Anti-War Up -"Mistakes of Vietnam Repeated With Iraq" By Max Cleland

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Mistakes of Vietnam Repeated With Iraq
By Max Cleland
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Thursday 18 September 2003

The president of the United States decides to go to war against a
nation led by a brutal dictator supported by one-party rule. That dictator
has made war on his neighbors. The president decides this is a threat to the
United States.

In his campaign for president he gives no indication of wanting to
go to war. In fact, he decries the overextension of American military might
and says other nations must do more. However, unbeknownst to the American
public, the president's own Pentagon advisers have already cooked up a plan
to go to war. All they are looking for is an excuse.

Based on faulty intelligence, cherry-picked information is fed to
Congress and the American people. The president goes on national television
to make the case for war, using as part of the rationale an incident that
never happened. Congress buys the bait -- hook, line and sinker -- and
passes a resolution giving the president the authority to use "all necessary
means" to prosecute the war.

The war is started with an air and ground attack. Initially there is
optimism. The president says we are winning. The cocky, self-assured
secretary of defense says we are winning. As a matter of fact, the secretary
of defense promises the troops will be home soon.

However, the truth on the ground that the soldiers face in the war
is different than the political policy that sent them there. They face
increased opposition from a determined enemy. They are surprised by
terrorist attacks, village assassinations, increasing casualties and growing
anti-American sentiment. They find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla
land war, unable to move forward and unable to disengage because there are
no allies to turn the war over to.

There is no plan B. There is no exit strategy. Military morale
declines. The president's popularity sinks and the American people are
increasingly frustrated by the cost of blood and treasure poured into a
never-ending war.

Sound familiar? It does to me.

The president was Lyndon Johnson. The cocky, self-assured secretary
of defense was Robert McNamara. The congressional resolution was the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution. The war was the war that I, U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Chuck
Hagel and John McCain and 3 1/2 million other Americans of our generation
were caught up in. It was the scene of America's longest war. It was also
the locale of the most frustrating outcome of any war this nation has ever
fought.

Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war
in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president.
Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad.
They could have learned some lessons:

. Don't underestimate the enemy. The enemy always has one option you
cannot control. He always has the option to die. This is especially true if
you are dealing with true believers and guerillas fighting for their version
of reality, whether political or religious. They are what Tom Friedman of
The New York Times calls the "non-deterrables." If those non-deterrables are
already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go
home.

. If the enemy adopts a "hit-and-run" strategy designed to inflict
maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman
once said about Vietnam) you can't win the war.

. If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also
pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better
have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you
make it the 51st state.

If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an
occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you.

. If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence
must be not just "darn good," as the president has said; it must be
"bulletproof," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the
administration's was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps
credibility.

. If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the
troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.

. In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war,
it should be the first cause of war. It is the only way the Congress and the
American people can cope with getting through it. As credibility is
strained, support for the war and support for the troops go downhill.
Continued loss of credibility drains troop morale, the media become more
suspicious, the public becomes more incredulous and Congress is reduced to
hearings and investigations.

Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above
happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and
the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in
the desert.

They attacked a country that had not attacked us. They did so on
intelligence that was faulty, misrepresented and highly questionable.

A key piece of that intelligence was an outright lie that the White
House put into the president's State of the Union speech. These officials
have overextended the American military, including the National Guard and
the Reserve, and have expanded the U.S. Army to the breaking point.

A quarter of a million troops are committed to the Iraq war theater,
most of them bogged down in Baghdad. Morale is declining and casualties
continue to increase.

In addition to the human cost, the war in dollars costs $1 billion a
week, adding to the additional burden of an already depressed economy.

The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to
every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in
his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for
servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are
keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks
in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had
the chance.

-------

Max Cleland, former U.S. senator, was head of the Veterans
Administration in the Carter administration. He teaches at American
University in Washington.

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In article , redvet
wrote:

> Go to Original
>
> Mistakes of Vietnam Repeated With Iraq
> By Max Cleland


Max who?

....and I should give a rats ass what he thinks because...?