Good Morrrrrning, Iraq...

Let's start with a touch of irony. For thirty years, the men (and lone woman) now running our country havealso been running away from Vietnam. In this war, it only took six days for Vietnam to catch up to them. Lastnight, for instance, here's what I noticed on the CBS and ABC national news, followed by the Lehrer News Hour.CBS led off with word that the U.S. military in Iraq, where all was going according to plan and on schedule,had nonetheless called for reinforcements from the States to guard exposed supply lines and 700 soldiers froman armored unit were being shipped out immediately. As the Vietnam War went on, of course, the military wasalways offering public reassurances about how splendidly things were going and then asking the President formore men.

President Bush spoke at Centcom Florida yesterday, the sort of protected military base from whichPresidents Johnson and Nixon both found themselves most comfortable giving talks as opposition to the VietnamWar increased. The ABC and CBS reports on the President's speech both noted quite explicitly that, at the lastminute, he had "edited" his speech, changing "our progress is ahead of schedule" to"good progress." Again a strangely familiar note from another era.

On ABC, a reporter in a sandstorm outside Nasiriya, backed by American soldiers slipping through alandscape of palm trees, pointed out that this wasn't "desert" fighting; that military vehicles werenow stuck in the mud ("quagmire" anyone?); that, given the un-uniformed Fedayeen fighters, it was"hard to tell friend from foe" (Where have we heard that before -- or for that matter seen shots of"peasants" clambering over a downed American chopper?). We then saw a shot of someone, not inuniform, being led off with hands tied or cuffed behind his back and what might have been a hood over hishead. The report ended with the journalist quoting a Marine as saying, "The other forces [in Iraq] arefighting Gulf War II. We're here in Nasiriya fighting Vietnam."

On PBS, two of their three military analysts agreed that we had "lost momentum." Of reports thatunder the cover of the sandstorm Republican Guard units were advancing on American units, one said, "[Ourforces are] sitting in the desert with a lot of broken down vehicles awaiting the attack."

PBS also aired clips of the daily Centcom briefing in Qatar. The uniformed briefer seemed distinctly on thedefensive. A Canadian reporter was shown complaining that the military never displayed videos of missiles thatmissed their targets or hit wrong targets and demanded to know when some would be available. Then, to mysurprise, a CBS correspondent rose to complain fairly vehemently that, while "embedded" reporterswere offering many tiny pictures, the "big picture" was supposed to come from Centcom; instead, hecommented, all that was being offered were videos of micro-air strikes. In fact, all the Pentagon newsconferences of the day managed to look both ridiculous and untrustworthy as spokesmen and women tried to pinthe blame for civilian casualties from the missile-in-the-Baghdad-market on the Iraqis.

In fact, it's taken less than a week for American reporters to begin to doubt Pentagon briefers (foreignreporters began in that mode) -- a passage that took years in Vietnam -- and for the briefers to begin to looklike participants in the long ago Saigon press briefings that included the infamous "body counts,"mockingly nicknamed by reporters "the Five O'clock Follies. " In other words, a week into the war thefirst cracks in what may become a media "credibility gap" are already showing. As it turns out,Pentagon policies for controlling the media were quite brilliant, but also dependent on the delivery of thepromised war -- a brief "cakewalk" of liberation.

And then there's the issue of casualties. For a long time the only remnant of Vietnam left to scareAmerican planners was the matter of American casualties -- or rather, the fear that if American forces tookthem in any significant numbers those body bags coming home would cost any administration the support of theAmerican people. This fear went under the name "The Vietnam Syndrome" and was seen as a kind ofpublic pathology to be overcome. As a result, in the last Gulf War, there were no more shots of body bags, andin an increasingly long-distance war, no more American bodies. The irony of this moment is that the Pentagonfinds itself in the awkward position of running from the other side's casualties as well, which are doing forthe world what American casualties did for the United States in Vietnam.

Both CBS and ABC last night showed the first lingering shots I've seen of wounded Iraqi children from thatBaghdad market, already commonplace shots on global TV sets but not here. Another mainstream first, one weekin: shots of "the other side" as fighters, of a Fedayeen jeep with a machine gun mounted on it andof Fedayeen in a trench, guns aimed as if in preparation for an ambush, all taken from Iraqi TV.

Perhaps even more fascinating, one week into the war, most of the late arguments and charges of the Vietnamera have reemerged and the official recriminations are already beginning. Here are some of the arguments fromthe right, for instance, that would be recognizable to anyone who lived through the end of the Vietnam War andits postscript:

We're fighting with one hand tied behind our back: Yesterday, on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, forinstance, strategist Ed Luttwack was already calling on the military to stop worrying about Iraqi casualtiesand do a little retargeting in Baghdad in order to get the war over with more quickly.

Civilians in the White House and the Pentagon haven't let the military run the war it wanted: A week in,the sniping among retired generals and admirals (speaking for their still active comrades) and various unnamedfigures in the military, the intelligence services, and the administration is already fierce. As JosephGalloway just wrote ( Rumsfeld's strategy under fire as war risks become increasingly apparent) for KnightRitter, "'This is the ground war that was not going to happen in [Rumsfeld's] plan,' said a Pentagonofficial. Because the Pentagon didn't commit overwhelming force, 'now we have three divisions strung out over300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing.'" Orless politely, "'One senior administration official put it this way: 'Shock and Awe' is Air Forcebull---!'"

It's the media's fault: Fred Barnes, executive editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard has already beenquoted in the New York Times as saying, "The American public knows the importance of this war. They arenot as casualty sensitive as the weenies in the American press are." And how far can we be from thewe-won-every-battle, how-can-you-claim-this-is-a-no-win-strategy argument?

Believe me, this is Vietnam on fast-forward. We've leapt years in a week. Who knows, if things don't breakjust right for this administration, where we'll be a week from now? When you think about it, it's taken a lotof ridiculous dreaming and planning by men inside not just the Beltway, but the Bubbleway, over many years, toturn Sadaam Hussein into Ho Chi Minh for even a few weeks or months.

What's already obvious is that our government lacked nothing when it came to confidence. Despite the proforma cautionary word or two in the prewar weeks, our leaders were evidently all too in love with their own"plan," and too enamored of American power and its allure to prepare for a real war, the sort that,since the Spanish guerrillas defeated Napoleon, has been fought by ill-armed forces, often not in the name ofkindly, democratic gents, against far greater powers and odds that defied explanation (at least any that theinvading power could think of.)

Somehow, the men in Washington didn't imagine that, in all those endless months of build-up to war, theirenemy could or would do a thing. They had too high an opinion of themselves to favor their future enemy with aserious thought. They were simply incapable of imagining the other side of the war they were planning tofight, no less the world they were planning to step into. (Doesn't that ring a little ting-a-linging bell froman era I won't bother to name again?)

The "living room war" was New Yorker journalist Michael Arlen's famous phrase for the Vietnam Warat home, but back then they didn't know what a living-room war really was. A 24/7 war that isn't a cakewalk bythe globe's last imperial power on a gazillion TV sets worldwide evidently puts the kinds of pressures on agovernment in a few days that took years to build in the Vietnam era. Despite that quarter-million dollar setthe Pentagon constructed in Qatar to wow the press, perhaps the Pentagon was no less incapable of imaginingtheir "enemies" in the media (for that's how they've conceived of them ever since the Vietnam era).Now, if things take a turn for the worse, they have a pool of hundreds of reporters from whom potentialcritics and doubters, already "embedded" in military units, are likely to emerge. I give it a weekor two at best unless this war quickly turns Washington's way.

Don't make a mistake here, the war in Iraq for endless reasons isn't the Vietnam War redux -- unless, ofcourse, it's that tragedy for all sides returned as the most deadly of farces. But whatever it is, it could bea formula for catastrophe no matter when we "win." And our leaders are not the sorts of men who havehad much experience with losing control. The prospect, I assure you, is a frightening one.

Tom Engelhardt is a long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture. This articlefirst appeared on his weblog for the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flowof alternate sources, news and opinion. Courtesy, Znet