Please, please, please, implores Kevin Myers, an end to the Vietnam analogy in comments about the US engagement in Iraq.
The US is not in a Vietnam, where it faced a formidable enemy which was organised across the length and the breadth of a tree-covered country, sponsored by a dedicated Marxist state alongside it. The truth is that much of Iraq is relatively peaceful, and according to a Gallup poll, 62 per cent of Iraqis agree with the use of war to get rid of Saddam, and 67 per cent are optimistic about the future.
But what about the violence in the capital? What about violence across the country? Six million crimes, over 11,000 reported rapes, crime up over 90 per cent in one provincial area, and in the capital, a positive wave of violence - nearly 180,000 personal attacks. Overall, six million crimes have been committed across the country. What about those figures? What about them indeed. They are official government statistics about Britain. In Lincolnshire last year crime rose by 92 per cent. Annually, there are 180,000 violent crimes in London alone.
Yes, it's worse in Baghdad, but anarchy is what you get when you replace a tyranny that has been in place for 30 years. But it's not all anarchy in Iraq. There are 40,000 serving police officers in Iraq, and 7,000 in Baghdad. All of the country's 400 courthouses are open, as are all 22 universities and 43 technical colleges. Teachers are back at work, and their pay has increased between ten to twenty-fold. More than 22 million Iraqi children have been vaccinated since the war.
What about the continuing war against the US-led forces? Well, it's having some impact, to be sure, and it's following the usual trajectory of such terrorist wars: murder local civilians working with the occupying forces, and wait for the institutions of state to collapse. But that tactic only works when a majority of the population are either indifferent to the governing institutions or actively opposed to them. This is not the case in Iraq. Moreover, the tenacity and courage of those Iraqis who are prepared to work for the allies suggests they, and much of the rest of the population, see the bigger picture: unless democratic structures can be forged out of the chaos of post-war Iraq, then the Iraqi people will be doomed to revert to that murderous anarchy from which they are emerging.
Yes, but can the coalition forces take the casualties they're suffering? Well, though all of them are tragic, the casualties are not all that heavy. The US has suffered about 120 dead in five months: about the losses on a bad day in Vietnam at the height of the war. Approximately ten times that many motor-cyclists, or ten times that many children under the age of seven, have been killed on US roads over the same period. Moreover, some 12,800 people have been killed on US roads since the war formally came to an end.
Nobody could countenance everything that US forces have done since their arrival. There have been tragic mistakes, and perhaps a fairly predictable heavy-handedness. US forces don't seem to do peacekeeping all that well: it requires the social skills and patience that sit ill-at-ease with the US military doctrine of force protection, which in turn creates a culture of maximum firepower and aggression.
That is the legacy of Vietnam and of President Clinton, one of the most catastrophic choices for the White House in US history. His abject desire to be popular at home meant that US operations were conducted with a view to minimising American casualties rather than to achieving intended outcomes, But one wretched president and one lost war will not blight US forces for ever. And contrary to what people think, the lesson of history is that guerrilla/terrorist wars do not always end in victory for the insurgent. The British largely got what they wanted in Ireland in 1921, and in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus in the 1950s and 1960s, and Ireland again in the 1990s. Where political will has been determined, and the wherewithal has been provided, the experience of recent decades is that terrorism does not secure simple victories.
And it is now in the US's vital interests that terrorism doesn't succeed in Iraq. The US has no choice but to be successful in creating stable government there. Similarly it is also in our interest. Yet across Europe, and even within the US itself, there is apparently a widespread desire to see the US fail, to see it humiliated: and this hope seems to colour a great deal of commentary about events in Iraq.
But we are all in the one boat. America must fight this war on terrorism, because unchecked our common Islamo-fascist enemies will certainly make a dirty nuclear bomb or biological weapons, for use at a time and place of their choosing. The US can no longer allow them the luxury of the initiative: from now on, that must be the US prerogative.
The military operation against the satanic regime of Saddam Hussein was one of the most morally justified wars in history. And now the forces of liberation are left with the complex task of introducing free institutions where none had existed before.
Pain - pain almost past human bearing - has been visited on many Iraqi and US homes in the past few months. More suffering is certain to follow - but not as much as there would be if the US didn't confront world terrorism. The war has been joined: there is no alternative but to fight it.