Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular war in which the Americans ever fought. There was so much suffering and many soldiers died for their country. There are many veterans of the war, and for many, their wounds might never heal.

As the war in Iraq drags on, it seems to have a strange resemblance to the Vietnam War. People are starting to believe that they are becoming similar to each other. According to an article about the Iraq and Vietnam wars, like Vietnam, the war in Iraq is another faraway conflict that has tested America’s resolve. The terrain is difficult, and the insurgents know it better than we do. The American troops are fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq. The enemy attacks whenever it wants so the U.S troops won’t be ready for them. The battleground of Iraq poses enormous challenges for American soldiers, seeking to separate soldiers from civilians without alienating most Iraqis. We face in Iraq, like we did in Vietnam, an enemy who refuses to play by our rules and is clearly willing to die for his beliefs.

According to the same article, war spending has drained billions of dollars from the federal budget, and drove the government into an even deeper debt just like Vietnam did with the cost of that war. The Vietnam War cost U.S taxpayers nearly $500 billion in today’s dollars. Iraq has run the nation about $200 billion.

Americans are torn apart by the conflicting feelings about the war. There are protests against the war and Bush. Everyone was torn apart with the Vietnam War also. I think the War in Iraq was a bad choice for President Bush because it is just killing our soldiers over there in Iraq. It is not really helping us at all.

According to an article by Ronald Bruce St. John, the U.S military has generally refused to account for civilian casualties in Iraq because they are frequently huge. In Vietnam, 600 dead or dying Iraqis too often appear as 600 “insurgents” in army press accounts. The refusal to acknowledge civilian casualties, while fully accounting for our own, has another downside. It suggests to Iraqis that American lives are more important than those of the people we supposedly came to liberate. Insurgents are variously labeled “dead-enders”, “fanatics”, “thugs”, “militants”, “terrorists or “outsiders” despite growing evidence that a large percentage of the Iraqi people are opposed to the U.S occupation. Recent intelligence reports suggest that support for the insurgents is widespread and growing. In some areas, Sunni and Shiite groups are joining forces, at least temporarily, in a common cause which is killing Americans. That was also the goal of the insurgents in Vietnam.

Vietnam and Iraq were both wars of choice. They are also similar in that deceit and misrepresentation was employed by the U.S government, first to engage U.S forces, and then to keep them there. Bush took us to war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and had ties to Al Qaeda. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and no ties to Al Qaeda have been discovered. I think that President Bush should have waited to invade Iraq until he was absolutely sure that they had weapons of mass destruction.

It is clear we had no idea what we were getting into when we marched into Vietnam, and the same appears true in Iraq. According to the same article by Ronald Bruce, President Johnson, in reference to Vietnam, pledged in April 1965 “we will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.” Four decades later, President Bush pledged “we’ve