Is Iran War Another Vietnam for the US? No, It's Even Worse |
Twenty-two years ago this week, I published an article in this space, “Is Iraq Another Vietnam?” It proved prescient, for the Iraq War was, inevitably, lost. Part of the reason—and this was the burden of that article—was that the US hadn’t learned the obvious lessons from Vietnam, the first war America had ever lost. Nor has it, since.
Because of that, Iran, too, will prove another Vietnam: not the first or even the second or third war America ever lost, but certainly the most consequential. It will not be a localized loss in a specific theater of the American Imperium, like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were. It will be the defeat on a global scale of the Imperium itself. It’s worthwhile understanding why this has happened.
The contexts for Vietnam and Iran are different, but they bear haunting similarities; situations the US couldn’t stay out of, but conflicts it couldn’t win, either. That is the working definition of “quagmire.”
Vietnam became a US challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War. India had joined the Soviet camp when it gained independence, in 1947. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War ended in 1953 but was only fought to a draw. The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The US was clearly losing the Cold War, at least in Asia.
By its actions, the US has explicitly, unambiguously repudiated its legitimacy as the global leader. It is taking care of itself, and to hell with everybody else.
In the middle of all that, Vietnam declared that it wanted to detach from the US orbit and align itself with the Soviet Union. If successful, it would be a model to the scores of other nations in Africa and Asia that were then fighting Western imperial powers to become free, themselves, from centuries of colonial bondage.
Where it ended, nobody could tell. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw dominos falling from Vietnam through Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, all the way to the Persian Gulf and the world’s greatest supply of oil. It had to be stopped.
Because of this, there was no way the US could stay out of Vietnam. But neither would it ever be able to win. Why?
Ho Chi Minh had approached Harry Truman in 1946 asking for US help in ejecting the French who had occupied his country as a colony since 1870. Truman not only didn’t help Vietnam, he sided with the French. That was the “original sin” that made it impossible for the US to ever “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, and, therefore, to ever win the war.
Iran: fraught with the seeds of defeat
The stage, today, is no longer the Cold War but the global transition to multipolarity. The Global South wants to end the unipolar era of US dominance and replace it with a more equitable, peaceful, collaborative, sovereignty-respecting global order. The US doesn’t want that. It wants to retain its position as global hegemon. But it is faltering, badly.
It lost its war in Iraq. It lost its war in Afghanistan. It isn’t announced, yet, but it has lost its war against Russia, through its proxy, Ukraine. The US destroyed incalculable moral stature through its lusty, broad-spectrum support of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. It’s hard to fathom more rapid, self-inflicted imperial damage.
As for its economy, the US is actuarily bankrupt. It deindustrialized in the 1980s and 1990s, moving its manufacturing base to low-cost countries. That forced it to have to borrow $38 trillion in the past 45 years (almost $1 trillion a year). It will never be repaid. If foreign countries do not help fund the US’ $2-odd trillion per year budget deficit (in a good year), the lights will go out. That’s not hysteria. It’s accounting.
Meanwhile, China has blown by the US, lifting more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time, than has any country, ever. It became the largest economy in the world, in 2014. China dominates the planet in all manner of manufacturing, trading, exports, and development assistance to other countries. It is the global economic powerhouse of the 2020s that the US was in the 1950s.
The US strategy to deal with this epic, decades-long decline is to try to seize control of the world’s oil and use that control to extort wealth from all the other countries of the world, especially China. It is pure banditry masquerading as muscular strategy.
That’s what the destruction of Libya and Iraq were all about. It’s what the attack, via Ukraine, against Russia was about. It’s what the piracy of seizing Venezuela’s oil was about. It’s what this illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran is about. Control the oil. The US doesn’t have a Plan B to regain its privileged perch atop the global order. It has to try to make this strategy work.
But, as was the case in Vietnam, the US will not be able to win, here, either. The reasons are eerily similar.
In 1953 (the same time the US was helping the French fight the Vietnamese), the US staged a coup d’etat against Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. It installed a brutal dictator, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In 1980, in retaliation for Iranians taking back control of their own government, the US had its local proxy, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, attack Iran. The Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988 and killed an estimated 500,000 Iranians. Since then, the US has imposed a harsh regimen of sanctions against Iran designed to foster domestic discontent and undermine the Iranian state.
So, just as it had done to the 35 million Vietnamese, the US has unified 93 million Iranians into a visceral, unshakable compact against it. That unification was solidified when, in February, President Donald Trump tried to decapitate the Iranian leadership. That gambit backfired, spectacularly, unifying the county even more.
So, that’s the context. As was the case with Vietnam, the US can’t afford to stay out. But it won’t be able to win, either. Again, that is the definition of “quagmire,” the essential, fateful trap of the US in Vietnam.
In both wars, the US relied on overwhelming force to bring the enemy to submission. In Vietnam, it dropped 12,000,000 TONS of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped in all theaters in all of World War II, combined. Did it work? Obviously not.
The US lost the war, including 58,000 soldiers killed and another 300,000 wounded. It spent $450 billion, or $3 trillion in today’s dollars. It wrecked its economy, inflicted traumatic civic pain on itself, and grievously damaged its reputation in the world.
Against such overwhelming force, Vietnam’s strategy was enervation: Stay alive and sap the foe of its will to fight. Knowing the superiority of US fire power, the North Vietnamese army avoided direct conflicts. It fought opportunistically, when odds favored it, and melted away when necessary, to preserve men, ammunition, and weapons. Did this work? Obviously, it did.
Even though the US inflicted 9 casualties for each 1 it incurred, it couldn’t sustain those losses in its war-fighting context. As more and more........