John Graham, a longtime Foreign Service officer who spent 18 months in Vietnam during the darkest days of that war, has a riveting account on truthout.org of the "Vietnamization" program that was supposed to extricate us from that mess. The parallels between it and our future in Iraq are inescapable.
Vietnamization (whereby the U.S. forces were supposed to gradually switch from fighting the war to training the South Vietnamese army to fight it) was, as Graham puts it, "not a military strategy. It was a public-relations campaign" designed to conceal the fact of America's defeat. Nixon and Kissinger knew perfectly well it wouldn't work, but went ahead anyway to waste thousands of lives and billions of dollars just so they could buy some time, appease the growing anti-war movement, and in the end, blame our failure on the South Vietnamese.
Graham was one of their sacrificial lambs, dumped into the horrific meltdown to help execute the PR strategy: "Pictures of unarmed American advisors, like me, shaking hands with happy peasants would support the lie that Vietnamization was succeeding." He was lucky to escape with his life.
Read his predictions on what we have to look forward to in Iraq…
Deteriorating conditions on the ground will soon force President Bush to accept this shift in mission strategy (from fighting the war to training Iraqis to fight it). It is Vietnamization in all but name. Its core purpose is not to win an unwinnable war, but to provide political cover for a retreat, and to lay the grounds for blaming the loss on the Iraqis. Based on what I saw in Vietnam, here's what I think will happen next:
The increased training will make no difference. It could even make things worse…Violence and chaos will increase across the country.
As the situation continues to deteriorate in Iraq, anti-American feelings will increase. Cursed for staying, we will now be cursed for leaving. Iraq will become an ever more dangerous place for any American to be.
At home, political pressure to get out of Iraq completely will increase rapidly as the violence gets worse.
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Our ultimatums and conditions won't be met. As the situation gets worse, whatever remains of a central government in Baghdad will be even less able to make the compromises and form the coalitions necessary to control centuries of factional and tribal hatreds. The civil war will spiral out of control, giving us the justification we need to get out, blaming the Iraqis for the mess we've left behind. Then we will face the regional and global ramifications of a vicious civil war whose only winners will be Iran and al-Qaeda.
Seriously, read the whole article. It's not just an incisive analysis by one who's been there, but it's a powerful story. (Full disclosure: Graham is a personal friend, but that in no way diminishes the importance of what he has to say.)