former Shadow Foreign Secretary, writing on these pages last week, have invoked the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War Memorial. Can we not learn from history, they ask, and recognise we have made another error to rank with that error-strewn conflict in the jungles of South-East Asia?
The demand that we should learn from history makes sense. But, sadly, none of the comparisons so far drawn with Vietnam display a full sense of the nature of that conflict, or the one we face now.
There are key differences between the North Vietnamese and Vietcong assault on South Vietnam and the insurgency being mounted in Iraq. Differences which suggest we face a radically different outcome. In Vietnam the Communist forces were ideologically united, enjoyed broad popular support and were battling against a corrupt status quo with the promise of a radically different, and more hopeful, future.
In Iraq, by contrast, the insurgents are united only in their hatred of the West and dislike of democracy. The most implacable are remnants from Saddam Hussein’s most loyal cadres. They have been joined, in this fight, by other Sunnis who fear that the privileges their minority group once enjoyed will be lost in a future democratic Iraq. And their struggle has been augmented, for tactical reasons, by outside jihadis, from Syria, Jordan and across the Arab world, drawn by the heat of the crucible.
They lack any sort of political unity and offer no coherent programme of hope for Iraq’s people. While they might hanker for the restoration of Sunni minority rule, such a reactionary step could, by definition, never secure majority popular support.
In contrast to insurgents who are either nostalgic for Saddam’s reign or, in the case of the Islamists, dreaming fondly of the restoration of a medieval caliphate, a radically different and more hopeful future looks likely to be embraced by Iraq’s majority. In Iraq, unlike Vietnam, it is the Americans who are offering an escape from the corrupt status quo that prevails in the region. If democracy takes root, then Iraq has a chance to transcend the miseries of arbitrary and autocratic rule which, so sadly, imprison many other Arab peoples.
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