Hey folks.
Sorry for going political today, but I need to.
President Bush was touring Vietnam yesterday and talked about the Vietnam War and compared it to the war in Iraq. He commented that we need to learn the lessons of the Vietnam war and make sure that we don't pull out too soon.
That isn't the lesson that we needed to learn from Vietnam. There are many that we can learn from decades of war in Vietnam.
1) Never underestimate a people's desire to fight against an invading force. This was true on so many levels with Vietnam. American policy makers and generals could not comprehend the casualties that the North Vietnamese were taking in the war. America lost its will to fight with fewer than 60,000 dead or MIA. Vietnamese deaths have been estimated as high as 1,000,000 and they were still putting up a fight. In Iraq, for every insurgent that is killed, another steps into his/her place.
2) Learn about a people and their history BEFORE invading their country and you'll make better decisions. Vietnam had a long history of imperialism, and a long history of fighting it. Not understanding that lead to the problems listed in #1. Iraq has had years of friction and violence between its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations. Invading the country, removing the government and disbanding the police and military is NOT going to make things better.
3) Tell the truth. Public support on the home front dwindled during the Vietnam War in part because the folks back home stopped believing that they were being told the truth. The media said one thing and the government said another. What the government was saying didn't match up with what the people perceived as reality. The Johnson and Nixon administrations railed against the press coverage of the war, but the information they were putting out didn't match with reality. They lost credibility. That seems to be happening again with Iraq. We invaded Iraq on bad information and from my point of view, almost EVERY word about the war that comes from the Bush administration does not ring true.
4) Treat the cause, not the symptom. There are a lot of causes to the problems that we faced in Vietnam and are facing in Iraq. Unfortunately the biggest cause is one that we can't treat.... entering the conflict on false pretences with bad information. We never were able to overcome that in Vietnam. The cause of that conflict was imperialism. Fighting that war just made the root cause worse. It isn't that different in Iraq. The Bush administration said the cause of the problem was Saddam Hussein. That obviously wasn't true. He had no links to al-Qaeda. He's out of the picture. Things are much worse than they were before we invaded. The country is, by many standards, in civil war. We're in the middle of it. We're the cause of it. We don't appear to be able to do anything about it. We've created a terrorism problem that may never go away.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that we need to cut and run. Pulling out of Iraq now would be truly disastrous for everyone involved. We do need a new strategy though. Start telling the truth about the war. Make sure that our troops have EVERYTHING they need to succeed. Get back to winning hearts and minds through making life for every day Iraqis. better. Just killing people isn't working because no matter how many people we kill, there will always be more who step up to fight. We cannot win a war like that. Handing off to the Iraqi military is not the solution either. We need to address the cause. There in lies the problem. If we're the cause, how do we deal with it? We can't pull out. Chaos will rule.
Do something good. Win some hearts and minds. Make their lives better in some way. Keep on the high ground. Don't murder and rape civilians. Don't torture prisoners. Don't insult Islam. We need to find a way to be the good guy, even though we've invaded another country and are killing its people.
I hope someone finds a way that we can win this war... or at least get out of it alive. There are no easy answers. Every action will have a high cost. It burns me that we entered this war so casually. War shouldn't be casual.
Sorry for ranting.
Pete
No comments:
Post a Comment