For a long time now I have purposefully (or hopefully) put the Vietnam war so far in the back of my mind that I have been unwilling to believe that the Iraq war was in any way similar. No longer! I am old enough to have lived it, to have had family members fight in it, and to have been impacted by the daily news of the death of our soldiers (50,000 plus) fighting there for years on end. In retrospect, this war is exactly like Vietnam both politically, in its poor execution, and in its inevitable outcome. Defeat. No way to beat around the bush. We lost it. Though there are those who will inevitably disagree, I have said more than once that the Bush administration has given me the "heebe jeebies" of the Nixon administration. That will remain to be seen. Meanwhile. This article brought it home to me if you care to read it.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041004&s=greider

For those of you who have questions, I edited the title of my topic. In retrospect, the new one seemed to describe what I wanted to say, exactly.

And once again, there stands John Kerry, doing his damnedest to help us lose yet another one.

The only thing about this war that resembles Vietnam is the same whining, "give up" crowd that complained then are again complaining. That's why *this* time, we must keep those people in the background, out of power.

I agree with you, bcarey. I've said repeatedly that you can't win this war on the cheap. You also can't win a war based on ideology.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine is plain wrong. Our high-tech military will not prevail over guerrilla warfare and terrorism without getting down and dirty, and in far greater numbers than we have now. This war is being run just like Vietnam. "No-Go" zones, even in Baghdad?? That's moving backward. The war is being from from the White House, not the Pentagon. Congress likely won't appropriate more money. The UN is refusing to send workers to help in the election, and there aren't enough military on the ground to ensure safe polling places. Yet we continue to hear "we've turned the corner," "things are progressing well," and elections are a certainty.

I don't think so.

THE "WAR IS LOST"
Military experts say they see no exit from the Iraq debacle -- and that
the war is helping al-Qaida.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 16, 2004


"Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency
in July of last year. Since then 812 American soldiers have been killed
and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day in
campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how we are "winning"
in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard
convention on Tuesday.

But according to the U.S. military's leading strategists and prominent
retired generals, Bush's war is already lost.

Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency,
told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse -- he's lost
on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal
is lost, too. It's lost." He added: "Right now, the course we're on,
we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."

Retired Gen. Joseph Hoar, the former Marine commandant and head of the
U.S. Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the
way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're
conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no
sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone
who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all," said Jeffrey Record,
professor of strategy at the Air War College. "The worst case has
become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in
Iraq and the advantages we had after World War II in Germany and
Japan."

"I don't think that you can kill the insurgency," said W. Andrew
Terrill, professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies
Institute, the top expert on Iraq there. According to Terrill, the
anti-U.S. insurgency, centered in the Sunni triangle, and holding
several key cities and towns, including Fallujah, is expanding and
becoming more capable as a direct consequence of U.S. policy. "We have
a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and
more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can
self-regenerate. The idea there are X number of insurgents and when
they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an
ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill
the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more
hostile to the U.S. presence. The longer we stay, the more they are
confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah, the U.S.
Marines besieged the city for three weeks in April -- the watershed
event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on
Fallujah," said Gen. Hoar. "I asked a three-star Marine general who
gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the
conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then,
just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained
control, using the city as a base, al-Qaida ("base" in Arabic) indeed.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a
non-Islamic power, it becomes a religious requirement to resist that
occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not
liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah
and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the prophet
Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs
whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's
called Vietnamization. The idea we're going to have an Iraqi force
trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination.
They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign
occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in
Vietnam than in Iraq."

"This is far graver than Vietnam," said Gen. Odom. "There wasn't as
much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went
ahead with a war that was not constructive for U.S. aims. But now we're
in a region far more volatile and we're in much worse shape with our
allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained U.S. military offensive against the
no-go areas of the Sunni triangle "could become so controversial that
members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign." Thus
an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining
political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a
victory."

Gen. Hoar believes from the information he has received that "a
decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in
November. That's the cynical part of it -- after the election. The
signs are all there." He compares any such planned attack with late
Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You
could flatten it," said Hoar. "U.S. military forces would prevail,
casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with
respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians
would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase 'collateral damage.'
And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

Gen. Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and
senior military officers over Iraq is worse than any he has ever seen
with any previous U.S. government, including during Vietnam. "I've
never seen it so bad between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and
the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a
disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been
the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that
our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad.
They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

Search long enough and hard enough you will find retired military (active duty would be barred from comment) that will disparage current policy. The same goes for those in support. What is the point?

Why should anyone consider Sidney Blumenthal credible???

That was actually my first thought but I did not want to rub Pique's nose in her indifference to liberal sources while being so fastidious about those countering Dan Rather.

I would think there would be an epiphany in all this for her considering the way things have transpired for her vaunted CBS fact checking but I am certain that us mere mortals will continue to recieve instruction from her about the high priesthood of journalism. Perhaps she can quote Topeka Bob in saying "at the very least, our lies went to the heart of the truth." (I stand in awe of that statement). Anyway, I hold Pique in high regard but a good look in the mirror might do her a world of good.

hi, jb,
i honestly have not been following the dan rather story. i take it from the many comments here that he screwed up big time.

like i said before, i've opted out of journalism for the time being, don't read the papers, and don't watch the news. the writing and editing i am doing these days is completely unrelated to my past journalism career.

i got the above clip by email from my brother, who is working for the kerry campaign. (and i'm right proud of him, too).

i don't need any more information at this point to make up my mind about the election, especially since any and all news i have heard is just more and more sordid, and depressing.

just for the record, when i post clips here, unless i include my own comments, i am posting them without comment, to see what others think of them. i haven't vetted any of the articles i post, and don't know what in them is true, and what isn't. they aren't posted to prove a point or to persuade, but to provoke discussion.

Fair enough.