Absent the original justification for the invasion, several arguments for staying put have emerged. Yet each is fundamentally flawed. The first revolves around assumptions about what would happen to Iraq if the United States left. There are certainly some legitimate concerns about regional containment: Iran, for example, does have strategic interests in extending its power into the Gulf via Iraq. But the United States does not face a peer competitor with imperial ambitions in the Middle East, and its regional adversaries do not have a great-power patron comparable to the Soviet Union or China. Iran, in other words, is no Soviet Union. Furthermore, North Vietnam was, by and large, ethnically and religiously homogeneous, and its people were united behind its government, while the South Vietnamese were largely disillusioned by a decadent government and the ham-fisted U.S. strategy of attrition. Iraq is fiercely heterogeneous, both religiously and ethnically, and it is in the midst of a civil war between Sunnis and Shia. Beyond that, while the civil imperative in Vietnam was to maintain the status quo, in Iraq it is considerably more difficult: to complete regime change from autocracy to democracy.

Overall, these realities suggest that in the event of a U.S. withdrawal, outside powers–including Al Qaeda, Iran, and the United States–will lack the political or military means to comprehensively control events inside Iraq. Whereas communists readily took power in South Vietnam, jihadists will not take power in Iraq. Nevertheless, a forced withdrawal following abject U.S. military failure in Iraq, à la South Vietnam, would leave the Iraqi government bereft of strong American backing. While it is unclear what difference this would make to the outcome of the civil war, it is clear that a well-planned, orderly pullout would be more likely to result in congressional approval of financial and operational support for the Iraqi government that might preserve some American influence in Iraq.

Second, on the operational side, proponents of intervention, the surge, and a continuing military presence in Iraq–the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, for example–argue that counterinsurgency is finally working. But relative operational success by the U.S. military is only a part of the overall question of political victory. In 1970-72, America’s military strategy was finally working in Vietnam, too. Indeed, by 1970 the insurgency in South Vietnam was all but kaput. The Vietcong cadres had simply impaled themselves on superior American firepower during Tet. Hanoi understood this, and from Tet on, its war strategy was to build up and sustain North Vietnamese combat power in and around South Vietnam. The United States sought to disrupt and interdict Hanoi’s efforts while building up the ARVN, but it never succeeded in building a South Vietnamese army that was up to the task of defending the country–at least in the absence of U.S. air power. This lesson alone is bad news for the Bush Administration, given the chronic difficulty it is having in getting the Iraqi army up to standard.

There is also a deeper problem with the assertions of impending "success." The insurgency in South Vietnam stemmed from agrarian hardship and was partly remediable by U.S.-assisted land reform and modernization initiatives. The Iraqi insurgency, in contrast, was directly caused by the United States, whose swift U.S. decapitation campaign precipitated the sudden collapse of the state with no serious plan for establishing order in the absence of Saddam Hussein’s strong if brutal national structures. Multiple insurgencies, justified by sectarian fear and fueled by opportunism, inexorably filled the power vacuum. The continuing American military presence stoked the violence. Since many, if not most, Iraqis see the United States as the source of their present grief, Washington is unlikely to gain sufficient credibility among Iraqis to win over the insurgents. In addition, with Afghanistan in need of close attention, the United States would not have the troops available to complete the job even if the Administration were inclined to allocate other resources to Iraq. And even if mainly soft power were required to make counterinsurgency more effective, the U.S. civilian effort in Iraq compares dismally with that mounted in Vietnam. As of January 2007, fewer than 200 U.S. civilian personnel were assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams charged with rehabilitating an Iraqi population of 28 million. This contrasts with some 1,700 civilian (mainly USAID) employees assigned to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program during the Vietnam War, covering a South Vietnamese population of 18 million. And even CORDS had mixed results at best in terms of "winning hearts and minds."

In other words, as long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, American efforts are bound to have an inherently feckless one-step-forward-two-steps-back quality. To capitalize on any military advances that the surge has produced, the Iraqi military–not American forces–would have to consolidate the gains, and Iraqi politicians would have to strike courageous bargains. Neither Iraqi institution appears capable of doing its part, just as neither ARVN nor the Saigon government was able to do theirs during the Vietnam War. In citing strictly military successes of the surge–a degree of pacification in areas of intensified U.S. occupation, the apparent degradation of insurgents’ and terrorists’ operational capabilities–as indications of progress in Iraq, the Bush Administration thus commits the same error that the Johnson and Nixon administrations did with respect to Vietnam: emphasizing that we are winning on points while suppressing the likelihood that the resiliency of the insurgency, Iraqi military inadequacy, and Iraqi political dysfunction will eventually combine to inflict a knockout punch.

Given this structural feature of our involvement in Iraq, domestic U.S. popular support is unlikely to last. As Eric Larson and Bogdan Savych’s RAND Corporation study has shown, the American public will tolerate a high number of casualties if it is convinced they are serving vital American interests in a cause that can be won in the foreseeable future and if it sees wall-to-wall agreement among Congress, the administration, and the punditocracy. When the stars align in this way, as they did during World War II–and, indeed, for much of the Vietnam era–Americans will accept large losses. But when the public regards the spilling of American blood as strategically unnecessary or even pointless, as it did in Somalia in 1993, it is understandably loath to accept casualties in abundance.

To be sure, U.S. fatalities in Vietnam dwarfed the fewer than 4,000 Americans killed so far in Iraq, and the rate of military losses in Vietnam was far higher than that in Iraq. But public intolerance is not attributable to any inherent, quantifiable squeamishness on the electorate’s part. As with Vietnam, the factors most responsible for undermining the national will are the imperturbable and almost surreal incompetence and duplicity of the United States’ war leaders. On account of these transgressions–in particular, the grudgingly conceded fact that the casus belli were at best contrived and at worst simply manufactured, and the extravagantly stupid failure to anticipate a robust insurgency–an open-ended commitment is politically out of the question. Indeed, support for the war was thoroughly gutted by 2006, when Democrats, propelled by intensifying opposition to the war, seized control of Congress.

The Message of Vietnam

Iraq is geostrategically more critical to American interests than Vietnam. The loss of Vietnam certainly depressed American status and morale, especially in light of the disgraceful way the war ended. But ultimately, Southeast Asia didn’t matter all that much strategically and, as we now know, adding a unified Vietnam under the communist tally didn’t actually increase the Soviet Union’s global power. America’s pullout from Vietnam led to a thorough regional disengagement that was ultimately liberating for the United States. The same cannot be said for Iraq, if only because it is in a place that matters very much to the rest of the world (and now, thanks to Amrica’s rash intervention in 2003, to terrorists).

Thus, the United States cannot abandon or ostracize Iraq, as it did Vietnam. But contrary to Bush Administration shills and conservative pundits, this does not mean that any form of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will have terrible and persistent consequences–namely, an all-out Sunni/Shia war; the emboldenment of Iran, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda; and diminished energy security. Those consequences are much more likely to arise from a panicky exit springing from continued American futility. Consequently, the Vietnam experience counsels not staying put but rather minimizing the U.S. military presence soon, while still promoting political progress in Iraq and regional stability. No cost-free solution exists; any "victory" would achieve far less than what was originally envisioned by the war’s architects and strongest defenders. But a strategic withdrawal would constitute a mature response to what has become an obviously futile quest and to the American people’s loss of trust and confidence in the way the war has been conducted.

The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam over the course of 1973 to 1975 proved so divisive precisely because a fictional "who lost the war" story line was pushed by conservatives in an effort to mask the inept conduct of a war they had backed. This stratagem recalled that of German nationalists during the Weimar era, who cultivated the myth that the Ludendorff Offensive of spring 1918 had effectively won World War I, but that democratic German politicians–the so-called "November criminals," some of Hitler’s favorite scapegoats–had discarded victory through craven capitulation. Such tendentious posturing should not cloud the fact that U.S. involvement in Vietnam ultimately exceeded what the public would tolerate. The decline of public support, coupled with U.S. indecision, led to a frenzied withdrawal behind a political fig leaf and a dearth of post-withdrawal support for any legitimate South Vietnamese government.

The same thing could happen with respect to Iraq. If we do not exercise strategic discretion and design a near-term military disengagement that incorporates residual U.S. support for Iraq, we are likely to be forced–by domestic opinion at least as much as facts on the ground in Iraq–into a Vietnam-esque withdrawal that leaves no room for such support for Iraq and diminished American standing throughout the world. That fate is the one we tempt by keeping troops in Iraq when their presence there cannot secure America’s interests and only weakens the United States’ strategic position. At the end of the day, America’s allies value, and its adversaries fear, not its persistence in a dubious policy that is unlikely to serve its own interests, but its preservation of viable strategic options.