I thought someone would have diaried
this, but apparently not. In today's Washington Post, former Vietnam war correspondent Lewis Simons, back from a recent trip to Iraq, lays it out very clearly why we are doomed to fail in Iraq. In addition he shows unmistakable parallels with Vietnam, and shows that we failed to learn our lesson there. We are doomed to repeat history. Indeed, our lesson in Iraq seems to be to pound into the heads of those who did not get it the first time that you never start an unwinnable war.
I have written similar things on my blog, but it means a lot more coming from someone who reported from both Vietnam and Iraq. This is a must read item!
An excerpt:
What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out.
Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.
Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.
The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?
This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.
What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.
As awful as this scenario is (although most of us expected it before we went into Iraq), is there perhaps a silver lining? I think so. I feel that the political climate will dramatically shift over the next several elections. Mistakes on such a massive scale will not be overlooked by an angry public. I think Cindy Sheehan is a harbinger that brings down Bush and our Republican Congress. They just cannot see it yet.
Providing the Democrats are ballsy enough to capitalize on it, it could put us back in power. In fact, I feel it is almost inevitable. But I also feel it is much more likely if the party adopted an aggressive get out of Iraq stance, because that's where the American public is already headed.
As Simons makes clear, it's all over but the body count. Read it!!