As a specialist on Vietnam at the University of Hawai'i for the past 37 years, the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq haunt me more and more each day.

I look at pictures of the children of Iraq and I can't help seeing pictures in my mind of children I knew in Vietnam, or thinking of my own children and grandchildren who have some prospects of a decent future.

Yet, more and more every day, it seems that many Iraqi children must face a hellish future, just like the hellish one they have already known in recent times.

Things are falling into place, very much as I had sadly predicted in my letter to the editors of The Honolulu Advertiser on March 19, 2003, on the eve of what even then was a clearly foolish enterprise. Here are 10 essential points I think we should contemplate:

1) CIVIL WAR

The Bush administration says that there is danger of civil war in Iraq, so the U.S. cannot leave. That's both right and wrong: There is no "danger of civil war"; there is civil war already, and it is about to get a whole lot worse. The U.S. presence is one of its proximate causes; had the United States not precipitously invaded, there would be no civil war in Iraq today.

The primary victims thereof will be innocent Iraqi civilians. In Vietnam, the U.S. government said that war was not a civil war when it actually was. Today, our government says the war in Iraq is not yet a civil war when it already is one.

2) LOYALTY OF TROOPS

The forces the United States are currently training in Iraq, the bright face put on things by spokesmen from the Bush administration and Pentagon notwithstanding, are either: (a) largely made up of Sunni officers and Shiite enlisted men, and have zero prospect of long-term coherence; or (b) units of the Kurdish Pershmerga or the Shiite militia, who are temporarily under Iraqi national colors because they are the only competent and vaguely Iraqi-looking military units in Iraq.

When push comes to shove, these units will return to their home areas and they will fight to oppose — not support — Iraqi national unity. When Saigon changed hands in April 1975, the number of folks who, just in case, were able to break out National Liberation Front flags on their balconies and declare "we were on your side all the time!" surprised most foreign observers and probably surprised the NLF, as well.

3) NATIONAL UNITY?

Iraq as a supposedly unified entity is a product of the legacy of the Turkish Empire (which ruled Basra, Baghdad and Mosul as three distinct provinces, but which favored the minority Sunni population because the Turkish Sultan styled himself as the "Khalifa," or commander of the faithful in Sunni Islam). It also traces to off-handed post-World War I British colonial incompetence, plus greed to get control of the as yet untapped oil reserves in the southern and northern areas of what was then called "Mesopotamia."

Thus, in spite of a brief 20th century dysfunctional marriage of the three older Ottoman provinces, Iraq quite lacks the internal glue to operate as a single country and any outside power that takes on the task of trying to unify it is foolish beyond belief. The Bush administration and its advisers, who were naive, solipsistic and arrogant at the outset of the war, have proven themselves uninformed and incompetent in accomplishing that goal since they declared the official end of hostilities on May 1, 2003.

4) CHANGE FROM WITHIN

As is the case everywhere else in the world, the only people who ever had any chance of making Iraq a single functioning federal country were the Iraqis themselves, but only if they were totally unencumbered by outside intervention.

The Vietnam of today, with the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia, recognized by the United States (with "most favored nation trading status"), is proof that only inside forces can successfully orchestrate a national revival.

In case more proof of this proposition is needed, just consider: The people who put Vietnam back together after the United States left were the very people the United States tried to defeat.

Our Vietnamese political clients fled and took their loot to Switzerland, France and California. The highly unfortunate people under them had to run away any which way they could and many died at sea in the process.

Those who stayed in Vietnam labored under a 20-year U.S. economic embargo. Yet, even while the Soviet Union was collapsing, the very Vietnamese government that we said was bad for Vietnam, clamped down on dissent but also brought stability and development, and the United States now has peaceful, productive relations with it.

The United States has proven it often cannot use military intervention to bring about what's best for other countries and Iraq is not only the latest example, it will prove to be the most debilitating for us in the long run.

5) OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE

History and recent events demonstrate that there is absolutely no prospect whatsoever that Iraq will be sufficiently free of outside meddling to become functional in the foreseeable future and, thus, it follows logically, there is no good future for Iraq in sight. The longer we stay, the worse it will be for us (and for the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds, et al. — I hesitate to say "Iraqis," since that "national" group may not continue to exist as a nation per se) when we finally do pull out.

6) WIN-WIN FOR JIHADISTS

The administration still maintains there is no military parallel with Vietnam, a subject about which we can all remember a few things.

Here it is right and it is wrong again. It is right, in that the insurgency, which is almost entirely Sunni, does not (unlike the Vietnamese communists) have any credible long-term ideological content; it is simply predicated on perceived self-interest. In essence, if the Shiites take power, the Sunnis fear (with good reason) that the Shiites will treat them as cruelly as they treated the Shiites and will not give them any kind of meaningful access to the oil revenues.

(The Kurds are out of it in their northern fastness and want to stay out — they don't give a damn about any Iraq; Kurdistan with de facto if not de jure independence is their only goal and, given their history, who can blame them?)

The fundamentalist religious ideology we hear so much about comes afterward, and the jihadists are using the situation to strengthen themselves, thanks to the opportunity that the U.S. entry into Iraq has provided them.

Overall, the jihadists are prospering from America's being in Iraq, and for every jihadi killed there, they can recruit two new ones. For the Islamic fundamentalists it's a win-win situation.

7) 'STAY THE COURSE'

But there are, in fact, clear major, overriding Vietnamese historical parallels, to wit: