Mirror, mirror

Arguments on the current war frequently revolve around the question of whether Iraq is or is not another Vietnam. Debaters could save their breath. The countries have almost nothing in common.

The Vietnam where I went to make a documentary film in 1972 is hardly the Iraq I reported from last year. Vietnam was and is a lush country with ethnicity, culture, religion, history, politics and a relationship with its neighbors thoroughly different from that of Iraq. Whenever I left a city in Iraq, I saw mostly desert. Iraq’s Muslims – whether publicly militant or privately pious – are nothing like the more contemplative Vietnamese Buddhists. As combat in Vietnam grew bloodier, there was a famous instance of a monk immolating himself to protest the war, but it started no trend and was in any case a far cry from suicide bombing.

Though there were and are numerous Christians in Vietnam – about 10 percent Catholic today and a sprinkling of Protestants – there is no religious strife between them and the 70 percent of the country that is Buddhist. The nominally Communist government grows more market-oriented each month, in line with Vietnam’s history as a trading nation. Diverse sects thrive among the Buddhists, but the fractious internal divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq are almost nonexistent in Vietnam. The 26 million Iraqis – Vietnam’s population is three times as large – constitute a country only a little more than 80 years old, while Vietnamese point proudly to a 5,000-year history. Vietnam was divided into three parts during the French colonial period, and into two parts during the American war, but Vietnamese think of themselves as being completely distinct from their neighbors.

Yet both Vietnam and Iraq confounded American expectations. Far from seeing their country as a Chinese suburb or part of a metastasizing Communist monolith, the Vietnamese dislike their northern neighbors and actually fought a short war against China a few years after the Americans finally withdrew. Iraq, instead of being on the brink of democracy, is filled with rivalries and sectarian hatreds so deep, as well as religion so firmly implanted, that it is difficult to picture a near future in which the country – if indeed it remains one country – is not governed by an authoritarian regime. I met with no insurgents or terrorists in Iraq (or none who would declare themselves U.S. enemies), but everyone I did meet envisioned a new government with little or no separation of mosque and state. American rhetoric to the contrary, Iraq is not about to become Oregon. The Iraqis I spoke to, all of whom proclaimed themselves patriots, nonetheless had a sense of pan-Arabism that reaches across national borders and has no equivalent among the Vietnamese.

When Americans went to war in Vietnam the divided country had two leaders, Ho Chi Minh in the north and Ngo Dinh Diem in the south, neither of whom matched in any way the murderous tyrant we deposed in Iraq. An Iraqi who became my close friend told me Saddam Hussein was like cancer and the American invasion a necessary chemotherapy. Did that mean he saw us, now that Saddam was gone, as liberators? “Absolutely not,” he said. “You are occupiers who have done everything wrong since chasing Saddam out of his palace. When the cancer is cured, chemotherapy only makes us sicker. The sooner you are gone the better.” He bitterly criticized neighborhood searches because of the rumored presence of a rebellious “dead-ender” and the midnight bombing of homes containing only grandparents and their grandchildren after someone had fired a grenade down the block.

The American policy I observed in Iraq in 2003 appeared aimed less toward peace than pacification, and the Iraqis are demonstrably less pacified this year than last.

A fervently anti-Communist philosophy professor in Danang, whose husband headed the local branch of Texaco, told me in 1972 the United States’ biggest mistake had been to withdraw support from South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been assassinated when Americans looked favorably on the coup to overthrow him and his family. Diem, she claimed, was a brilliant statesman as well as the second greatest patriot in all the long history of Vietnam. I bit: Who then was the first greatest patriot? “Ho Chi Minh of course,” said this staunch anti-Communist without hesitation. This is nothing like Iraq, as I saw, where my friend said we applied needed chemotherapy before overstaying our leave. Yet the results, in terms of winning friends and making enemies, bear an eerie resemblance.

Reflections of our current position in Iraq can be found both in Vietnam and in Iraq itself. After World War I, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) filed a dispatch to the Sunday Times of London describing British policy in what is today Iraq. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap,” Lawrence wrote, “from which it will be difficult to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqu?s are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Let us pause for the naming of places. When we hear Najaf, Samarra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Basra, along with the daily dispatch from Baghdad, are we not reminded of Danang, Hue, Pleiku, Cam Ranh Bay, Bien Hoa, Hanoi, Haiphong and wartime Saigon? The names return as insistent echoes in our national inner ear, old melodies, as if they were our auditory madeleines. Iraqis have made their own judgment. A thoroughfare in Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge slum, has been renamed Vietnam Street.

Peter Davis, who lives in Castine, reported from Iraq for The Nation, and his documentary film on the Vietnam War, “Hearts and Minds,” for which he received an Academy Award in 1975, is being re-released this month.