By Robert Dreyfuss*

Link to Part II

Comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are coming fast and furious now, so let's consider one more. There is an apt parallel between the way we got out of Vietnam and the way that we will get out of Iraq—sooner or later. Public opinion is turning sharply against the war, even though mainstream Democrats and most Republicans are mostly sticking with the victory-in-Iraq strategy. The conditions in Iraq and here at home are strikingly similar to those we saw surrounding Vietnam at the end of the Johnson administration. Those looking for an exit strategy, take note.

In Vietnam, by the spring of 1968, it was clear to just about everyone—including our intelligence agencies—that the war was lost. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong weren't being defeated or decimated. The United States insisted that it would never talk directly or negotiate with the communist North and their allied partisans in South Vietnam, insisting that the quisling regime in Saigon was the lawful government. So the war dragged on for another five years, killing tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese. Finally, during 1972-1973, the United States did what it had previously said it wouldn't do: it essentially abandoned its puppet government in South Vietnam and began direct talks with the Vietnamese communists. The communists were magnanimous enough to give the United States a face-saving way out, rather than forcing Washington to admit that it was surrendering. And we left.

And today? Once again, it is obvious to all—again, including our intelligence agencies—that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the Tet Offensive, the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has admitted that U.S. authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating—instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the U.S.-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.

It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting. There is no other exit strategy. As in Vietnam, it's likely—given the bull-headedness of the administration—that the United States won't seek the sort of face-saving deal that it struck to end the war in Vietnam for years. My guess is, it won't dawn on them until deep into 2007, when the imminence of the 2008 elections concentrates their minds wonderfully. But by then, the United States will have spent another $100 billion or more, lost at least 1,000 more men and women killed, and forced the death of another 30,000 or more Iraqis. To avoid that, it's time for the foreign policy establishment—the graybeards, the think-tankers, and above all, Howard Dean and the Democratic Senate leaders—to catch up with public opinion on Iraq. Why wait another two years? Why not do now what we are going to do anyway then?

Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses—John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director—have their way. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost, almost persuaded him that the war was winnable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.

Can the United States make a deal with the resistance now? The way do it would be through Amman, Jordan, where the king has myriad ties to the Sunni resistance, to the former Baathists, to tribal leaders, to Sunni businessmen, to the Iraqi clergy. If asked, King Abdullah of Jordan could host a peace conference along the lines of the Paris peace talks, where the United States and the Iraqi resistance would be the main players, and the fictional Iraqi government could attend if they were told, politely, to be quiet and listen.

Doing this would, admittedly, have a high degree of difficulty. First, it is not at all clear that the mostly Sunni resistance is ready to coalesce into a party ready for talks with the United States. Unlike Vietnam, there is no Hanoi-style central committee to run the show. "It may be too early for the resistance to come together like that," said one former U.S. intelligence official with wide-ranging experience in the Middle East. "But if they are, Amman would be the right place to try it." To make it work, the United States would have to induce a wide spectrum of the insurgent leadership to come into the peace-talks umbrella, from the Sunni tribal leaders to the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars to the former Baathist military men to the community-based street fighters in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah (but, of course, not including the Zarqawi jihadists, who are irredeemable). So far, those few timid Sunnis who've agreed to join the Iraqi government or to take part in the constitution-writing exercise merely open themselves up to be branded as collaborators, so the coalition we end up talking with needs to include all but the most incorrigible Islamists or else it will shatter.

A second problem, even more serious, is that by announcing we are ready to talk, we may convince the resistance that they have everything to gain. "If we say we are ready to talk, then the insurgents may conclude that it is in their best interest to keep fighting," says another former U.S. intelligence official with years of experience with Iraq. That's true—but it is a chance we will have to take, since they will keep fighting anyway. This problem is the precise analog to the problem of setting a fixed date for a U.S. withdrawal, namely, that if we do so then the resistance will simply lie low until then and wait us out. That, too, does not seem to me to be a strong argument against our setting a date for a withdrawal. But, in terms of exit strategies, a political solution that is reached through an accommodation with the mostly Sunni resistance seems a better way to go than to imagine a precipitate withdrawal. Still, if the talks can't be organized, we have no choice but to cut and run—that is, to declare victory and get out.

Abandoning the current Iraqi government is not as big a deal it might seem. First of all, although few journalists treat it as such, it is a temporary, interim government anyway—expressly designed to disappear once a constitution is ratified and new elections held. Second, there is no one who believes that the Talabani-Jaafari regime in Baghdad would last a week without U.S. forces there to prop it up. When I asked a former U.S. official about comparisons between the Saigon and Baghdad regimes, he said without hesitation that the regime in Saigon in the 1960s and early 1970s was far better organized and more stable than the current Iraqi one. The South Vietnamese government commanded a massive army and police force, a national bureaucracy and provincial governments with a solid economic base; the current Iraqi one has none of that.

The fact that the United States has already tried a limited dialogue with the Iraqi resistance is not a great surprise. Such talks have been reported periodically since last year, and some elements in the CIA are undoubtedly pursuing tentative, olive branch-type talks with resistance leaders both directly and through intermediaries in Jordan, Syria, through former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and via Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, during Allawi's tenure, steps in this direction already took place. But without the imprimatur of the United States, none of these intermediaries can have any real credibility with the hard-core resistance, since Bush's recent statements ("We will settle for nothing less than victory!") don't allow any wiggle room for peace talks. Still, the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the U.S. intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out.

Back to the Vietnam analogy: In the end, it was a combination of continuing military stalemate and heavy losses, along with ever-angrier public opinion, that made it impossible to continue the war any longer. Despite the turn in the polls, at this stage in the Iraq war things aren't there yet. However, the steady drumbeat of U.S. casualties, hitting hard in small towns in red states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas, is fast souring public opinion. The dead are former high school track stars and Main Street businessmen from the U.S. Army reserves and the National Guard, and their deaths are making painful headlines and causing sorrowful memorial services from coast to coast, and ordinary Americans are getting the message. Bush, however, is not getting the message. Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men—the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s—who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.

About the Author: Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.