L-R: Howard Zinn, Christopher Hitchens, Jessica Stern

Howard Zinn: Vietnam parallels are striking

There are obvious differences between this situation and Vietnam, but the similarities are striking. The United States is sending its troops halfway around the world, invading another country, claiming that it is doing it for liberty and democracy, and subjecting the people of that country to a ferocious military attack. We haven’t yet reached the level of mayhem that we reached in Vietnam, where several million people died, but we have only been at war with Iraq for a year.

As we became more involved in Vietnam, and as it became clear that we were not simply winning quickly and getting out, Lyndon Johnson had to escalate the war very rapidly — 100,000 troops the first year, 200,000 the next year, 200,000 the next year. As it became obvious that the increase in troops was not resulting in victory in Vietnam, people said, "Well, we can’t cut and run" and "We must show our resolve" — which is exactly what they are saying now. There is something absurd about the most powerful military nation in the world thinking it will somehow increase its respect in the world by killing more people in another country.

Another similarity has to do with the press. I think the press has been shamefully negligent in not asking fundamental questions. We’re in a very critical situation in Iraq, and the press has not made fundamental criticisms of this war. The criticisms are generally superficial. They will ask, "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?" They will not ask, "Well, what if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, would we then be justified in going in and invading another country because they, among many, many other countries in the world, have weapons of mass destruction?" Or you’ll find the press saying, "Well, it was wrong because we had to do it alone." You mean if we had allies in a war that was fundamentally immoral and illegal then that would legitimize it? So I’m finding a similarity in the lack of basic analysis and lack of fundamental questioning that is going on in the media.

Ahmed Chalabi is also illustrative of the larger problem. We take a guy who is a fugitive from justice in Jordan for embezzling $200 million, and then we bring him from London, where he is in exile, and say, "Now we have a leader." Talk about similarities — we plucked Ngo Dinh Diem out of New Jersey and flew him to Saigon and said, "Now we have an ally."

But the biggest mistake is that we are reacting to Iraqi hostility with more and more military power. The more we react with military power, the more we will create hostility. It’s the Ariel Sharon approach. You have suicide bombers, so you raze a bunch of houses in the West Bank — which only leads to more suicide bombers. The mistake we’ve made since we’re been there is to act like a military power instead of a humanitarian power. We could be there, we could be dispensing food and medicine, we could be doing useful things, but we have 100,000 troops, we have planes, we have tanks, and we are killing Iraqis by the day. That is not going to help the situation.

Howard Zinn is author of A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (Perennial, 2003) and co-author of Terrorism and War (Seven Story Press, 2002).

Christopher Hitchens: This is nothing like Vietnam

The only people that you can decide to ignore in this debate are people who start by talking about Vietnam. There’s absolutely no meeting point between the two at all, of any kind. The Vietnamese, even at their most Stalinist, had never been condemned by the United Nations or the international community for invading neighboring countries, for using weapons of genocide at home and abroad, or for sponsoring and encouraging terror. I think it’s an insult to compare the Vietnamese revolutionaries to these jihadist and Baathist riffraff. Most importantly, Vietnamese nationalism, even in its communist form, could never be described by anyone as a threat to international order or to civilization. The forces of jihad have to be described that way. It is as important to prevent them taking over Iraq, which they would have had a strong chance of doing if Saddam Hussein had been allowed to run out his term, as it would be to prevent them taking over any other country, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Uzbekistan.

This is a bit more like Bosnia or Kosovo. That was an attempt to rescue Muslims from massacre in the heart of a largely Christian setting. This is an attempt to create something like a democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, so the context is different. But it belongs with the post–Cold War nation-building operations that we’re going to have to get much better at.

When I was in Iraq last summer, a lot of my Iraqi friends were saying to me to look out for this guy Moqtada Sadr, he’s a small guy at the moment but he’s very unpleasant and he could become a real nuisance. They were wishing something could be done about him. If what I read is true, that they had a warrant for his arrest on the charge of murder of a senior Shiite imam, I certainly think it was a mistake to close his newspaper rather than arrest him. I do remember feeling a qualm, a pang, when I read about the closing of the paper. Not that it’s a newspaper exactly, it doesn’t deserve the name of newspaper, but still, his propaganda sheet. I’d like to have it out where I could see it if I were in charge of Iraq. I’d like to know what they were saying. So that doesn’t seem to have been handled very brilliantly.

Also, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi argued that there should have been a transfer of sovereignty much sooner, and I think that he has been proved right. The basic training you have if you’re Iraqi is keeping your head down and watching out to see which side will be the winning side. It’s evident from looking at the newspapers that that’s what people are doing to a large extent. So this is potentially a very great tragedy. It’s not as bad as it would have been without an intervention, though. My God, then it would have been like Somalia, squared.

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, and the author or editor of more than 35 books.

Jessica Stern: The war in Iraq has made us less safe

We’re stuck in a bind, which is similar to what Israel is dealing with in responding to the Intifadah. Most things we would want to do to increase security of our forces in the short term, could potentially make things a lot worse in the long term. Like bombing that mosque in Fallujah, for example. We don’t yet know the details, but even if we accept the argument that 100 percent of the people in that mosque were militants, in the short term it was probably the right thing to do, but in the long term that’s an incredible provocation. And if there were any innocent civilians in there it, of course, makes it worse.

We set ourselves up for this by going into Iraq without being prepared to create a functioning state. My colleague Steve Walt put this really well: we made a grave error, and when you make a major mistake, you are left with bad choices. And you have to take the least bad of those bad choices. The bad choices we have are: stick it out, put our troops at risk, and also, I believe, put at risk the broader war on terrorism to some extent. It’s sort of like whatever we do, it will be bad because we don’t have very good choices. I think if we leave, that’s probably the worst thing we could do because we really have created precisely what the Bush administration has identified as a major threat to national security: an extremely weak state that’s a mecca for terrorists.

The really frightening thing about what is happening in Iraq is that Sunni and Shiah extremist groups, and foreign and international terrorist groups, are all learning from one another — and from Saddam’s military personnel. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan, when we financially supported the training of what eventually became Al Qaeda and a number of jihadi groups around the world. The international jihadi army learned things from its exposure to military personnel, who obviously have a different level of training. In Iraq now, the amateurs are intermingling with the professionals. It’s not just that we have unified various jihadi groups by giving them a common enemy, but we have also inadvertently exposed them to people with professional training. We really did create a mess, most of which was pretty predictable.

I am not very political — in fact, I’m quite allergic to politics — but I feel that the Bush administration is quite dangerous on national-security grounds. I think they have made Americans less safe. I think they are dangerous. This administration has so many times, for no real reason, offended its allies. We gratuitously offend our allies on a regular basis, and now we need them and, big surprise, they don’t really want to help us out. If there’s any hope that we’re going to get the international community willing and able to do something for us in Iraq, a Kerry administration would be far more likely to pull that off.

Jessica Stern is lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (HarperCollins, 2003).