|
Hi, Karen, thanks for catching Laird’s opinion. But Laird misses the point: Iraq is already our next Vietnam.
Ill-conceived to begin, birthed in deceit, maintained through ignorance,
Americans still think it is up to us to decide when we will withdraw. It hasn’t
yet dawned on them that the US has lost the initiative, as we did in Vietnam.
It took Nixon and Kissinger three whole extra years to find a way out that they
were able to dub ‘honorable’, though the terms of our retreat were
available to us three years earlier. Three years of putting aside ego, spinning
the matter to the American people, three years of fake negotiations, three
years of additional US and Vietnamese deaths, three years of massive budgetary
losses. There may be one difference between Vietnam and Iraq: the
Vietnamese were glad to see us go. In Iraq, we may be faced with provocateurs
that want to see us bogged down there as long as they can do so. My sense
is that we will be lucky to get out, and that it is, politically and
militarily, no longer in our hands. Ironically, the ‘better’ we
fight there, the more we get ensnared. But the American people were naive enough to be tricked into
wanting this, and this is what they will get. In sadness, Lawry From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole 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." |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
