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Subject:
RE: Elephant Trap?
F22
6/25/2005 12:42:44 AM
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The sky is falling! The sky is falling! How do I know? Because Max "Chicken Little" Hastings says so!
Max Hastings
Friday June 24, 2005
The Guardian
A year after the Iraq insurgency began in 2003, sceptics asked: "Is this the new Vietnam?"
They were asking this before the insurgency began. They were asking right after the war started. The also asked in Afghanistan, Gulf War 1, Panama, and Grenada. Every time a soldier has even sneezed over the last 30 years, someone has yelled "quagmire!"
At the time, many of us who pontificate about these things answered no.
Whereas all the others who pontificate about these things answered yes.
Simplistic historical comparisons are almost always mistaken.
Therefore it's only natural that we're going to base this article on simplistic historical comparisons.
It seemed premature to pass any melodramatic judgment about Iraq.
Not that that stopped anyone.
Today, another year on, important differences persist.
Here come the simplistic historical comparisons...
The US commitment in Iraq is much smaller than in Vietnam, and so is the casualty rate. Half a million Americans spent five years pursuing victory in Indochina, and five more disengaging. "Only" 140,000 US soldiers are deployed in Iraq. George Bush is likely to declare victory and start getting out, rather than escalate his war as Lyndon Johnson so disastrously did.
And it's also likely that if Bush declares victory and pulls our troops that we will have in fact been victorious.
Yet in significant respects Vietnam comparisons have become unavoidable.
Unavoidable in the sense that every time a soldier so much as scratches his rear, comparisons are made to Vietnam.
First, it is hard to believe that Washington's objective - the creation of a viable local government and institutions to run Iraq as a unitary state - is achievable within an acceptable time-frame.
And it's hard to believe because of...why? Perhaps it's because you don't want it to happen? And please define what exactly an "acceptable time-frame" is. Would the 15 years it took the US to go from the Declaration of Independence to ratification of the Constitution be too long for consideration?
Second, intelligence is proving a critical weakness. Recently, I heard an American commander deplore the extraordinary paucity of information on the ground: "We spend all these billions of dollars on the CIA and your SIS, and we know next to nothing about what the other side is doing. We need less technology and more spies."
And this is news, right? You are just now figuring this out?
Third, and most important, whatever military successes American forces achieve against the insurgents, there is no sign that they are winning the critical battle, for hearts and minds.
Nope. We sure aren't winning their hearts and minds, now are we?
The experience of ordinary Iraqis with the US military is at best alienating, at worst terrifying. There is no hint of shared purpose, mutual sympathy and respect between the armoured columns rolling along the roads, intermittently belching fire, and the hapless mass of local people, caring only for survival.
Evil Americans! How dare they do horrible things like this to the poor Iraqi people!
Last month, BBC4 screened an uncommonly vivid documentary, A Company of Soldiers, about a unit of the US 8th Cavalry fighting in Iraq. It brought all the old memories of Vietnam flooding back. These shaven-headed young philistines, fearful and even sometimes tearful, wore on their arms the horse's head badge of a formation I knew in Indochina as the 1st Air Cavalry Division.
It's those darn simplistic historical comparisons agains!
As the 8th Cavalry's armoured vehicles roared forth on patrol, their occupants seemed infused with the same bewilderment about an unknown enemy that one remembered so well in the boondocks of Indochina.
And the jungles of Guadalcanal, the sand and coral of the Central Pacific islands, the beaches of Normandy, the trenches of France during WW1,...need I go on?
These soldiers' view of Iraq was determined by what they could glimpse through their weapon slits, or at night on their infra-red screens.
Because American soldiers are too stupid to learn from the experiences of those who have gone before. Did I get that anti-American rant right?
"We're trying to save their lives," said an exasperated officer about the Iraqis, "but they're not helping us by getting in our way."
So they had to destroy the village in order to save it. Oops, now I'm making one of those simplistic historical comparisons...
Soldiers quizzing local people through interpreters on a house search are young men from Ohio or Wyoming, Georgia or New Jersey. Yet cocooned in helmets and sunglasses, body armour and weapons that conceal almost every inch of flesh, they do not seem human at all. They resemble the robot legionaries of Darth Vader.
Because they were sent on their nefarious mission to destroy by that very evil empire that America has now become. Am I still getting the anti-American rhetoric right?
The doctrine of "force protection" - making preservation of American lives the first mission priority - has made US forces unconvincing peacekeepers in Somalia and the Balkans, Vietnam and Lebanon. So, too, has insensitivity about the interests of the people they are allegedly fighting to help.
Of course we're not there to help. We're only trying to rebuild the infrastracture, provide food and medical supplies to the people, assist the Iraqi people in achieving democratic self-rule, defeat the...oh wait. That is helping out. My bad!
There was a powerful scene in the TV film, in which a bored and jumpy soldier impulsively put a bullet into a dog. Its owner emerged from his house, bent over his pet's corpse for a moment, then walked away, throwing up his hands in impotent misery. Whatever commanded that man's loyalty six months ago, who can doubt which side he is on today.
Who can doubt? Uhhh...anybody with reasoning ability? Did anyone happen to ask him? Of course, having his dog shot like that is a terrible personal tragedy. I have four dogs myself, and I know how distraught I would feel. But did anyone think to ask how many family members of this man---actual human beings, not dogs---were arrested, tortured, and murdered by Saddam's thugs? No one thought to ask? That's strange. I thought the job of the media was to investigate and objectively report the facts. I guess they missed a few. Oops!
"This is Indian territory ... If we meet the enemy, we shall overwhelm him with combat power," said the unit's colonel, briefing his officers for an operation. After an emotional episode in which the whole regiment learned live on the radio about the death on patrol of one of its men, the colonel warned: "I don't want to hear anyone say anyone's dead on the net, right?"
Let's see, what do we have here, an aggressive combat leader that is intent on defeating the enemy, and looks after the morale and welfare of his men. Well, it's clear to me, we need to court martial this loser!
The key imperative for every counter-insurgency campaign is to engage sympathetically with the population.
I'm sure the Shias and Kurds, which represent 80% of the population, are REAL sympathetic to the insurgents.
"The only time most Iraqis converse with Americans is when a civil affairs officer comes to pay out compensation for killing somebody in the family," a reporter who has spent several months in Iraq observed recently. American forces bring nothing in their wake that Iraqis can perceive as good or helpful, only a cacophony of military noise, spasmodic death and destruction.
And how much of his time in Iraq did the reporter spend outside of his hotel in the Green Zone in Baghdad? Just wondering...
In all this, of course, the resemblance to Vietnam is striking.
Of course it is, because we know that simplistic historical comparisons are never mistaken.
US commanders would say more emollient tactics are impossible in the face of an increasingly violent insurgency.
I'm sure that's exactly what they WOULD say, but what in fact DID they say? You are allowed to report that too, aren't you?
The suicide bombers, rocket firers and snipers oblige US units tooperate as they do.
To kill the enemy? Yeah, I guess they are sort of obliged to do that, being the freaking fascists they are. Is my anti-American rhetoric still going strong?
If men went forth on foot, bare-headed, they would pay with their lives.
Duhhhhhh! I bet he wins a Pulitzer for that brilliant piece of insightful reporting.
This may be true. Yet the aim of all insurgencies is to provoke the ruling power to inflict such pain on the civilian population that it forfeits support.
Another Pulitzer.
This is what happened so spectacularly in Vietnam, and what also seems to be happening in Iraq.
Now tell me again, what we were saying about simplistic historical comparisons?
For each of the 1,600 US soldiers killed since Bush declared "significant combat operations" at an end more than two years ago, some 20 Iraqis are estimated to have died.
Our reporter seems reluctant to provide any additional analysis, so let's take a closer look at this, shall we? For every one of those 20 Iraqis killed that is an insurgent, that's one less insurgent to worry about, which is bad for the insurgents and good for us. For every one of those 20 that was an innocent civilian killed by the insurgents, it's that much less support for the insurgents, which is bad for the insurgents and good for us. Is that enough, or would you like to argue that all 20 were innocent civilians killed by US troops? Go ahead, I'm waiting...
The warrior culture and firepower of the US army make it almost irresistible in a conventional war,
Good. Let's endeavor to always maintain that overwhelming military advantage.
yet disastrously ill-orientated for the sort of the struggle it faces today.
Says who, the insurgents? The ones still alive, I mean. And what about the Marines and soldiers? Did anyone happen to ask THEIR opinion?
The more domestic pressure Bush faces, the less inclined will be his commanders in the field to risk exposing their men in human contact with Iraqis.
And you know this for a fact, or are we mixing in speculation to support a political agenda?
I wrote here a few weeks ago that it seemed premature to write off Iraq, even if the omens are grim. It remains the case that, however disastrously misconceived was the original decision to invade, to quit precipitately promises anarchy. In the US, disillusionment with the war has not - yet, anyway - developed into the sort of national rage that, during Vietnam, destroyed Lyndon Johnson.
No, but you and your media buddies sure are doing such a WON-DER-FUL job at helping to provoke such national rage.
Yet the rival timetables, of rising anti-war feeling at home and lack of progress on the ground are plainly working against the Bush administration. Most experts suggest it will take five years, if not more, before Iraqi security forces can conceivably take over from the coalition. Who can believe that US opinion will tolerate a commitment on the present scale, a continuing drain of American casualties, for that long?
Given the constant barrage of doom and gloom reporting such as this, I'm surprised that crowds aren't already marching on the White House to lynch Bush and install Michael Moore as President.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former British senior representative in Iraq, thinks it somewhere between difficult and impossible to remedy US policy failures in the immediate aftermath of the war. He is probably right.
Of course he's right, he's Jeremy Greenstock. Pardon me, Sir Jeremy Greenstock.
Bush is still many months off being ready to quit and leave the country to resolve its own fate.
If ever. You do have a firm grasp of the obvious. Yet another Pulitzer!
But this is coming to seem the likeliest outcome.
Who told you that, Deep Throat?
The most notable irony of a comparison between Indochina and Iraq is that American defeat in 1975 brought about Vietnamese unification, while American failure in Iraq will almost certainly precipitate that country's fragmentation.
The most notable irony of a comparison between Indochina and Iraq is that in Vietnam America fought to preserve the existing government of South Vietnam, while in Iraq America fought to overthrow the existing government of Saddam and replace it with a government based upon freedom, democracy, and human rights.
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