Certainly our kids in Iraq, more than anyone else, want to come home. Instead this is what they got from Donald Rumsfeld, according to the AP this morning:
Rumsfeld addressed Marines at Al Asad air field in Iraq's western desert Sunday morning. "Our hope is that as we build up Iraqi forces we will be able to relieve the stress on our forces and see a reduction in coalition forces over some period of time, probably post-Iraqi election," he said. "But again, it will depend entirely on the security situation here in this country."
In Vietnam our military and politicians believed we could fight our way to victory. We bombed North Vietnam to stop the flow of troops and supplies South. We built-up the body count of VC so that we could break their will (we had 500,000 troops in a then much smaller country than present-day Iraq). Not so in this war. Rumsfeld has told the Marines that the matter is outside their control. We "win" not by outgunning or defeating the insurgents, but by "training" the Iraqis to defend themselves. The Marines can come home only if the contractors and the desk guys and the politicians are successful.
Rumsfeld basically told the Marines they are in Iraq just to keep Allawi and his cohorts in power until the Iraqi security forces are ready. Of course, Rumsfeld casts this in the form of securing Irag for the elections to be successful, which he insists will inevitably swing the war in our direction. But this must nonetheless still be maddening to our troops because it further isolates them from controlling their destiny. In essence our troops can't do what they're trained to do -- fight for victory. They can only sit and patrol and hope. They are simply cannon fodder in the eyes of the civilian leadership, leaving our troops with nothing to fight for but the hope that the guys in DC are successful. This is not a good formula for winning a war.
Iraq is much worse than VN as far as troop morale is concerned, because it presages a good ten years of grinding bloody occupation. We've got to win this election so that we can bring our kids home now.