http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/809725.html
Saddam'd if he does, Saddam'd if he doesn't By Shmuel Rosner WASHINGTON - U.S. President Lyndon Johnson received the fateful memorandum on January 27, 1965. The national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, and the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, recommended one of two paths: pulling out of Vietnam, which would mean defeat, or increasing the number of troops in an effort to achieve victory. "Why did we escalate rather than withdraw amid a rapidly worsening situation? Why did we fail to foresee the implications of our actions?" McNamara asked in his book "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." Between the end of January and the end of July of 1965, Johnson undertook to increase the number of American soldiers in Vietnam from 23,000 to 175,000, leading to years of bloodletting that continued until the end of his term and well into that of his successor, Richard Nixon. Indeed, that period ended only during the term of Gerald Ford, with the resounding fall of Saigon, which had been so obviously on the cards. "[Donald] Rumsfeld and [Dick] Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said in an interview published posthumously by Bob Woodward in The Washington Post, last week. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do." Ford reserved his sharpest words for Vice President Cheney, who was his own chief of staff in the 1970s. He was an "excellent" chief of staff, Ford explained, but he became much more "pugnacious" as vice president. The former president went on to agree with the analysis of Cheney's bitter foe, former secretary of state Colin Powell, who said the vice president developed a "fever" about the terrorist threat and about Iraq. In other remarks published after his death, Ford was also critical of McNamara's book and his belated confession about the mistakes of Vietnam, saying, "If we were wrong, why did he participate?" Ford's death and the funeral which followed provided an appropriate concluding note for the holiday season. The American capital was enveloped in ceremonial sadness, the holiday was prolonged by one day, and a melancholy atmosphere of unity blew from the cold, high walls of the National Cathedral. Cheney's wife Lynne chatted with former President Jimmy Carter. Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of another Democratic president, held a whispered conversation with the woman seated next to her, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. For one hour, one day, the bitter disagreements, the old rivalries, the resentments and the grudges disappeared. For one day the American capital was awash in small wavelets of history and presidential biography, with old jokes extracted from the dusty archives. All this will end next week. The new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat Joseph Biden, has already summoned the committee for three continuous weeks of hearings on the war in Iraq. Most of its members, Republicans and Democrats alike - many of them potential candidates for the 2008 presidential race - will turn the hearings into public whipping sessions aimed at the administration for its deeds and its blunders. The White House. Decision Next week President George Bush may do again what he has already done on numerous occasions in the past: prove again to the world that he is not one to flinch in the face of public opinion and its caprices. Again he will present to the public his iron backbone. His many opponents will view this as a sign of stubbornness or stupidity; his supporters will brandish it as proof that he is a leader of character. None of this is apparently of any interest to Bush. He has long since grasped that he will spend his remaining time in the White House in splendid electoral isolation. Accordingly, his decisions are not intended to satisfy the voters in the present, but rather for the perusal of the historians in the future. In a survey conducted a few days ago, the U.S. public was asked to choose the "villain" of 2006. Bush won handily. Twenty-five percent of the respondents cited his name, while behind him trailed leaders who are apparently less harmful, such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il who, by the way, was followed on the list by Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary. It is hard to believe that a decision to send more troops to Iraq will necessarily improve Bush's public standing, but the continuing leaks concerning the president's remarks before announcement of his decision has pointed to this as a concrete and even reasonable possibility. Bush will likely make the announcement in an address to the nation next week. What is the essence of the plan? That is the big question. The headlines about "troop reinforcements" encompass only one detail of several important points: How many troops? (The estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000.) How long will they be there? Will their presence in Iraq be limited to a specific period? And what is the purpose of the reinforcements? Will their main mission be to "secure the population" - or, perhaps, "to transfer the reins to the Iraqi army as quickly as possible"? Many believe that a victory of the sort that Bush is interested in is simply not within the realm of possibility. However, the president also has some important supporters, among them Senator John McCain, a lone voice calling for more forces in the past year, whose political future - like the race for the presidency - clearly depends on the outcome of such a decision. If it is perceived as a failure, it will be hard to forget who recommended it so enthusiastically. It is too early to say which memorandum will be remembered as fateful in the history of the Iraq war. James Baker and Lee Hamilton, whose long-winded Iraq Study Group report was dumped in a well-managed maneuver and without resplendent burial ceremonies, can still hope that when the time comes, their document will be recognized as the one that proposed the most sensible road: the road that the president chose not to take. But McCain can hope that his persistent battle to increase the number of troops will go down as the move that led to the turning point. He and a handful of commentators and opinion-makers from the neoconservative circles, who are now out of favor due to battle fatigue, called for this move time and again. Their call at times seemed to be a nagging provocation, at times an analysis severed from the political reality, at times sheer eccentricity. But those who looked at it in this way forgot to take into account one key variable: The serving president also has a tendency to make moves which are not compatible with the healthy logic of the Washington establishment. Baghdad. Command The news from Iraq poured in this week at a dizzying rate. The most dramatic - though probably not the most important - item was the execution of the deposed ruler Saddam Hussein. Far more disturbing was the interview given by the country's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in which he stated that he is tired of his job and will be happy to step down before his term expires. Al-Maliki is the subject of another memorandum which in the future might be seen as a landmark. It was leaked on the day he met with President Bush in Jordan, and in it the U.S. national security adviser, Steve Hadley, cites his doubts about the Iraqi leader, who is supposed to impose order and democracy in his disintegrating country. "I didn't want to take this position," Al-Maliki told The Wall Street Journal. "I only agreed because I thought it would serve the national interest, and I will not accept it again." If anyone in the administration had doubts about him before, they were only heightened by the interview, and further complicated the political calculations of Bush's team before he commits himself to a new policy. In another leak this week, it was reported that Bush is also considering the removal of the top military commander in Baghdad, General George Casey. Casey is the person most identified with the present failed strategy, and with the decisions made in the past year by Rumsfeld. That will not necessarily prevent his appointment - which he wants and which Rumsfeld also apparently planned - as the next chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, just as General William Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam, who led the escalation which Johnson decided on, was promoted. In any case, the head of all of CENTCOM (the U.S.A. Central Command), General John Abizaid, will probably also retire within the next two or three months, leaving the president and his new defense secretary, Robert Gates, genuine room for maneuver in manning the two critical military posts in light of the change of mission. Many observers believe that General David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq, will be named to one of the two posts - either head of CENTCOM or troop commander in Iraq. Petraeus, now serving in training and other postions, was one of the supervisors of the completion of the manual of the U.S. Army and the Marines in the war against terrorists and insurgents. This document, more than 280 pages long, offers the key to a new military doctrine in the light of the lessons gleaned in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the face of the challenges that U.S. security forces are expected to encounter in world arenas. The U.S. Army and Marine Manual for Counterinsurgencies contains few surprises, and its editor, Dr. Conrad Crane, told The Army Times that "the way we're fighting [in Iraq] already reflects this document." With a new defense secretary, two new top generals, and probably also a new ambassador to Iraq - as the present ambassador, Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, is being considered as the leading candidate for ambassador to the United Nations in place of John Bolton, who resigned - the president will have a fresh team that will lead a new policy. The question is, what kind of Iraqi leadership it will have to contend with and how it will manage those relations. A burned-out prime minister is not the leader Bush is now looking for in Iraq. But in contrast to his own tired warriors, on and off the field of battle, whom he can simply replace, Bush will have to accept the Iraqis as a given. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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