-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 26, 2007 10:22:39 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It!
"Vietnamization" was not a military strategy. It was a public-
relations campaign.
The White House hoped that Vietnamization would keep the house of
cards upright [until the next election], providing what C.I.A.
veteran Frank Snepp famously called a "decent interval" that could
mask the American defeat by declaring that the fate of South
Vietnam now was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese. If
they didn't want freedom badly enough to win, well, we had done our
best.
To make this deceitful drama work, however, the pullout had to be
gradual. The plan (Vietnamization) had to be easily explained to
the American people. And the U.S. training force left behind had
to be large enough and exposed enough to provide visual signs of
our commitment on the 6 o'clock news. Pictures of Americans
shaking hands with happy peasants would support the lie that
Vietnamization was succeeding.
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From: "Jim S" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: March 25, 2007 10:00:44 PM PDT
Subject: Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It!
*Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It*
By John Graham
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Tuesday 19 December 2006
I was a civilian advisor/trainer in Vietnam, arriving just as U.S.
troops were going home. I wasn't there to fight, but I hadn't been
in country a week before I learned that the word "noncombatant"
didn't mean much where I was posted, fifty miles south of the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that then divided South Vietnam from
North. I got the message when a sniper's bullet whistled past my
ear on the main highway twenty miles south of HuŽ. Joe Jackson,
the burly major who was driving, yelled at me to hold on and duck
as he gunned the jeep out of range, zigzagging to spoil the
sniper's aim.
Snipers or not, in 1971 it was the U.S. government's policy not to
issue weapons to civilian advisors in Vietnam, even to those of us
in distant and dangerous outposts. The reason was not principle,
but PR -- and here begin the lessons for Iraq.
Sometime in 1969, the White House, under siege from the public and
faced with unrelenting facts on the ground, quietly made the
decision that America couldn't win its war in Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger didn't put it that way, of course. America was
a superpower, and it was inconceivable that it could lose a war to
a third-rate nation whose soldiers lived on rice and hid in holes
in the ground. So, the White House conceived an elaborate strategy
that would mask the fact of an American defeat. The U.S. would
slowly withdraw its combat troops over a period of several years,
while the mission of those who remained would change from fighting
the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to training the South Vietnamese
to carry on the fight on their own. At the same time, we would
give the South Vietnamese a series of performance ultimatums which,
if unmet, would trigger a total withdrawal and let us blame the
South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow. This strategy
was called "Vietnamization." Implementing it cost at least 10,000
additional American and countless more Vietnamese lives, plus
billions of dollars.
It was a rigged game from the start. All but the wildest zealots in
Washington knew that the South Vietnamese would not and could not
meet our ultimatums: an end to corrupt, revolving-door governments;
an officer corps based on merit, not cronyism; and the creation of
a national state that enjoyed popular allegiance strong and broad
enough to control the political and cultural rivalries that had
ripped the country's fabric for a thousand years.
During the eighteen months I was in Vietnam, I met almost no
Americans in the field who regarded Vietnamization as a serious
military strategy with any chance of success. More years of
American training could not possibly make a difference in the
outcome of the war, because what was lacking in the South
Vietnamese Army was not just combat skills but belief in a cause
worth fighting for.
But none of that was the point. Vietnamization was not a military
strategy. It was a public-relations campaign.
The White House hoped that Vietnamization would keep the house of
cards upright for at least a couple of years, providing what C.I.A.
veteran Frank Snepp famously called a "decent interval" that could
mask the American defeat by declaring that the fate of South
Vietnam now was the responsibility of the South Vietnamese. If
they didn't want freedom badly enough to win, well, we had done our
best.
To make this deceitful drama work, however, the pullout had to be
gradual. The plan (Vietnamization) had to be easily explained to
the American people. And the U.S. training force left behind had
to be large enough and exposed enough to provide visual signs of
our commitment on the 6 o'clock news. Pictures of unarmed American
advisors, like me, shaking hands with happy peasants would support
the lie that Vietnamization was succeeding.
Living in the bulls-eye, we understood the reality very well,
especially when, as public pressures for total withdrawal increased
in 1971~1972, most of the "force protection" troops went home too.
That left scattered handfuls of American trainers left to protect
themselves. As the very visible U.S. advisor to the city of HuŽ, I
was an easy target for assassination or abduction, anytime the Viet
Cong chose to take me out. I kept a case of grenades under my bed,
I slept with an M-16 propped against the bedstead, and I had my own
dubious army of four Vietnamese house guards who I hoped would at
least fire a warning shot before they ran away.
In April 1972, North Vietnamese forces swept south across the DMZ.,
scattering the South Vietnamese Army defenders and driving to
within six miles of HuŽ. I and a handful of other American
trainers and advisors could only watch as a quarter-million
panicked people gridlocked the road south to Danang, in a
terrifying night reverberating with screams and explosions. We
knew that any choppers sent to save us would be mobbed by
Vietnamese eager to escape. I'm alive because American carrier
jets caught the advancing North Vietnamese just short of the city
walls and all but obliterated them.
Now we have the Iraq Study Group Report, advising that the mission
of U.S. forces shift from fighting a war to training Iraqi troops
and police. The report calls for the U.S. to lay down a series of
performance conditions for the Iraqis, including that the Iraqis
end their civil war and create a viable national state.
I've lived through this one before.
Deteriorating conditions on the ground will soon force President
Bush to accept this shift in mission strategy. 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, since we will be making better fighters of many
people who will end up in partisan militias. What the Iraqi
military and police need is not just technical skill but unit
cohesion and loyalty to a viable central government. Neither can
be taught or provided by outside trainers.
When U.S. troops pull back from fighting the insurgents, most Iraqi
units will lack both the military skills and the political will to
replace them. More soldiers and police we've trained will join the
militias. 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. The military force
left behind to protect the U.S. trainers will be drawn down to --
or below -- a bare minimum, further increasing the dangers for the
Americans who remain. Military affairs commentator General Barry
McCaffrey issued this sober warning in the December 18 issue of
Newsweek: "We're setting ourselves up for a potential national
disaster in which some Iraqi divisions could flip and take 5,000
Americans hostage, or multiple advisory teams go missing in action."
Nothing destroys troop morale faster than being in a war you know
is pointless. At this same stage in Vietnam, drug use among
Americans became a serious problem.
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.
U.S. leaders may decide, as they did 37 years ago, that we must
again create a "decent interval" to mask defeat and that the PR
benefits of that interval are worth the cost in lives and money.
If they do, however, they should not -- like the Iraq Study Group
-- lie to us that such a strategy has any military chance
whatsoever of success.
About the author:
John Graham shipped out on a freighter when he was sixteen,
took part in the first ascent of Mount McKinley's North Wall at
twenty, and hitchhiked around the world at twenty-two. A Foreign
Service officer for fifteen years, he served in Libya during the
revolution and in the war in Vietnam. In the mid-seventies, he
planned nuclear war strategies for N.A.T.O., then served as a
foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn. At the United
Nations in the late 1970s, he was deeply involved in U.S.
initiatives in Southern Africa, South Asia, and Cuba. When he left
the Foreign Service, he took a job lecturing on cruise ships.
On his first cruise, with 550 people on board, the ship burned
and sank in the Gulf of Alaska. His lifeboat lost in a violent
storm, Graham was finally pulled to safety and to a new sense of
purpose for his life. Today his speeches, workshops, and books --
all part of the non-profit Giraffe Heroes Project -- have helped
thousands of people solve tough problems in their communities and
beyond. He is the author of "Stick Your Neck Out -- A Street-Smart
Guide for Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond," from
Berrett-Koehler.
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