When Vietnam fell, I had no problem with offering asylum to our former collaborators, although I had little respect for them. They were creations of US foreign policy, to which I and other Americans paid taxes to maintain. It would not have been fair to these people, corrupt and treacherous as they were, to use them and leave them in the lurch.
The situation in Iraq seems more complicated that Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a misguided attempt to take over colonial rule from the French in at least half the country and in effect cancel or modify by force the Geneva Accords of 1954, to which the US was not a party. The US position was motivated not by a desire to seize any wealth from Vietnam (she didn't have enough to justify the investment in blood and treasure), but long term strategic considerations aimed at the containment of Communism.
While Vietnam was battling to become a sovereign state, Iraq was a sovereign state prior to 2003. While there are strategic considerations to occupying Iraq, the goal is control of resources, not the containment of an enemy. Terrorism is neither a movement nor an ideology. It is a revolting tactic used by criminals who express vaguely political goals. It's not something that can be "contained". If the enemy is militant Islam, which at least is something that can be associated with people like Osama and his followers who mean harm to Americans, then invading Iraq was counter productive; whatever Saddam was, he was not a militant Islamist and no friend to any. At least the cold warriors who blundered their way into Vietnam could say with a straight face that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist. If the neocons are concerned about the spread of militant Islam, it would make more sense to undermine and overthrow the Sauds. However, the Sauds sell the US all the oil they can and price it in dollars, so the neocons don't have a problem with them, even if they are paying protection money to Osama.
In short, the idea that we are containing anything in the Middle East by invading and occupying Iraq is garbage. It is a resource war disguised as national security.
But what about the Iraqis who support the present government? To what extent are they puppets? What about the insurgents? What do they want?
The United Iraqi Alliance, the slate that won the most seats in the
January elections, ran on a program of demanding from the US a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops and socio-economic planks that also flew in the face of neoconservative goals in Iraq. Only in the final days before the election did the slate amend its program to drop the timetable demand, but it is clear that what they want is real sovereignty, not the
counterfeit sovereignty that Iraq was granted a year ago. Not all of these people are neocon puppets and know very well that, if they want to win elections in an Iraq that is even nominally democratic, they can't appear to be anything of the sort. The slate headed by Dr. Allawi, who didn't mind being seen as a neocon puppet, was crushed in those elections.
Many members of the transitional parliament reflect the view of an estimated four out of five Iraqis on the street: they want foreign troops out of Iraq sooner rather than later. It would be wrong to characterize them all as neocon puppets.
The insurgents are not a monolithic group. Zarqawi was in Iraq while Saddam was power, as the neocons like to remind us, but they want us to overlook the fact that he was a thorn in Saddam's side and allied himself with Islamist groups operating in Kurdish regions over which the US had more influence than Saddam. Some unreconstructed Baathists, who used to hunt down and torture Zarqawi's followers, are also part of the insurgency. Meanwhile, we shouldn't discount Moqtaba al-Sadr, the militant Shiite nationalist, who followers have taken up arms against the occupation and could very well do so again. Zarqawi believes Shia is an Islamic heresy and is behind many of the violence against Shiites. Saddam, the head Baathist, murdered Moqtaba's father.
It's hard to make sense out of an "insurgency" made up of at least three distinct groups who have different visions of a post-Saddam Iraq and don't really have a lot to say to each other. Are there really several insurgencies? The only thing these people have in common is that they want foreign troops out of Iraq. They have that in common with some members of parliament, too. The odd man out of this group seems to be Zarqawi, the Jordanian Islamist, who has allied himself with Osama, the Arabian Islamist. Perhaps Zarqawi doesn't really have a problem with foreign forces fighting in Iraq.
In Vietnam, it was a lot easier to keep it straight. The National Liberation Front and their North Vietnamese allies wanted US troops gone; the Saigon clique couldn't have survived very long after US withdrawal, and didn't. The Saigon regime was for the most part made up of Vietnamese quislings who supported the French against the Viet Minh after World War II (Nguyen Van Thieu was a notable exception). The Viet Cong were nationalists.
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