WAS IRAQ WORSE FOR AMERICA THAN VIETNAM?

At the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, we stand in the same position relative to the initial invasion as America stood in 1985 relative to the 1965 arrival of our first combat troops in Vietnam. This makes it a useful moment to compare the two conflicts and their effects, and to consider which was more disastrous.

I doubted Iraq could outstrip Vietnam in the ranks of American debacles. More than 12 times as many American troops died in the Vietnam War as died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. The bloodletting among Iraqis was terrible, but so was the civilian toll in Southeast Asia. The US lost the Vietnam War completely; in Iraq, we left behind an unsteady and corrupt republic rather than a new dictatorship, with a government that still allows a US military presence.

Domestically, the period around the Vietnam War was dreadful — a wave of domestic terrorism, a crisis of authority, the 1960s curdling into the 1970s. The immediate aftermath of Iraq was sour and paranoid in its own way, but even with the Great Recession, there wasn’t the same kind of radicalism and social breakdown. When Barack Obama was elected president, American conservatism seemed shattered by Iraq, as American liberalism was shattered by Vietnam. Today, there’s a stronger case for seeing Iraq as a more epochal disaster. In American domestic life, the Vietnam effect was more of a fever, whereas the Iraq effect seems like a wasting or relapsing disease. Its lingering effects have made the body politic more susceptible to left-wing radicalism and right-wing demagogy, while contributing to a persistent mood of pessimism and disappointment that’s exacerbated by other forces (social media, the pandemic).

But it is in the effect on America’s global position that the costs of the Iraq War really keep compounding. It’s now clear that not just the war alone but its ever-spreading secondary consequences — which included our futile overinvestment in Afghanistan, fatefully cast as the “good war” by many Democrats opposed to the Iraq invasion — kept us tied down during critical years of geopolitical realignment, making it hard to even think about, let alone cope with the revival of Russian power and the rise of China to superpower status.

The all-but-certain influence of our final defeat in Afghanistan on Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was just one link in a long chain of consequences forged by the Iraq War. Likewise, our newly aggressive posture toward the Chinese regime is a risky attempt to play catch-up to shifts that we should have been more attuned to a decade ago.

And while the effects of the Iraq War on the developing world’s attitudes toward the US can be overstated, our initial invasion clearly made us seem like a less trustworthy hegemon — reckless and revisionist rather than steady and reliable. So not only Russia and China but also other power centres, from India to Turkey, were pushed toward post-American and post-Western paths by everything that followed. Now return to the comparison between 2023 and our Reagan-era situation, barely a decade after the last helicopters left Saigon. By 1985, we had managed to separate China from Russia, the Soviet economy was faltering, and Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected general secretary of the Communist Party, with glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall just around the corner.

Today, with Russia and China increasingly aligned together against us and Chinese influence increasing, we seem to be descending back into the kind of twilight struggle that in 1985 we were poised to finally transcend. So if Vietnam 20 years on looked like a disaster that in our strength we were able to absorb, Iraq 20 years on looks more like our empire’s nemesis.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Almost nobody in 1985 realised just how quickly the Soviet Union would collapse, and perhaps today the American comeback is already beginning. We have resources and forms of legitimacy that are lacking in our more authoritarian rivals; their systems are persistently vulnerable to the follies of autocratic decision-making.

And the Ukraine conflict, for some, is seen as a possible doorway to revival — reinvigorating the West much as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II once did, drawing Mr Putin into the same sort of quagmire that Afghanistan offered to the Soviets, helping us shake our Iraq distemper on a different timetable than with our Vietnam syndrome, but with similar results. It’s not a coincidence that among those most invested in this hope are some of the Iraq War’s most ardent advocates. They want redemption, understandably, for their vision of American power, if not for the Iraq decision itself.