Analysts opposed to the Iraq War love to speak of a quagmire, and they cite the Vietnam War in support of their theories. Two-plus years into this war, American deaths number some 1800, and there will be many more. Whether they'll approach the Vietnam level of 58,000 killed is highly debatable. (And, I think, highly unlikely.)

You'd think that if experts were looking for historic quagmires, a better place to search than Southeast Asia might be, well, Iraq. While we hear a lot about the Vietnam "Quagmire" (the one war we're said to have "lost"), we don't hear much about the most recent war we won -- not in Vietnam, but in Iraq itself: Gulf War I. The actual ground war started on February 24, ended on February 28th, 1991, and a total 148 Americans were killed.

Not that there's much of a parallel between a four day, in-and-out war and a protracted campaign like the present one, but isn't the recent military history of wars in Iraq at least as relevant as an older one in Vietnam?

What I find more remarkable is that we're hearing so little right now about another Iraq War, the 1980-1988 Iran Iraq War, which really was a quagmire by most objective standards. Here's a pretty good summary of how it started:

Iran-Iraq War, an armed conflict that began when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 and ended in August 1988, with an estimated total of 1.7 million wounded and 1 million dead. The underlying cause of the war lay in the long-standing regional rivalry between Persian Iran and Arab Iraq.

The immediate cause, however, was a border dispute that had its origins in the mid-1970s. In 1974 Iran had begun supplying weapons to Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq, enabling them to stage a revolt against the Iraqi government. In order to halt the rebellion, Iraq in 1975 compromised on a dispute with Iran regarding the border on the Shatt al Arab estuary. In exchange, Iran stopped supplying arms to the Kurds.

In 1980 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran hoping to reverse the 1975 border settlement and perhaps to gain control of the rich, oil-producing Iranian province of Khûzestân. Hussein also wanted to put an end to religious propaganda directed against Iraq's secular regime by the Islamic government of Iran, which had come to power in 1979 under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Khomeini and most Iranian Muslims belonged to the Shiite sect of Islam. Hussein feared that the propaganda would undermine the loyalty of Iraqi Shiites, who comprised about 60 percent of his country's population.

The war solved little:

At the end, virtually none of the issues which are usually blamed for the war had been resolved. When it was over, the conditions which existed at the beginning of the war remained virtually unchanged. The UN-arranged cease-fire merely put an end to the fighting, leaving two isolated states to pursue an arms race with each other, and with the other countries in the region.

With things heating up vis-a-vis Iran, I have no idea why this older, truly Iraqi quagmire has escaped the attention of so many MSM analysts. (Might there be an assumption that "Vietnam" is the only quagmire we understand?)

I'm not arguing that the current war in Iraq is headed for anything like the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. With U.S. forces there and Saddam Hussein out, how can it? Such things might be preventable, if we can at least remember that they've happened before. And if we remember that many of the same tensions still exist.

While it's indisputable that history repeats itself, it strikes me that those who make that claim (or love to quote Santayana on Vietnam and Iraq) might take into account the history that most bears repeating.

What's going on in Iraq right now is often called a "civil war," and that may very well be the correct label. I do not claim any expertise at all, and the reason I dislike war blogging is because I am not in possession of more than a small fraction of the relevant facts in Iraq.

But if history is to be a guide in analyzing the Iraq War, and if it is a civil war, how can we be so sure that Vietnam (or the American Civil War) are better starting places than the Iran Iraq War?

MORE: Lest anyone get the idea that Saddam Hussein was the greater villain for starting the Iran Iraq War (or that we're facing tactics that are especially new), it should be remembered that "suicide" missions were commonplace during the Iran Iraq War:

Lacking the equipment to open secure passages through Iraqi minefields, and having too few tanks, the Iranian command again resorted to the human-wave tactic. In March 1984, an East European journalist claimed that he "saw tens of thousands of young boys, roped together in groups of about twenty to prevent the faint-hearted from deserting, make such an attack." The Iranians made little progress despite these sacrifices.

Their mission is to detonate mines and draw fire in preparation for full-scale attacks Iraqi lines. The boys carry plastic keys to heaven. They have been assured by their leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that if they are killed on the battlefield they will go directly to paradise. "The purest joy in Islam," Khomeini has explained, "is to kill and be killed for Allah."

AND MORE: I think it is significant to note the the "Badr Brigades" (which are creating many problems in Iraq right now) date back to the Iran Iraq War, when the organization was formed by Iraqi "defectors" loyal to Iran.

UPDATE (08/13/05): James Wolcott, of all people, is making the case for war with Iran. (Whether he knows it or not.)

I just knew there had to be a reason why Drudge links Wolcott....

UPDATE (08/13/05): Henry Kissinger weighs in on the Vietnam analogy:

Vietnam was a battle of the Cold War; Iraq is an episode in the struggle against radical Islam. The stake in the Cold War was perceived to be the political survival of independent nation-states allied with the United States around the Soviet periphery. The war in Iraq is less about geopolitics than about the clash of ideologies, cultures and religious beliefs. Because of the long reach of the Islamist challenge, the outcome in Iraq will have an even deeper significance than that in Vietnam. If a Taliban-type government or a fundamentalist radical state were to emerge in Baghdad or any part of Iraq, shock waves would ripple through the Islamic world. Radical forces in Islamic countries or Islamic minorities in non-Islamic states would be emboldened in their attacks on existing governments. The safety and internal stability of all societies within reach of militant Islam would be imperiled.

This is why many opponents of the decision to start the war agree with the proposition that a catastrophic outcome would have grave global consequences -- a fundamental difference from the Vietnam debate. On the other hand, the military challenge in Iraq is more elusive. Local Iraqi forces are being trained for a form of combat entirely different from the traditional land battles of the last phase of the Vietnam War. There are no front lines; the battlefield is everywhere.

(Via Stephen Green.)