuming significant oil production. Some economists estimated that the Iraq War would end up costing the United States nearly $2 trillion, an almost unimaginable sum.

With no end in sight to the conflict, comparisons with the American experience in Vietnam became commonplace. Iraq and Vietnam, of course, have very different histories, cultures, and geographies. But in both wars, American policy was made by officials who had little or no knowledge of the countries to which they were sending troops and distrusted State Department experts on these regions, who tended be skeptical about the possibility of achieving quick military and long-term political success. The war’s architects preferred to get their knowledge of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s exiled opponents, who exaggerated their own popularity and the degree of popular support for an American invasion. Administration officials gave little thought to postwar planning.

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