What is Iraq like, and what is it not like? The effort to locate suitable analogies to describe what is happening in Iraq is not merely, or necessarily, an attempt at understanding. Transparently, such homology as has been inferred has been adduced as an attempt to confer on Iraq the same emotive values as attended the original. So, for example, it is obvious enough why the anti-war Left in America would be eager to locate something of Vietnam in Iraq. Not merely, or even principally, because Vietnam was an insane and villainous attack on a country that killed millions, but because it involved the dreaded "quagmire". We may get bogged down, and our boys may be stuck there for decades. (Fine by General Myers ). The similarites are compelling for Robert Freeman at Common Dreams. According to William Greider in The Nation, the uprisings in Iraq resemble a "little Tet" . For the Libertarian Justin Raimondo , it is the language and lies of Vietnam that persist today.

What to make of such efforts? Since someone keeps yanking my pisser, demanding I do more stuff on Hitchens, let's have a look at his prefered juxtaposition. First of all, he does not accept a parallel with Vietnam, on the following grounds:


"[...] But I would like to say, will say in fact, that I don't think there is any fair comparison with the war in Vietnam. For one thing, I have been in Abu Ghraib prison myself. They were just finishing digging it out as one of the most revolting, evil excremental pits in the world last July when I saw it. Everyone knows what it was like a year ago. Everyone knows what it would be like if Muqtada al-Sadr was running it. This wasn't really the case with Vietnam. The difference really is, apart from about 100 other comparisons, the difference is in the nature of the enemy [...] what if I didn't know those pictures were from Iraq? If you ask me, well, does it change my opinion about the removal of Saddam Hussein or the need to defeat Jihadist, I would have to say no, and I would have to add that I would suspect anybody who was using pictures in that way, and was exploiting one's natural humanitarianism and revulsion at corruption in the chain of command."
(Christopher Hitchens, BBC Newsnight , 10th May, 2004).

Although this is perfectly eloquent and logical in its exposition, I maintain there is something suspect about this argument. First, because the nature of the enemy is not as different as he may like to pretend. He wonders, and fancies he knows, what would become of Abu Ghraib if al-Sadr got hold of it. The only way he will find out, however, is if full elections are allowed with a complete transfer of power under the dictation of Iraqis. But, at any rate, why does he imagine the post-war Vietnamese government refrained from the use of violence and oppression ? The tactics of the NLF were not quite as vile as those of the South Korean client-state, but they hardly conduced to a sanguine purview on the likely result of a Vietnamese success. The principle was not that one revered the anti-imperialist resistance, but that it was understood that the success of a rapacious imperial power would have incalculably wicked consequences for the region and the world. As it happened, the US loss in Vietnam severely restricted what it was able to get up to in the ensuing years...

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