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Another Old Guard
Republican defects from Reagan’s 11th Commandment (“thou shalt not
speak ill of another Republican” in public). However, a former
politician as well as Pentagon chief, he avoids the false premises for the
invasion and the ulterior motives for being there – except in his grandiose final
sentence, which we only hope is not taken as crusaderism. Maybe we should
compile a list of defectors. I
think it will be growing in the next few weeks…kwc Nixon's Vietnam-era
defense chief calls for Iraq exit plan
By Bryan Bender,
Globe Staff, October 19, 2005 WASHINGTON -- The
defense secretary who served under President Richard M. Nixon during the
Vietnam War is warning that the United States is repeating in Iraq some of the
mistakes that led to public disillusionment and ultimate defeat in Vietnam,
including the impression that there is no clear goal for victory or a detailed,
well-described plan to bring US troops home. Melvin R. Laird, who led the Defense Department in the final
years of the Vietnam War, writes in the next edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that most Americans want to see a
clearly defined exit strategy and will not tolerate an open-ended military
commitment in Iraq -- something that he said would make the fledgling Iraqi
government even more dependent on US forces and hinder its independence. In the article, which
breaks more than three decades of silence about his tenure during Vietnam, the
83-year-old Laird compares on-the-job lessons he learned from the US experience
in Southeast Asia with the ongoing US presence in Iraq and calls on Pres. Bush
to begin a phased
withdrawal of some troops on a one-for-one plan: When one newly trained Iraqi soldier is ready
to fight, one US soldier heads home. Bush, Laird writes, must also hold top
administration officials accountable for abuses of detainees in American
custody to restore US prestige in the region. ''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," writes Laird, a former
nine-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who served as Nixon's secretary
of defense from 1969 to 1973. ''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 US 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." He adds, ''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." Nixon recruited Laird
from Congress to help find a way to end the war, which had dragged on for
nearly a decade and claimed tens of thousands of US casualties. The jungle war
still raged throughout his four-year tenure, but Laird managed the withdrawal
of hundreds of thousands of US troops from Southeast Asia. He is also widely credited
for initiating the transition from a conscript military to a professional,
all-volunteer force and retooling the Army, which had been devastated by
Vietnam combat deaths and widespread drug abuse. Writing in the
November issue of Foreign Affairs, a national journal about foreign policy
published by the Council on Foreign Affairs, Laird argues that in Vietnam the
United States failed to pressure its allies in South Vietnam to take on a
greater role in battling the communists in the North: ''It was wrong to
Americanize the war [in Vietnam] from the beginning, and by that point the
patience of the American people had run out. The Iraq war should have been
focused on Iraqization even before the first shot was fired." Political comparisons
between Iraq and Vietnam have been largely avoided because of the obvious
political, geographical, and historical differences -- and the fear of
reopening old wounds. Vietnam fueled social division and upheaval in the United
States, stirring emotions that are still raw more than a generation later; last
year, when Senator Edward M. Kennedy called Iraq ''George Bush's Vietnam,"
outraged critics accused the Massachusetts Democrat of using the bitter war for
his own political gain. But as the bloody
battle with Iraqi insurgents stretches into its third year while public support
plummets and American and Iraqi casualties continue to climb, military
specialists and historians are increasingly noting the similarities between the
wars. Laird writes that the Vietnam analogy is being used to define Iraq as an
unwinnable war but that the United States could have met its goals in Southeast
Asia -- and can meet them in Iraq -- with the right plan. In his view, the Vietnam War and the deployment of US
troops to Iraq were both based on faulty assumptions; in Vietnam, the United States misinterpreted
the motives of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and underestimated the Viet Cong,
while the Iraq war began with the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons
of mass destruction. ''Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched
based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception," Laird
writes. The similarities continue, according to
the article:
As in Vietnam, US troops were sent to war in Iraq with little depth of
understanding about the history, culture, and ethnic divides of the nation in
which they were fighting. In Vietnam, troops were fighting a guerrilla war
where it's nearly impossible to tell friend from foe, much like in Iraq. Like
the Viet Cong, Iraqi insurgents have infiltrated the government and security
forces, and the president is losing credibility with the people over the war,
much like Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, his predecessor. Indeed, public
relations failures are the target of some of Laird's bluntest criticism of
Bush. ''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,"
he writes. ''When troops are dying, the commander in chief cannot be
coy, vague, or secretive. We learned that in Vietnam, too." Laird, who says he
kept silent until now ''because I never believed the old guard should meddle in
the business of new administrations," believes America has no choice but
to succeed in Iraq. ''Our troops are not fighting there only to preserve
the right of Iraqis to vote," he wrote. ''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." |
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