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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 |
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