In preparation for the foreign policy debate I started to collect my thoughts on why Iraq is so different from Vietnam, but I never got to finish it. And while I was doing it others started to look around for historic parallels of US intervention and seeding democracy, David Brooks for instance discussed El Salvador last week. Still, the comparison with Vietnam is interesting and at the same time it leads to some remarkable conclusions about the road ahead. Let me summarize why Iraq is not Vietnam, in random order:

1. In Vietnam the US fought an insurgent group (Vietcong) supported by a regular army that represented a sovereign state, North Vietnam. This is not the case in Iraq, for now we are dealing with loosely organized terrorists that are backed by, well, loosely organized insurgents from elsewhere. We could point to Iran and Syria but they have nowhere near the pull that the NVA had in South Vietnam. The NVA/Vietcong analogy actually works better for Syria/Hizbollah in Lebanon.

2. In Vietnam the opponent was under the leadership of a leader who had managed to claim the mantle as the sole representative of Vietnamese nationalism. There’s absolutely no equivalent today of a Ho Chi Minh in Iraq, on the contrary there’s a number of ethnic and religious leaders none of whom can lay claim to represent the nation as a whole.

3. Indeed, Iraq is an artificial construct consisting of Kurds, Sunni and Shia as opposed to the fairly homogenous Vietnam.

4. In Vietnam the opponent was supported by a major superpower ensuring an unlimited supply of arms and other support. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, Iraqi insurgents can not claim any large scale institutional support, it has to rely on small and illicit arms traders who, true, may be supported by regional powers but nothing compared to the size and magnitude of the former USSR.

5. The battlefield is different; there are no jungles or densely populated rural areas in Iraq that can serve as a launching pad for well-organized attacks. The battle in Iraq is confined - for now- to urban areas which concentrates the conflict in smaller and easily identifiable areas.

6. In Vietnam the US relied on an army of draftees as opposed to a professional and voluntary outfit that is now fighting the battle in Iraq. We may indeed go back to conscription is some from, but for now that’s not the case.

7. And then you can compare casualties, but given the above aspects they only validate what was clear beforehand: Vietnam and Iraq are two entirely different conflicts.

These are the obvious ones; they are pretty much beyond challenge, although I am open to additions. There are other aspects that make the two conflicts incomparable, but they are assumptions about the nature of the conflict we are finding ourselves in today. They are based on what we have learned since the early beginnings of the Iraqi conflict (1990), the eruption of Islamist terror (2001) and operation Iraqi Freedom (2003). Let me now turn to these assumptions about the current war.

During the relatively peaceful interbellum from 1945 to 2001, the main conflict was between capitalism and communism, and waged, managed and settled at the diplomatic table. Whenever the two superpowers picked up arms to fight, they delegated that to their proxies and Vietnam was nothing more than a regional exponent of that larger struggle, just like the Greek civil war, Cuba and the war in Nicaragua to name a few. What made Vietnam exceptional was the fact American troops got directly involved in a proxy war, an enormous number of US troops were killed and the war eventually was lost: to this date the red flag flies over both North and South Vietnam.

If we treat Iraq as another regional event where the US by default had to pick up part of the effort than it is not a stretch to compare Iraq to Vietnam. The opponents of the war see it that way and therefore argue that as soon as feasible US troops should move out to avoid a Vietnam style quagmire. Those that support a pro-longed stay until well beyond democracy has taken root do not see the war in Iraq as a substitute war where the US and its coalition got in by mistake. They argue it is the very frontline of the clash between liberal free-market democracies and retrograde Islamism. This clash of ideas is in substance similar to the capitalist-communist struggle, in its format it’s very different which is why picking an easily identifiable frontline is preferable once it offered itself up in the form of Iraq. Regional skirmishes will continue unabated (Philippines, Indonesia, Chechnya and the occasional bombing in a western urban center) but the epicenter has been found. That’s why the deployment in Iraq will continue until the roots of the conflict have been neutralized which can only be deemed to have been successful when democracy and liberalism are firmly established throughout the Muslim Middle East.

That’s hardly something to put at the center of your platform when you seek re-election as president of the United States. The prospect of a war that may span generations is not going to excite the average American, nor is it easy to translate the terrorist Osama bin Laden into this notion, at least not during an election. Yet, all of Bush’ actions to date indicate to me that he bought into the frontline argument a long time ago, but for now he can’t or won’t say it. Kerry hasn’t accepted the new reality and lives as if we are still in an extension of that great post-1945 interbellum. To him it’s another Vietnam which is why it is so comfortable for the left to compare that war to Iraq. Based on the facts and the nature of the conflict there can however be no comparison at all.