'Iraqnam' is being created in the Mideast

[bhamlett]

I ran this editorial in the the Greenville News out of Greenville, SC. You can access it at my http://www.hamlettpost.com">website.

I can almost hear Gen. William Westmoreland of Vietnam fame calling out from the grave, "Send more troops. Send more troops!" His voice echoes in Iraq today as the surge plunked 20,000 more soldiers in combat but did nothing to tamp down the burgeoning civil war, reduce ever more lethal attacks on our troops, or abate the flow of foreign fighters pouring through Iraq's unsecured borders.

The Vietnam deja vu is eerie, especially as more and more commanders are asking for more troops, beyond those already emplaced by the surge. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, said in a recent press conference that Iraq would be a "mess" if the surge forces left now. In a different interview, Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, commander of Multinational Force-West, echoed the sentiment for additional forces, expressing "concern with the Iraqi forces' capabilities."

During Vietnam's early stages in 1961, President Kennedy sent Maxwell Taylor to collect facts on the status of our military advisors in the otherwise insignificant Southeast Asian country. Upon returning, Taylor recommended boosting U.S. troop levels from 700 to 15,000, on the precedent-free theory that a protracted ground war was unlikely. In 1963, Taylor returned to Vietnam, gathering sunny stories about the success of the U.S. military intervention.

In 1964, General Westmoreland took command over 20,000 U.S. advisers. In 1965, he was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year, as he heralded the success of his new strategy for "Americanizing" the war with a massive U.S. troop buildup. In 1968 he returned to Washington, leaving 500,000 troops in the field to deal with a significantly heightened enemy.

Westmoreland also publicly criticized the Johnson administration for not sending an additional 200,000 troops. When he died in 2005, he blamed our failure in Vietnam on an inadequate South Vietnamese army, Lyndon Johnson's refusal to send more troops, and negative media coverage.

Fast forward 40 years, and you can do a search-and-replace on any encyclopedia entry of the Vietnam War, replacing "Vietnam" with "'Iraq," "NVA" with "insurgency," "South Vietnamese army" with "new Iraqi army," and ever-sunny "Maxwell Taylor" with any member of Bush's war Cabinet.

Even the results of the Iraq war are similar. Our policy in Iraq, much like the "containment" profundity in Vietnam, is having an extraordinarily negative effect on our broader effort to counter Islamic extremism in the Middle East. According to the White House's own recently released National Intelligence Estimate, the war in Iraq energizes Sunni extremism, provides a bottomless pool of young terrorist recruits, radicalizes the West's Muslim population, and provides an excellent training opportunity for terrorists fighting against the world's best military.

From a national security standpoint, the last thing in our best interest is to expand the Iraq war. We are not "turning a corner." Just like the phased buildup in Vietnam, we are not in the first stages of a new, incipient strategy to win Iraq. We have succeeded only in turning Iraq into a failed state, motivating the very extremists we desperately need to discourage, and training untold thousands of terrorists who can export their brand-new skills throughout the region.

The Iraq war has only made this paramount struggle more difficult, hampering our relations with valuable partners in global intelligence and counterterrorism operations, and clouding our message to the majority of the Muslim community that the United States and Islam are not at war.

We must stop the unmitigated disaster that is our policy in Iraq. The end of Iraq is only the beginning of the broader conflict against jihadist forces that we must counter if we want to survive as a free nation.

[unhappycamper]

1. You are correct, Sir.

I was part of the '67 buildup, and (finally) came to understand the Vietnam 'war' was BS. There is NO way for a foreign occupier to 'win' a civil war.