Newsweek -- Why Iraq could be worse than Vietnam

As the death toll for Americans goes up day by day and folks back home are having to think about what it means to fight what’s now acknowledged to be a guerrilla war, you’re starting to hear comparisons with the long, soul-destroying counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Well, Iraq could be even worse.

In Nam, there was a government, however feeble and corrupt, to invite us in. There were structures, including a bureaucracy and an army, that could be improved, advised, derided or deplored—but which at least existed. In Iraq, thanks to the American blunders and indecisiveness of the last three months, there is no army. There are precious few police. And there’s barely a bureaucracy to speak of. The United States has to do just about everything, but it looks as if it didn’t prepare for anything. “People in the conspiracy-minded Arab world just can’t believe you could make such mistakes,” a Jordanian business consultant told me this afternoon. “They see a great plot to dismember an Arab state or whatever. But they’re just misreading your incompetence.”

The Iraqi people themselves were not implicated in the overthrow of the dictator, any more than they were involved (apart from the bounty-hunting informant) in killing his two sons. This was a favor the Iraqis did not ask, a revolution in which they did not participate and a debt of gratitude they do not feel.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz clings to the idea that paid assassins are at the heart of resistance to the benevolent American presence. And we should all hope that’s the case, because if it is, then the end of Saddam, which may come soon, could really mean an end to the war.

But Adnan Abu Odeh, a former advisor to Jordan’s King Hussein and one of the region’s real wise men, offers another scenario. He suggests the Iraqi people see themselves struggling against two enemies now: Saddam on the one hand, the American occupiers on the other. “Ironically, if Saddam is killed as well as his two sons,” says Abu Odeh, “that will accelerate the process of seeing the Americans as the real enemy.”