From London daily The Morning Star:
Common sense on Iraq
(Monday 12 June 2006)
PICK: Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (The New Press, £14.99)
by Anthony ArnoveGEOFF SIMONS
THIS is an excellent little book which graphically places the Iraq disaster in a historical and deeply human context.
Many reputable authors seemingly find it difficult to convey the relevant information about a past or present political crisis, while, at the same time, indicating what it all means for the people caught up in the situation.
Anthony Arnove is not among them.
Here, we have an accessible text that clearly charts the illegalities and horrors of the criminal Iraq policies being pursued by Bush and Blair – all set against the background of former US aggressions and occupations, including particularly good commentary on the US invasions of the Philippines and Vietnam. …
It is illuminating to learn that, in not probing the Bush policies on Iraq, even the New York Times and the Washington Post are now driven to admit that they have served the criminal propaganda for war, though they do not put the matter in quite these terms.
Nonetheless, they say that “coverage was not as rigorous as it should have been” and “we didn’t pay enough attention” to those voices raising questions about the war.
It is useful also to see emphasis on the oil factor.
I am always amazed to see how many broadcast discussions of Iraq contain no mention of the US lust for energy resources – as if it is impolite for respectable pundits to raise such inconvenient considerations. …
We should also remember a 2003 quotation, not in this book, by Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld‘s deputy in the Pentagon: “Economically, we had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Resume of a Yale acquaintance in the oil business*
Posted by: “hapi22” hapi22@earthlink.net robinsegg
Date: Wed Jun 14, 2006 8:18 am (PDT)
I found this on a bulletin board and thought it was too delicious not to
share it with you.
This is all true.
————————————————————————
MID-CAREER-TRANSITION Digest for Sunday, June 11, 2006.
Resume of a Yale acquaintance in the oil business- any recommendations,
tips what should be added or deleted?
———————————————————————-
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:
COLLEGE: I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a
cheerleader.
MILITARY: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused
to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By
joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in
Vietnam.
LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for
driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and
had my driver’s license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record
has been “lost” and is not available.
PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:
001 – I ran for U.S. Congress and lost.
002 – I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, in 1975.
003 – I bought an oil company, but couldn’t find any oil in Texas. The
company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
004 – I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that
took land using taxpayer money.
005 – With the help of my father and our right-wing friends in the oil
industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:
006 – I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies,
making Texas the most polluted state in the Union.
007 – During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most
smog-ridden city in America.
008 – I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of
billions in borrowed money. 008 – I set the record for the most
executions by any governor in American history.
—
ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:
010 – I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a
criminal record.
011 – I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over
one billion dollars per week.
012 – I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S.
Treasury.
013 – I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S.
history.
014 – I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in
any 12-month period.
015 – I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month
period.
016 – In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their
jobs and that figure has risen to over 3 million lost jobs by the end of
2003.
017 – I’m proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any
administration in U.S. history. My “poorest millionaire,” Condoleezza
Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
018 – I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S.
President.
019 – I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the
most corporate campaign donations.
020 – My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best
friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy
fraud in U.S. history, Enron.
021 – My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys
to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election
decision.
022 – I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against
investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent
investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent
investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.
023 – I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and
refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was
revealed.
024 – I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.
026 – I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be
awarded government contracts.
027 – I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any
President in U.S. history.
028 – I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest
bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.
029 – I’ve broken more international treaties than any President in U.S.
history.
030 – I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United
Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.
031 – I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.
032 – I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. “prisoners of war”
detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.
033 – I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations
election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).
034 – I set the record for fewest number of press conferences of any
President since the advent of television.
035 – I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any
one-year period.
036 – After taking off the entire month of August 2001, I presided over
the worst security failure in U.S. history.
037 – I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade
Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated
country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.
038 – I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to
simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people),
shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of
mankind.
039 – I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked,
pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I
did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S.
citizens, and the world community.
040 – I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut
in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families – in wartime.
041 – In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for
attacking Iraq, then blamed the lies on our British friends.
04 – I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans
(71%) view my presidency as the single biggest threat to world peace and
security.
043 – I am supporting development of a nuclear “Tactical Bunker Buster,”
a WMD.
044 – I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden
to justice
RECORDS AND REFERENCES:
045 – All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my
father’s library, sealed and unavailable for public view.
046 – All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my
bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public
view.
047 – All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-
President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy
and unavailable for public review
PLEASE CONSIDER ALL THE EXPERIENCE WHEN HIRING.
PLEASE SEND THIS FINE RESUME TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.
LikeLike
Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam
By Melvin R. Laird From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005
Summary: During Richard Nixon’s first term, when I served as secretary
of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up
the South’s ability to defend itself. The result was a success — until
Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding
for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now,
but this time finish the job properly.
MELVIN R. LAIRD was Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973, Counselor to
the President for Domestic Affairs from 1973 to 1974, and a member of
the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1969. He currently serves as
Senior Counselor for National and International Affairs at the Reader’s
Digest Association.
SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on the assumption that he had a plan
to end the Vietnam War. He didn’t have any such plan, and my job as his
first secretary of defense was to remedy that — quickly. The only
stated plan was wording I had suggested for the 1968 Republican
platform, saying it was time to de-Americanize the war. Today, nearly 37
years after Nixon took office as president and I left Congress to join
his cabinet, getting out of a war is still dicier than getting into one,
as President George W. Bush can attest.
There were two things in my office that first day that gave my mission
clarity. The first was a multivolume set of binders in my closet safe
that contained a top-secret history of the creeping U.S. entry into the
war that had occurred on the watch of my predecessor, Robert McNamara.
The report didn’t remain a secret for long: it was soon leaked to The
New York Times, which nicknamed it “the Pentagon Papers.” I always
referred to the study as “the McNamara Papers,” to give credit where
credit belonged. I didn’t read the full report when I moved into the
office. I had already spent seven years on the Defense Subcommittee of
the House Appropriations Committee listening to McNamara justify the
escalation of the war. How we got into Vietnam was no longer my concern.
(Although, in retrospect, those papers offered a textbook example of how
not to commit American military might.)
The second item was another secret document, this one shorter and
infinitely more troubling. It was a one-year-old request from General
William Westmoreland to raise the U.S. troop commitment in Vietnam from
500,000 to 700,000. At the time he had made the request, Westmoreland
was the commander of U.S. forces there. As soon as the idea had reached
the ears of President Lyndon Johnson, Westmoreland’s days in Saigon were
numbered. Johnson bumped him upstairs to be army chief of staff, so that
the Pentagon bureaucracy could dilute his more-is-better philosophy
during the coming presidential campaign.
The memo had remained in limbo in the defense secretary’s desk, neither
approved nor rejected. As my symbolic first act in office, it gave me
great satisfaction to turn down that request formally. It was the
beginning of a four-year withdrawal from Vietnam that, in retrospect,
became the textbook description of how the U.S. military should decamp.
Others who were not there may differ with this description. But they
have been misinformed by more than 30 years of spin about the Vietnam
War. The resulting legacy of that misinformation has left the United
States timorous about war, deeply averse to intervening in even a just
cause, and dubious of its ability to get out of a war once it is in one.
All one need whisper is “another Vietnam,” and palms begin to sweat. I
have kept silent for those 30 years because I never believed that the
old guard should meddle in the business of new administrations,
especially during a time of war. But the renewed vilification of our
role in Vietnam in light of the war in Iraq has prompted me to speak out.
Some who should know better have made our current intervention in Iraq
the most recent in a string of bogeymen peeking out from under the bed,
spawned by the nightmares of Vietnam that still haunt us. The ranks of
the misinformed include seasoned politicians, reporters, and even
veterans who earned their stripes in Vietnam, but who have since used
that war as their bully pulpit to mold an isolationist American foreign
policy. This camp of doomsayers includes Senator Edward Kennedy, who has
called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam.” Those who wallow in such Vietnam
angst would have us be not only reticent to help the rest of the world,
but ashamed of our ability to do so, and doubtful of the value of
spreading democracy and of the superiority of freedom itself. They join
their voices with those who claim that the current war is “all about
oil,” as though the loss of that oil were not enough of a global
security threat to merit any U.S. military intervention and especially
not “another Vietnam.”
The Vietnam War that I saw, first from my seat in Congress and then as
secretary of defense, cannot be wrapped in a tidy package and tagged
“bad idea.” It was far more complex than that: a mixture of good and
evil from which there are many valuable lessons to be learned. Yet the
only lesson that seems to have endured is the one that begins and ends
with “Don’t go there.” The war in Iraq is not “another Vietnam.” But it
could become one if we continue to use Vietnam as a sound bite while
ignoring its true lessons.
I acknowledge and respect the raw emotions of those who fought in
Vietnam, those who lost loved ones, and those who protested, and I also
respect the sacrifice of those who died following orders of people such
as myself, half a world away. Those raw emotions are once again being
felt as our young men and women die in Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot
speak for the dead or the angry. My voice is that of a policymaker, one
who once decided which causes were worth fighting for, how long the
fight should last, and when it was time to go home. The president, as
our commander-in-chief, has the overall responsibility for making these
life-or-death decisions, in consultation with Congress. The secretary of
defense must be supportive of those decisions, or else he must leave.
It is time for a reasonable look at both Vietnam and Iraq — and at what
the former can teach us about the latter. My perspective comes from
military service in the Pacific in World War II (I still carry shrapnel
in my body from a kamikaze attack on my destroyer, the U.S.S. Maddox),
nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and four years as
secretary of defense to Nixon.
Today, we deserve a view of history that is based on facts rather than
emotional distortions and the party line of tired politicians who play
on emotions. Mine is not a rosy view of the Vietnam War. I didn’t miss
the fact that it was an ugly, mismanaged, tragic episode in U.S.
history, with devastating loss of life for all sides. But there are
those in our nation who would prefer to pick at that scab rather than
let it heal. They wait for opportunities to trot out the Vietnam demons
whenever another armed intervention is threatened. For them, Vietnam is
an insurance policy that pretends to guarantee peace at home as long as
we never again venture abroad. Certain misconceptions about that
conflict, therefore, need to be exposed and abandoned in order to
restore confidence in the United States’ nation-building ability.
STAYING THE COURSE
The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget
is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In
fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when
Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to
continue to fight on its own. Over the four years of Nixon’s first term,
I had cautiously engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces
while building up South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself. My colleague
and friend Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, had negotiated a viable agreement
between North and South Vietnam, which was signed in January 1973. It
allowed for the United States to withdraw completely its few remaining
troops, and for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue
funding their respective allies in the war at a specified level. Each
superpower was permitted to pay for replacement arms and equipment.
Documents released from North Vietnamese historical files in recent
years have proved that the Soviets violated the treaty from the moment
the ink was dry, continuing to send more than $1 billion a year to
Hanoi. The United States barely stuck to the allowed amount of military
aid for two years, and that was a mere fraction of the Soviet contribution.
Yet during those two years, South Vietnam held its own courageously and
respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued
between the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut
off U.S. funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never
returned. Without U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We
saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South
Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973.
I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside
resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I
believe Iraq can do the same now. From the Tet offensive in 1968 up to
the fall of Saigon in 1975, South Vietnam never lost a major battle. The
Tet offensive itself was a victory for South Vietnam and devastated the
North Vietnamese army, which lost 289,000 men in 1968 alone. Yet the
overriding media portrayal of the Tet offensive and the war thereafter
was that of defeat for the United States and the Saigon government. Just
so, the overriding media portrayal of the Iraq war is one of failure and
futility.
Vietnam gave the United States the reputation for not supporting its
allies. The shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the first
place, but that we betrayed our ally in the end. It was Congress that
turned its back on the promises of the Paris accord. The president, the
secretary of state, and the secretary of defense must share the blame.
In the end, they did not stand up for the commitments our nation had
made to South Vietnam. Any president or cabinet officer who is turned
down by Congress when he asks for funding for a matter of national
security or defense simply has not tried hard enough. There is no excuse
for that failure. In my four years at the Pentagon, when public support
for the Vietnam War was at its nadir, Congress never turned down any
requests for the war effort or Defense Department programs. These were
tense moments, but I got the votes and the appropriations. A defense
secretary’s relationship with Congress is second only to his
relationship with the men and women in uniform. Both must be able to
trust him, and both must know that he respects them. If not, Congress
will not fund, and the soldiers, sailors, and air personnel will not follow.
Donald Rumsfeld has been my friend for more than 40 years. Gerald Ford
and I went to Evanston to support him in his first congressional race,
and I urged President Bush to appoint him secretary of defense. But his
overconfident and self-assured style on every issue, while initially
endearing him to the media, did not play well with Congress during his
first term. My friends in Congress tell me Rumsfeld has modified his
style of late, wisely becoming more collegial. Several secretaries
during my service on the Appropriations Committee, running all the way
from the tenure of Charlie Wilson to that of Clark Clifford, made the
mistake of thinking they must appear much smarter than the elected
officials to whom they reported. It doesn’t always work.
If Rumsfeld wants something from those who are elected to make decisions
for the American people, then he must continue to show more deference to
Congress. To do otherwise will endanger public support and the funding
stream for the Iraq war and its future requirements. A sour relationship
on Capitol Hill could doom the whole effort. The importance of this
solidarity between Congress and the administration did not escape Saddam
Hussein, nor has it escaped the insurgents. In the days leading up to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, television stations there showed 1975 footage
of U.S. embassy support personnel escaping to helicopters from the roof
of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. It was Saddam’s message to his people
that the United States does not keep its commitments and that we are
only as good as the word of our current president. We failed to deliver
the logistical support to our allies in South Vietnam during the
post-Watergate period because of a breakdown of leadership in
Washington. The failure of one administration to keep the promises of
another had a devastating effect on the North-South negotiations.
There are no guarantees of continuity in a partisan democracy. We are
making commitments as to the future of Iraq on an almost daily basis.
These commitments must be understood now so they can be honored later.
Every skirmish on the home front that betrays a lack of solidarity on
Iraq gives the insurgents more hope and ultimately endangers the men and
women we have sent to Iraq to fight in this war for us. We are now
committed to a favorable outcome in Iraq, but it must be understood that
this will require long-term assistance or our efforts will be in vain.
VIETNAMIZATION AS THE MODEL
Along with our abandonment of our allies, another great tragedy of
Vietnam was the Americanization of the war. This threatens to be the
tragedy of Iraq also. John F. Kennedy committed a few hundred military
advisers to Saigon. Johnson saw Southeast Asia as the place to stop the
spread of communism, and he spared no expense or personnel. By the time
Nixon and I inherited the war in 1969, there were more than half a
million U.S. troops in South Vietnam and 1.2 million more U.S. soldiers,
sailors, and air personnel supporting the war from aircraft carriers and
military bases in surrounding nations and at sea. The war needed to be
turned back to the people who cared about it, the Vietnamese. They
needed U.S. money and training but not more American blood. I called our
program “Vietnamization,” and in spite of the naysayers, I have not
ceased to believe that it worked.
Nixon was reelected in 1972 based in large part on our progress toward
ending U.S. direct involvement in the war, ending the draft, and
establishing the all-volunteer military service. His opponent that year,
George McGovern, made the war the primary issue of the campaign,
claiming that Democrats — the party in power that had escalated the war
to an intolerable level — would be the best folks to get us out.
McGovern lost because the American people didn’t agree with him.
We need to put our resources and unwavering public support behind a
program of “Iraqization” so that we can get out of Iraq and leave the
Iraqis in a position to protect themselves. The Iraq war should have
been focused on Iraqization even before the first shot was fired. The
focus is there now, and Americans should not lose heart.
We came belatedly to Vietnamization; nonetheless, there are certain
principles we followed in Vietnam that would be helpful in Iraq. The
most important is that the administration must adhere to a standard of
competence for the Iraqi security forces, and when that standard is met,
U.S. troops should be withdrawn in corresponding numbers. That is the
way it worked in Vietnam, from the first withdrawal of 50,000 troops in
1969 to the last prisoner of war off the plane in January of 1973.
Likewise, in Iraq, the United States should not let too many more weeks
pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed
forces by withdrawing a few thousand U.S. troops from the country. We
owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit
strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people. The
readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100 percent, nor must the new
democracy be perfect before we begin our withdrawal. The immediate need
is to show our confidence that Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own
terms. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual
withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis
to stand up to the insurgency.
I gave President Nixon the same advice about Vietnam from our first day
in office. As secretary of defense, I took the initiative in the spring
of 1969 to change our mission statement for Vietnam from one of applying
maximum pressure against the enemy to one of giving maximum assistance
to South Vietnam to fight its own battles. Then, the opponents of our
withdrawal were the South Vietnamese government, which we had turned
into a dependent, and some in our own military who harbored delusions of
total victory in Southeast Asia using American might. Even if such a
victory had been possible, it was wrong to Americanize the war from the
beginning, and by that point the patience of the American people had run
out.
Even with the tide of public opinion running against the war, withdrawal
was not an easy sell inside the Nixon administration. Our first round of
withdrawals was announced after a conference between Nixon and South
Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu on Midway Island in June 1969. I
had already softened the blow for Thieu by visiting him in Saigon in
March, at which point I told him the spigot was being turned off. He
wanted more U.S. soldiers, as did almost everyone in the U.S. chain of
command, from the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down. For each
round of troop withdrawals from Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs suggested a
miserly number based on what they thought they still needed to win the
war. I bumped those numbers up, always in counsel with General Creighton
Abrams, then the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Even Nixon, who
had promised to end the war, accepted each troop-withdrawal request from
me grudgingly. It took four years to bring home half a million troops.
At times, it seemed my only ally was General Abrams. He understood what
the others did not: that the American people’s patience for the war had
worn thin.
Bush is not laboring under similar handicaps in his military. His
commanders share his goal of letting Iraq take care of itself as soon as
its fledgling democracy is ready. And, for the moment, there is still
patience at home for a commonsensical, phased drawdown. In fact, the
voices expressing the most patience about a sensible withdrawal and the
most support for the progress of Iraqi soldiers are coming from within
the U.S. military. These people are also the most eager to see the
mission succeed and the most willing to see it through to the end. It is
they who are at high risk and who are the ones being asked to serve not
one but multiple combat tours. They are dedicated and committed to a
mission that ranges from the toughest combat to the most elementary
chores of nation building. We should listen to them, and trust them.
In those four years of Vietnamization, I never once publicly promised a
troop number for withdrawal that I couldn’t deliver. President Bush
should move ahead with the same certainty. I also did not announce what
our quantitative standards for readiness among the South Vietnamese
troops were, just as Bush should not make public his specific standards
for determining when Iraqi troops are ready to go it alone. In a report
to Congress in July 2005, the Pentagon hinted that those measurable
standards are in place. However, it would be a mistake for the president
to rely solely on the numbers. Instead, his top commander in the field
should have the final say on how many U.S. troops can come home,
commensurate with the readiness of Iraqi forces. If Bush does not trust
his commander’s judgment, as I trusted General Abrams, Bush should
replace him with someone he does trust. That trust must be conveyed to
the American people, too, if they are to be patient with an orderly
withdrawal of our troops.
THE PRETEXT FOR WAR
In this business of trust, President Bush got off to a bad start. Nixon
had the same problem. Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were
launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception.
The issue was much more egregious in the case of Vietnam, where the
intelligence lapses were born of our failure to understand what
motivated Ho Chi Minh in the 1950s. Had we understood the depth of his
nationalism, we might have been able to derail his communism early on.
The infamous pretext for leaping headlong into the Vietnam War was the
Gulf of Tonkin incident. My old destroyer, the U.S.S. Maddox, was
patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin 25 miles off the coast of North Vietnam on
August 2, 1964, when it was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo
boats. That solitary attack would have been written off as an
aberration, but two days later the U.S.S. Maddox, joined then by the
U.S.S. Turner Joy, reported that it was under attack again. From all I
was able to determine when I read the dispatches five years later as
secretary of defense, there was no second attack. There was confusion,
hysteria, and miscommunication on a dark night. President Johnson and
Defense Secretary McNamara either dissembled or misinterpreted the
faulty intelligence, and McNamara hotfooted it over to Capitol Hill with
a declaration that was short of war but that resulted in a war anyway.
I, along with 501 colleagues in the House and Senate, voted for the
Tonkin Gulf resolution, which was Johnson’s ticket to escalate our role
in Vietnam. Until then, the United States had been part bystander, part
covert combatant, and part adviser.
In Iraq, the intelligence blunder concerned Saddam’s nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction, which in the end may or may not have been Bush’s
real motivation for going to war. My view is that it was better to find
that Saddam had not progressed as far as we thought in his WMD
development than to discover belatedly that he had. Whatever the truth
about WMD in Iraq, it cannot be said that the United States slipped
gradually, covertly, or carelessly into Iraq, as we did into Vietnam.
MARKETING THE MISSION
The mistake on the question of WMD in Iraq has led many to complain that
the United States was drawn into the war under false pretenses, that
what began as self-defense has morphed into nation building. Welcome to
the reality of war. It is neither predictable nor tidy. This generation
of Americans was spoiled by the quick-and-clean Operation Desert Storm,
in 1991, when the first President Bush adhered to the mission, freed
Kuwait, and brought home the troops. How would Iraq look today if George
H.W. Bush had changed that mission on the fly and ordered a march to
Baghdad and the overthrow of Saddam? The truth is, wars are fluid things
and missions change. This is more the rule than the exception. It was
true in Vietnam, and it is true in Iraq today.
The early U.S. objective in Southeast Asia was to stop the spread of
communism. With changes in the relationship between the Soviet Union and
China and the 1965 suppression of the communist movement in Indonesia,
the threat of a communist empire diminished. Unwilling to abandon South
Vietnam, the United States changed its mission to self-determination for
Vietnam.
The current President Bush was persuaded that we would find WMD in Iraq
and did what he felt he had to do with the information he was given.
When we did not find the smoking gun, it would have been unconscionable
to pack up our tanks and go home. Thus, there is now a new mission, to
transform Iraq, and it is not a bad plan. Bush sees Iraq as the
frontline in the war on terror — not because terrorists dominate there,
but because of the opportunity to displace militant extremists’ Islamist
rule throughout the region. Bush’s greatest strength is that terrorists
believe he is in this fight to the end. I have no patience for those who
can’t see that big picture, and who continue to view Iraq as a failed
attempt to find WMD. Now, because Iraq has been set on a new course,
Bush has an opportunity to reshape the region. “Nation building” is not
an epithet or a slogan. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is
our duty.
Unfortunately, Bush has done an uneven job of selling his message,
particularly since he was relieved of the pressure of reelection. Nixon
lost his leadership leverage because of Watergate and thus lost ground
in the battle for public support. By contrast, I believe the American
people would still want to follow Bush if they had a clear understanding
of what was at stake. Recent polls showing a waning of support for the
war are a sign to the president that he needs to level with the American
people. When troops are dying, the commander-in-chief cannot be coy,
vague, or secretive. We learned that in Vietnam, too.
Bush is losing the public relations war by making the same strategic
mistakes we made in Vietnam. General Abrams frequently spoke to me about
his frustration with the war that the U.S. media portrayed at home and
how it contrasted with the war he was seeing up close. His sense of
defeat in his own public relations war, with its 500-plus reporters
based in Saigon, comes through in the hundreds of meetings held in his
office in Saigon — meetings that were taped for the record.
(Transcripts of those tapes are ably assembled and analyzed by Lewis
Sorley in his recent book, Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972.)
In Vietnam, correspondents roamed the country almost at will, and their
work brought home to the United States the first televised war. Until
that war, families back home worried about the welfare of their soldiers
but could not see the danger. Had the mothers and fathers of U.S.
soldiers serving in World War II seen a real-time CNN report of D-day in
the style of Saving Private Ryan, they might not have thought Europe was
worth saving. Operation Desert Storm married 24-hour cable news and war
for the first time. The embedding of journalists with combat units in
Iraq 12 years later was a solid idea, but it has meant that casualties
are captured on tape and then replayed on newscasts thousands of times.
The deaths of ten civilians in a suicide bombing are replayed and
analyzed and thus become the psychological equivalent of 10,000 deaths.
The danger to one U.S. soldier captured on tape becomes a threat to
everyone’s son or father or daughter or mother.
I have made too many phone calls to grieving families to ever downplay
the loss of even one life. But I have also been in combat, and it looks
different from the inside, from the viewpoint of those who volunteered
and trained to fight for just causes. For a soldier, ducking a sniper’s
bullet in downtown Baghdad is all in a day’s work, no matter how
alarming it looks on television. The soldier will shrug it off and walk
the same streets the next day if he believes in his mission. The key for
Bush is to communicate that same sense of mission to the people back
home. His west Texas cowboy approach — shoot first and answer questions
later, or do the job first and let the results speak for themselves —
is not working. With his propensity to wrap up a package and present it
as a fait accompli, Bush declared, “Mission accomplished!” at the end of
the major combat phase of the Iraq war. That was a well-earned high-five
for the military, but it soon became obvious that the mission had only
just begun.
_________________________________________________________________________
The president must articulate a simple message and mission. Just as the
spread of communism was very real in the 1960s, so the spread of radical
fundamentalist Islam is very real today. It was a creeping fear until
September 11, 2001, when it showed itself capable of threatening us.
Iraq was a logical place to fight back, with its secular government and
modern infrastructure and a populace that was ready to overthrow its
dictator. Our troops are not fighting there only to preserve the right
of Iraqis to vote. They are fighting to preserve modern culture, Western
democracy, the global economy, and all else that is threatened by the
spread of barbarism in the name of religion. That is the message and the
mission. It is not politically correct, nor is it comforting. But it is
the truth, and sometimes the truth needs good marketing.
_________________________________________________________________________
Condoleezza Rice is one person in the administration who understands and
has consistently and clearly stated this message. When she was national
security adviser, the media seemed determined to sideline her repeated
theme, perhaps because she was perceived as a mere water bearer for the
president. As secretary of state, she is in a better position to speak
independently. The administration should do its best to keep the
microphone in her hands.
BUILDING A LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT
As was the case in Vietnam, the task in Iraq involves building a new
society from the ground up. Two Vietnam experts, Jeffrey Record and W.
Andrew Terrill, recently produced an exhaustive comparison of the
Vietnam and Iraq wars for the Army War College. They note that in both
wars, the United States sought to establish a legitimate indigenous
government. In Iraq, the goal is a democratic government, whereas in
Vietnam the United States would have settled for any regime that
advanced our Cold War agenda.
Those who call the new Iraqi government Washington’s “puppet” don’t know
what a real puppet government is. The Iraqis are as eager to be on their
own as we are to have them succeed. In Vietnam, an American, Ambassador
Philip Habib, wrote the constitution in 1967. Elections were
choreographed by the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who
were no more than dictators in the garb of statesmen.
Little wonder that the passionate nationalists in the North came off as
the group with something to offer. I do not personally believe the
Saigon government was fated to fall apart someday through lack of
integrity, and apparently the Soviet Union didn’t think so either or it
would not have pursued the war. But it is true that the U.S.
administrations at the time severely underestimated the need for a
legitimate government in South Vietnam and instead assumed that a shadow
government and military force could win the day. In Iraq, a legitimate
government, not window-dressing, must be the primary goal. The factious
process of writing the Iraqi constitution has been painful to watch, and
the varying factions must be kept on track. But the process is healthy
and, more important, homegrown.
In hindsight, we can look at the Vietnam War as a success story —
albeit a costly one — in nation building, even though the democracy we
sought halfheartedly to build failed. Three decades ago, Asia really was
threatened by the spread of communism. The Korean War was a fresh
memory. In Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even
India, communist movements were gaining a foothold. They failed in large
part because the United States drew a line at Vietnam that distracted
and sucked resources away from its Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union.
Similarly, the effect of our stand in Iraq is already being felt around
the Middle East. Opposition parties are demanding to be heard. Veiled
women are insisting on a voice. Syrian troops have left Lebanon. Egypt
has held an election. Iran is being pressured by the United States and
Europe alike on its development of nuclear weapons. The voices for
change are building in Saudi Arabia. The movement even has a name:
Kifaya — “Enough!” The parasites who have made themselves fat by
promoting ignorance, fear, and repression in the region are squirming.
These are baby steps, but that is where running begins.
INSURGENTS AS ENEMIES
Insurgents were and are the enemy in both wars, and insurgencies fail
without outside funding. In Vietnam, the insurgents were heavily funded
and well equipped by the Soviet Union. They followed a powerful and
charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh, who nurtured their passionate
nationalist goals. In Iraq, the insurgency is fragmented, with no
identifiable central leadership and no unifying theology, strategy, or
vision other than to get the United States out of the region. If that
goal were accomplished now, they would turn on each other, as they
already have done in numerous skirmishes. Although they do rely on
outside funding, their benefactors are fickle and without deep pockets.
There is no way of counting the precise number of insurgents in the Iraq
war, but it appears to be in the thousands, which in comparative terms
is paltry. Communist forces in Vietnam numbered well over 1 million in
1973. North Vietnam, over the course of the war, lost 1.1 million
soldiers and 2 million civilians, and yet they were willing to fight on
and we were not. Why? Record and Terrill say the key to understanding
any war in which a weaker side prevails over a stronger one is the
concept of the “asymmetry of stakes.” Victory meant everything to North
Vietnam and nothing to the average American. We had few economic
interests in Vietnam. Our national security interest — preventing the
domino scenario, in which the entire world would fall under the sway of
communism if we lost Southeast Asia — didn’t have enough currency to
carry the day.
It is a very different story in Iraq, where the Bush administration
hopes to implant democracy side by side with Islam. The stakes could not
be higher for the continued existence of our own democracy and, yes, for
the significant matter of oil. We are not the only nation dependent on
Persian Gulf oil. We share that dependency with every industrialized
nation on the planet. Picture those oil reserves in the hands of
religious extremists whose idea of utopia is to knock the world economy
and culture back more than a millennium to the dawn of Islam.
Bush’s belief that he can replace repression with democracy is not some
neoconservative fantasy. Our support of democracy dates from the
founding of our nation. Democracies are simply better for the planet.
Witness the courage of the Iraqi people who shocked the world and defied
all the pessimists by showing up to vote in January 2005, even with guns
pointed at their heads. The enemies of freedom in Iraq know what a
powerful message that was to the rest of the Arab world, otherwise they
would not have responded by escalating the violence.
Although Vietnam may have been a success story when it came to defeating
an insurgency, the domestic insurgency — conducted by the Vietcong —
was unfortunately only one front in the war, the larger front being the
conventional military forces of North Vietnam. The Vietcong were largely
suppressed by a combination of persuasion and force. A similar
combination of deadly force against the Iraqi insurgency’s leaders and
incentives to co-opt their followers may work in Iraq, where the
insurgency is the only enemy.
Vietnam, however, should be a cautionary tale when fighting guerrilla
style, whether it be in the streets or in the jungle. Back then,
frightened and untrained U.S. troops were ill equipped to govern their
baser instincts and fears. Countless innocent civilians were killed in
the indiscriminate hunt for Vietcong among the South Vietnamese
peasantry. Some of the worst historical memories of the Vietnam War stem
from those atrocities. Our volunteer troops in Iraq are better trained
and supervised, yet the potential remains for a slaughter of innocents.
Reports have already surfaced of skittish American soldiers shooting
Iraqi civilians in acts that can only be attributed to poor training and
discipline.
To stop abuses and mistakes by the rank and file, whether in the prisons
or on the streets, heads must roll at much higher levels than they have
thus far. I well remember the unexpected public support for Lieutenant
William Calley, accused in the massacre of civilians in the village of
My Lai. The massacre did not occur on my watch, but Calley’s trial did,
and Americans flooded the White House with letters of protest, when it
appeared that Calley would be the scapegoat while his superiors walked
free. The best way to keep foot soldiers honest is to make sure their
commanders know that they themselves will be held responsible for any
breach of honor.
For me, the alleged prison scandals reported to have occurred in Iraq,
in Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay have been a disturbing reminder of
the mistreatment of our own POWs by North Vietnam. The conditions in our
current prison camps are nowhere near as horrific as they were at the
“Hanoi Hilton”, but that is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. The
minute we begin to deport prisoners to other nations where they can
legally be tortured, when we hold people without charges or trial, when
we move prisoners around to avoid the prying inspections of the Red
Cross, when prisoners die inexplicably on our watch, we are on a
slippery slope toward the inhumanity that we deplore. In Vietnam, I made
sure we always took the high ground with regard to the treatment of
enemy prisoners. I opened our prison camps wide to international
inspectors, so that we could demand the same from Hanoi. In Iraq, there
are no American POWs being held in camps by the insurgents. There are
only murder victims whose decapitated bodies are left for us to find.
But that does not give us license to be brutal in return.
LIMITED WARFARE
Our commanders in Iraq have another advantage over those in Vietnam:
President Bush seems unlikely to be whipsawed by public opinion, but
will take the war to wherever the enemy rears its head. In Vietnam, we
waged a ground war in the South and did not permit our troops to cross
into North Vietnam. The air war over the North and in Laos and Cambodia
was waged in fits and starts, in secret and in the open, covered by lies
and subterfuge, manipulated more by opinion polls than by military
exigencies. In the early years, the services squabbled with one another.
Even the State Department was allowed to veto air strikes. President
Johnson stayed up late calling the plays while generals were sidelined.
In all, 2.8 million Americans served in and around Vietnam during the
war, yet less than ten percent of them were in-line infantry units, the
men we think of as our Vietnam veterans. Men were drafted and given a
few weeks of training before being attached to a unit of strangers. With
few exceptions, our all-volunteer military in Iraq is motivated, well
trained, well equipped, and in cohesive units. This is not to say that
any of these troops want to be there. They don’t. Yet they are far more
motivated to fight this war than were the average conscripts in Vietnam.
They are also part of a much smarter military, thanks in large part to
the lessons of Vietnam. In 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of
Defense Reorganization Act, with input from some veterans of my team at
the Pentagon, cleaned up many of the command problems that hindered us
in Vietnam and for a decade thereafter. The old system encouraged the
Joint Chiefs of Staff to be anything but joint. They protected their
fiefdoms and withheld cooperation from one another. The
Goldwater-Nichols act centralized authority in the chair of the Joint
Chiefs as the primary adviser to the president and the secretary of
defense. The separate services are now responsible for training their
people for war, but the area commanders who run the wars control all the
assets. Today’s soldiers, sailors, and air personnel can also be more
secure knowing that the people who make life-or-death decisions
represent a better balance between military expertise and the will of
the people as expressed through their elected officials.
Such confidence is critical to sustaining an all-volunteer military. As
the secretary of defense who ended the draft in 1972, I see no need to
return to conscription, even now that the prospect of combat has
somewhat dampened the enthusiasm for military service. As long as
servicepeople — current and future — know where their president is
leading them, the enlistments will follow.
As it did in Vietnam, in Iraq the enemy has sought to weaken the United
States’ will by dragging out the hostilities. In Vietnam, that strategy
was reflected in a bottomless well of men, sophisticated arms, and
energy the enemy threw into the fight. Similarly in Iraq, the insurgents
have pinpointed the weakness of the American public’s will and hope to
exploit it on a much smaller scale, with the weapon of choice being the
improvised explosive device, strapped to one person, loaded into a car
or hidden at a curb, and with the resulting carnage then played over and
over again on the satellite feed. But one lesson learned from Vietnam
that is not widely recognized is that fear of casualties is not the
prime motivator of the American people during a war. American soldiers
will step up to the plate, and the American public will tolerate loss of
life, if the conflict has worthy, achievable goals that are clearly
espoused by the administration and if their leadership deals honestly
with them.
Such was not the case in Vietnam. When President Nixon ordered the
secret bombing of Cambodia, I protested vigorously. I did not oppose the
bombing itself, as I believed the United States should fight the war as
it needed to be fought — wherever the enemy was hiding — or not fight
it at all. What I opposed was the deception. Behind closed doors, my
opinion was so well known that when the secret was exposed, as I knew it
would be, I was immediately and wrongly pinpointed as being the leak.
The president approved Kissinger’s order to the FBI to tap my military
assistant’s home phone, hoping to catch the two of us in a plot to leak
secrets. Americans will not be lied to, and they will not tolerate
secrets nor be sidelined in a war debate. As with the Vietnam War, if
necessary they will take to the streets to be heard.
AT WHAT COST?
The greatest cost of war is human suffering. But every war has its
monetary price tag, too, even if it is rarely felt in real time. As with
Vietnam, the Iraq war is revealing chinks in our fiscal armor. Only
after the Vietnam War ended did its drain on the U.S. economy become
apparent. During the war, our military readiness to fight other
conflicts was precarious. Billions of dollars were drained away from
other missions to support the war. It became a juggling act to support
our forces around the world. I reduced our contingent in Korea by 29,000
men, and I persuaded Japan to begin paying the bills for its post-World
War II defense by our troops. In retrospect, those two steps were
positive results from the financial drain that the Vietnam War caused.
But there were plenty of other places where the belt-tightening
suffocated good programs. The Army Reserve and National Guard units fell
into disrepair. President Johnson chose to draft the unwilling, rather
than use trained reservists and National Guard soldiers and air
personnel. As unpopular as the draft was, it was still an easier sell
for Johnson than deploying whole National Guard and Reserve units out of
the communities in middle America. So the second-string troops stayed
home and saw their budgets cannibalized. Their training was third-rate
and their equipment secondhand. Now, in our post-Vietnam wisdom, we have
embraced the “total force” concept. After two decades of retooling, most
National Guard units and reservists were better prepared to respond when
called up for Operation Desert Storm.
Yet, because of pandering to the butter-not-guns crowd, we still do not
spend enough of our total budget on national defense. The annual U.S.
GDP is in excess of $11.5 trillion. The percentage of GDP going to the
Defense Department amounts to 3.74 percent. In 1953, during the Korean
War, it was 14 percent. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, it was nearly
10 percent — an amount that sapped domestic programs and ended up
demoralizing President Johnson because he could not maintain his Great
Society social programs. Now our spending priorities have shifted to
social programs, with 6.8 percent of GDP, for example, going to Social
Security and Medicare. That is more than twice what it was during the
Vietnam War.
It will not be easy or popular to reverse the downward trend in defense
spending. But the realities of the global threat of terrorism and the
outside possibility of conventional warfare with an enemy such as China
or North Korea demand that we take off the blinders. To increase defense
spending to 4 percent of GDP would be adequate, but it is especially
important to increase the share of the pie spent on the U.S. Army. It
now gets 24 percent of the total Defense Department budget, but given
the new realities of modern warfare, it should receive at least 28
percent. The army is currently strung along through the budget year with
special appropriations, and that is no way to run a military service.
Reserve and National Guard units are understaffed and have been abused
by deployments that have taken individuals out of their units to serve
as de facto army regulars, many in specialties for which they have not
been trained, a practice that eats at the morale of reservists. Nearly
80 percent of the airlift capacity for this war and about 48 percent of
the troops have come from Reserve and National Guard units. The high
percentages are due, in part, to the specialized missions of those
troops: transporting cargo, policing, rebuilding infrastructure,
translating, conducting government affairs — in short, the stuff of
building a new nation. We have realized too late that our regular army
forces have not been as well trained as they should have been for the
new reality of an urban insurgent enemy. Nor was the military hierarchy
paying serious attention to the hints that their mission in the
twenty-first century would be nation building.
Secretary Rumsfeld is trying to reshape the army to be more mobile with
fewer soldiers, in “units of action” built on the Special Forces model.
But he is not being honest with himself or with Congress and the
American people about how much money will be needed to make the
transformation. Those specialized units will be more suited for urban
guerrilla warfare, but light and lean is not the only way to maintain
our military. Although guerrilla warfare looks like the wave of the
future, we still face the specter of conventional divisional and corps
warfare against other enemies. Both capabilities are expensive, but the
downward trend of defense budgets does not recognize that. Except for
bumps up in the Ronald Reagan years and during the Gulf War, the defense
budget has been on a downward slide when viewed in constant dollars. We
are coasting on the investments in research, development, and equipment
made during earlier years.
SHORING UP OUR ALLIES
Our pattern of fighting our battles alone or with a marginal “coalition
of the willing” contributes to the downward spiral in resources and
money. Ironically, Nixon had the answer back in 1969. At the heart of
the Nixon Doctrine, announced that first year of his presidency, was the
belief that the United States could not go it alone. As he said in his
foreign policy report to Congress on February 18, 1970, the United
States will participate in the defense and development of allies and
friends, but “America cannot — and will not — conceive all the plans,
design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the
defense of the free nations of the world. We will help where it makes a
real difference and is considered in our interest” (emphasis in the
original).
Three decades later, we have fallen into a pattern of neglecting our
treaty alliances, such as NATO, and endangering the aid we can give our
allies by throwing our resources into fights that our allies refuse to
join. Vietnam was just such a fight, and Iraq is, too. If our treaty
alliances were adequately tended to and shored up — and here I include
the UN — we would not have so much trouble persuading others to join us
when our cause is just. Still, as the only superpower, there will be
times when we must go it alone.
President Bush does not have the luxury of waiting for the international
community to validate his policies in Iraq. But we do have the lessons
of Vietnam. In Vietnam, the voices of the “cut-and-run” crowd ultimately
prevailed, and our allies were betrayed after all of our work to set
them on their feet. Those same voices would now have us cut and run from
Iraq, assuring the failure of the fledgling democracy there and damning
the rest of the Islamic world to chaos fomented by extremists. Those who
look only at the rosy side of what defeat did to help South Vietnam get
to where it is today see a growing economy there and a warming of
relations with the West. They forget the immediate costs of the United
States’ betrayal. Two million refugees were driven out of the country,
65,000 more were executed, and 250,000 were sent to “reeducation camps.”
Given the nature of the insurgents in Iraq and the catastrophic goals of
militant Islam, we can expect no better there.
As one who orchestrated the end of our military role in Vietnam and then
saw what had been a workable plan fall apart, I agree that we cannot
allow “another Vietnam.” For if we fail now, a new standard will have
been set. The lessons of Vietnam will be forgotten, and our next global
mission will be saddled with the fear of its becoming “another Iraq.”
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