A week later I see what Ahmed can only hope Baghdad will become. As my Vietnam Airlines flight touches down at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, the detritus of war is still visible—military hangars and mortarproof retaining walls left over from the time when thousands of American C-130s and F-5s thundered into the city. But 30 years after it ended, war has become a tourist attraction in Vietnam. My hotel, Graham Greene’s Continental, is filled with suited Asian businessmen rather than sweaty American spies. The nearby Cu Chi tunnels are now a chance for out-of-shape tourists (myself included) to huff and puff their way through claustrophobic underground channels. Deadly Viet Cong booby traps are displayed aboveground; the sound of rifle fire comes from the shooting range where, for $1 a bullet, you can fire rounds from AK-47s, M-16s and M-60s.
I can’t quite imagine what a “Lonely Planet: Iraq” might read like three decades from now. “Stay in the Paul Wolfowitz Suite at the Al-Rashid Hotel, where the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense survived a rocket attack in October 2003!” Would museums house IED displays? “Here’s the infrared sensor, garage-door opener and 60mm mortar shell that ’the honorable resistance’ hid among the trash; on the left is the EFP, or explosively formed projectile, supplied by Iran, which could pierce even the toughest American armor; up above is the famous DBIED, or donkey-borne improvised explosive device.”
The point is not that the weapons are deadlier in Iraq, or the fighting more grisly. On some weeks in Vietnam as many as 500 American soldiers were killed; about 3 million civilians died in the war, and one out of every 10 Vietnamese was a casualty. But Baghdad is unlikely ever to look like Saigon, for more than one reason.
Once the right policies were in place, Vietnam had a diverse enough economy to recover from war. Like Iraq, it’s got oil. But it’s also the world’s second largest rice exporter and a leading coffee producer, and it’s blessed with a cheap, educated and hardworking labor force. Saigon has a longstanding entrepreneurial culture; everyone you meet seems a hustling capitalist-in-waiting.
Iraq, on the other hand, is addicted to petrodollars. The population is accustomed to a heavily subsidized life; before the war the state was Iraq’s largest employer. And even if the security situation improved, it would take a generation to recover from the brain drain that has already taken place, both under Saddam and more recently, after the U.S. invasion.
Then there’s the demographics. Vietnam has a relatively homogeneous society, which was involved in a clearly nationalistic struggle. A unified Vietnam is a more or less natural state. In Iraq, a bloody sectarian war is now mixed up with apocalyptic jihadism and centuries-old tribalism. Iraq is three countries, not one, and even opposition to the United States is not enough to unify it.
Not that reconciliation was easy in Vietnam. Plenty of Southerners suffered after the war—like many others, my guide’s father, a South Vietnamese officer, was put in a re-education camp—but there was also a dedicated, and genuine, effort on the part of the conquerors to put the past behind them. Today two of the three most powerful leaders in Vietnam are from the South. By contrast, Iraq, as a U.S. military officer once pointed out to me, suffers from a “culture of revenge.” Grievances can be as recent as the car bomb that killed 50 people in Sadr City last month, or as old as the seventh-century murder of Imam Hussein. They will not easily be put to rest.
Nor are Iraqis—and not just the jihadists—eager to forgive the Americans they blame for the chaos. During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh sent a message to the Americans, according to David Lamb in his book “Vietnam Now”: “We will spread a red carpet for you to leave Vietnam. And when the war is over, you are welcome to come back because you have technology and we will need your help.” He was not kidding—Intel signed a $1 billion deal just this month. Bill Gates and Bill Clinton rank only behind Uncle Ho and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap as the most popular figures in Vietnam. “We welcome our American visitors,” a 30-year-old guide at the Ap Bac battlefield told me. Her uncle had been a Viet Cong fighter, killed in 1963. “We just ask that you please sign our guestbook.”
Having a clear resolution no doubt helped Vietnam move on. As Neil Sheehan notes in “A Bright Shining Lie,” Ap Bac was a rarity—“a decisive battle … in a conflict of seemingly endless engagements.’’ Today in Iraq, Marines go out on patrol simply to draw the fire of insurgents, towns like Ramadi and Fallujah are savagely taken only to revert to their Islamist overlords, and whole neighborhoods in Baghdad suffer under the terror of nighttime militia raids. It is also a country in a notoriously unstable region, and its neighbors haven’t proved too helpful yet. Peace is years, if not generations, away, and may be hard to recognize.
Conservative commentators often criticize the media for comparing Iraq to Vietnam, blaming a liberal bias and a desire to see America fail. That’s not true— I want America to succeed, of course—and it misses the point. Baghdad would be grateful to turn out like Saigon. I hope in 30 years I can take snapshots under Saddam’s Crossed Swords monument and pay too much for a soft drink in one of his palaces. I think Ahmed would agree.
