Tale Of Two Cities: Clean Slate; Our Baghdad correspondent visits Saigon and discovers the real reasons that Iraq shouldn't be compared to Vietnam.(Travel narrative)

Byline: Michael Hastings

A dust storm blew over Baghdad as I tried to leave last month, kicking up enough sand to clog my nostrils and cancel all flights for the day. I spent the night at the airport--the guest of a 19-year-old friend named Ahmed, who lives there in a second-floor office with a view of the parking garage. Ahmed's father, a Sunni, is in charge of airport security; the job makes it too dangerous for the two of them to live in the city itself, where they would be targets of both insurgents and Shiite militias. Ahmed's cousin was killed this summer--for "being a Sunni guy," he says--and his mother and sister are among the thousands of Iraqis living in exile in Syria. We spend the evening listening to Eminem and watching "Scrubs" on satellite TV. Ahmed asks me to bring back the final season of "Friends" (the original DVDs, "no bootlegs," he says). When does he think he'll get to enjoy a normal life? I ask. "Man," he says, sighing. "In 10 years, 15 years ... maybe never."

A week later I see what Ahmed can only hope Baghdad will become. As my Vietnam Airlines flight touches down at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, the detritus of war is still visible--military hangars and mortarproof retaining walls left over from the time when thousands of American C-130s and F-5s thundered into the city. But 30 years after it ended, war has become a tourist attraction in Vietnam. My hotel, Graham Greene's Continental, is filled with suited Asian businessmen rather than sweaty American spies. The nearby Cu Chi tunnels are now a chance for out-of-shape tourists (myself included) to huff and puff their way through claustrophobic underground channels. Deadly Viet Cong booby traps are displayed aboveground; the sound of rifle fire comes from the shooting range where, for $1 a bullet, you can fire rounds from AK-47s, M-16s and M-60s.

I can't quite imagine what a "Lonely Planet: Iraq" might read like three decades from now. "Stay in the Paul Wolfowitz Suite at the Al-Rashid Hotel, where the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense survived a rocket attack in October 2003!" Would museums house IED displays? "Here's the infrared sensor, garage-door opener and 60mm mortar shell that 'the honorable resistance' hid among the trash; on the left is the EFP, or explosively formed projectile, supplied by Iran, which could pierce even the toughest American armor; up above is the famous DBIED, or donkey-borne improvised explosive device."

The point is not that the weap-ons are deadlier in Iraq, or the fighting more grisly. On some weeks in Vietnam as many as 500 American soldiers were killed; about 3 million civilians died in the war, and one out of every 10 Vietnamese was a casualty. But Baghdad is unlikely ever to look like Saigon, for more than one reason.

Once the right policies were in place, Vietnam had a diverse enough economy to recover from war. Like Iraq, it's got oil. But it's also the world's second largest rice exporter and a leading coffee producer, and it's blessed with a cheap, educated and hardworking labor force. Saigon has a longstanding entrepreneurial culture; everyone you meet seems a hustling capitalist-in-waiting.

Iraq, on the other hand, is addicted to petrodollars. The population is accustomed to a heavily ...