CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, formerly of the Nation, now with Vanity Fair, has written a piece attacking the analogies now being made between Vietnam and Iraq by critics of the war (http://slate.msn.com/id/2112895/). He argues that it was right to oppose the Vietnam War, but not correct to oppose the Iraq War. Ordinarily these defenses of the Iraq War are not worth talking about, but this time, I think Hitchens has collected together many of the most enticing arguments. I want to challenge some of his arguments and those who want to can read his whole article and judge for themselves.

Hitchens challenges the general parallel made between the two wars, and certainly there is merit in this. The facile analogies that both defenders and critics of the Iraq War have made are usually not worth talking about, though sometimes they call attention to key points of controversy about the war in Iraq. In this case, I think Hitchens, by attacking the analogies, has actually brought out some nice parallels worth thinking about.

The key theme in Hitchens’ commentary is that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were much less obnoxious than the resistance in Iraq. Partly he makes this point by talking about the Vietcong as authentic representatives of Vietnamese aspirations, etc., and I don’t want to dispute that. But the other shoe drops when he asserts that the resistance in Iraq is made up of “Baathists and jihadists,” and that “Where it is not augmented by depraved bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi ‘insurgency’ is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned.”

There are actually two terrible mistakes here, both attributable to uncritical acceptance of the U.S. government’s (and mass media’s) characterizations of the resistance. One is that the guerrilla war in Iraq has a defined leadership made up of remnants of the old regime and terrorist imports like Zarqawi. The other is that support for the resistance is derived largely or exclusively from people who want to reinstall a Saddam-like government or who are outside Islamists seeking a Taliban-like regime in Iraq.

No one who knows anything about the guerrillas agrees with these characterizations (including most of the reporters in the major mainstream press). In the first place, everyone who has actually gotten close to the movement sees it as having no coherent national leadership; and even at the city level the leadership structure is usually a confederation of loosely cooperating groups. Moreover, the local group leadership is virtually all local clerics and tribal leaders, and their politics are very diverse, ranging from some rigorous Islamists to some who are virtually secular in the Western sense. And while Baathists have joined the resistance in large numbers, their politics have changed drastically; they do not represent the old party, they have become much more religious, and the party structure has been annihilated and replaced by new forms built around the mosques.

In the second place, the guerrillas themselves are virtually all local people who are fighting first, second, and third to rid the country of Americans, and not to restore Saddam (who most of them hated) or any form of Islamism that we have yet seen (though they are very often fundamentalist in orientation). If you want to get a sense of the actual politics of the guerrillas, try the interview with Sami Ramadani about the overarching organization of the resistance in Socialist Worker (for a general description),1 Nir Rosen’s remarkable reports on Fallujah when it was controlled by the resistance (and which is by no means altogether flattering to the local government they installed),2 or my piece on guerrilla war in Sadr City (which pastes together first hand accounts of the Sadrist dual government in Sadr City).3 These and other reports refute Hitchens’ characterization, which is a mechanical copy of the occupiers’ mantra about who they are fighting.

In the first place, a large part of the resistance (in Najaf, Sadr City, Basra, and other southern cities) is Shiite, not Sunni, and they have only contempt for the Saddamists and “bin Ladenists.” In the second place, the bin Ladenists, though present, represent a tiny fraction of the resistance (even the U.S. admitted that less than 5 percent of the guerrillas killed in Fallujah were foreigners), and they have not come to exercise any leadership over the main body of Sunni resisters (see the statement of the Fallujah clerics just before the U.S. attack).

Finally, and most important, the indigenous Sunni opposition is rooted in traditional Sunni society—clerical and tribal structures—and not in the old Saddamist structure. They are fighting a guerrilla war and engage in very little terrorism. This is best indicated by the simple fact that the most visible and respectable representatives of the Sunni resistance are members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, who regularly negotiate on behalf of the resistance and regularly denounce Zarqawi’s terrorist acts. We may not like their politics, but they are not as Hitchens describes them. Once you know this, the rest of Hitchens’ argument falls apart, but it is still worth reviewing a few subsidiary points.

Hitchens argues that there was no terror in Vietnam, but that the Iraq War is dominated by terror. Here he is making two mistakes. First, the U.S. government referred to the Vietcong as terrorists just as often as it calls the Iraqi resistance terrorist. Even the article about elections in Vietnam that has been circulating uses the word terrorist many times.

The larger truth about terror is this: The Vietcong engaged in very little terror. Maybe the Iraqi resistance engages in more terror, but even so, the vast majority (well over 80 percent) of military engagements initiated by the resistance in Iraq are against U.S. forces, Iraqi forces, interim government officials, or those who supply the U.S. war effort (convoys, workers at U.S. bases, etc.). These are typical military targets in any war and are not terror targets (which are aimed at civilians who are not engaged in the war effort). You wouldn’t know this from the press coverage, but if you actually look at the accounts of resistance attacks, there are very few directed at civilians; and most of these are accounted for by Zarqawi and a few others who are regularly denounced by other elements of the resistance—Sunni and Shiite.

Hitchens says that, “In Vietnam, the most appalling excesses were committed by U.S. forces.” But in Iraq, he asserts, the main atrocities have been perpetrated by the Saddamists and their descendants, the resistance. The U.S. and its allies “have done what they can to repair some of this state-sponsored vandalism.” This assertion is disconnected from any reality on the ground in Iraq, but once again it is a faithful translation of the official U.S. portrait of the situation. Two points are worth making about it. First, anyone who follows the war knows that the “most appalling excesses” in Iraq since the U.S. arrived were the wholesale destruction of Fallujah and the Najaf Old Town, with the bombing of Baghdad during the initial assault a close third. Then there were the wholesale invasions of citizens’ homes, indiscriminate incarceration of people who might have information about the resistance, and widespread torture of those incarcerated. These “appalling excesses” are what everyone in the world is talking about when they mention atrocities in Iraq, even though some of the terrorist bombings (e.g., the attacks on Shiite mosques) have also received widespread condemnation inside and outside Iraq (including from the Iraqi resistance). These events are not mentioned by Hitchens anywhere in his account.

Any comparison between the occupation and the Saddamist regime is misplaced for all sorts of reasons. It is worth remembering that the Johns Hopkins study, which is the best estimate we have, places violent civilian deaths at about 100,000, with the U.S. responsible for at least 80 percent of them. Certainly this is yet another sign of “appalling excess.” If you want to get a sense of how appalling these excesses are, the best estimates of Saddam’s slaughter is about 250,000 people over his twenty-five-year regime. His rate: 10,000 per year and maybe more. The U.S. rate: 40,000 per year and maybe more.

Hitchens claims that the insurgent leadership is “extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned.” This is simply not true and it is an extension of Hitchens’ incorrect assumption that the leadership derives directly from the old Saddamist regime. In fact, whenever polls are taken and released by U.S.-sponsored agencies they reveal that about 80 percent of the Sunnis and 60 percent of Shiites support or tolerate the armed resistance. Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader most identified with armed resistance, regularly receives over 50 percent support from non-Kurd Iraqis (including Sunnis) and far more among Shiites. The Association of Muslim Scholars is widely respected as well.

Finally, Hitchens argues against any negotiation with the resistance, asserting “One cannot quite see a round-table negotiation in Paris with Bin Laden or Zarqawi or Moqtada Sadr, nor a gradually negotiated hand-over to such people after a decent interval.” There is a two-pronged irony here: On the one hand, conjuring up bin Laden or Zarqawi as negotiating for the Iraqis is the final extension of Hitchens’ refusal to see the resistance as at all indigenous. On the other hand, saying that al-Sadr cannot be negotiated with reveals his complete lack of understanding of the Iraqi reality. Al-Sadr is none of the things Hitchens accuses the resistance of and everything he respects in the Vietcong. He is not Saddamist, he is an enemy of bin Laden, he has never engaged in terror, he represents one of the most venerable traditions of resistance to Saddam (his father and uncle were assassinated by Saddam after they led the 1991 insurrection), and he has the respect of a majority of Iraqis.

But perhaps most significant of all, Moqtada al-Sadr has already conducted successful negotiations with the occupation, negotiations at the end of last summer that resulted in the U.S. “handing over” control of Sadr City to Moqtada’s Mehdi Army. I guess on this point—and only this point—Hitchens is critical of U.S. policy in Iraq.