VIETNAM AND IRAQ

Daily, I'm reading or hearing someone talk about how Iraq is related to Vietnam and by extension, how in the hell can we extract ourselves from the Iraqi quagmire. I don't think withdrawing in wholesale scale is it. Remember the idea, "we are like a gambler at the table who can't quit the game." That's it!

I do agree with Stanley A. Karnow who wrote "Vietnam: A History." It was one of the first books I read about Vietnam, years after I had put the literal war behind me. Karnow says of Iraq: it is "unwinnable;" Dud! What I do like about his present day thinking is the idea of partitioning of Iraq: Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. And, he wants to set a deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal and begin phased withdrawals immediately. I think so.

What has basically happened in the Iraq war is what always happens in war: the planning goes to hell in a handbasket. Knowing the military as I do, the planning was down to a ghat's hair. And, if it had worked out, then we would have been "hunky dory" as my Mom would say. But, in war, it never works out as we plan. In Vietnam, LBJ started out as belligerent: we'll show those little guys running around in black pajamas. We know what happened.

In Iraq, we can't prevail because we face a dogged adversary every bit as determined as those little guys in black pajamas in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they were prepared to take unlimited losses to the point that you could never break their morale no matter how many we killed. In the end, politics tripped us up and we got out.

I've never gone along with the idea they beat us. They out patienced us. And, for my two cents, the powers that be never figured out that our mix of troops was wrong. The moment we introduced conventional forces into Vietnam, it was the beginning of the end. Conventional soldiers proved themselves more than adequate for the job. However, the drawback was simply the "conventional." The military was prepared to stand and fight. The enemy in Vietnam did not stand and fight. They fought and hid.

We could have salvaged Vietnam in my view had we gone back to the original tactical view of using the Special Forces (Green Berets) to continue to take the fight to the enemy. We had the firepower, the strategy. The thinking at the highest level was like a booby trap ready to be sprung. We tried to fight a conventional war with an unconventional enemy. If we had moved the conventional forces out, started a phased withdrawal and just kept doggedly struggling, I think Ho Chi Minh would have sued for peace and we'd have been at a standoff.

Would this have been better. The 64,000 question! The gigantic difference in Iraq and Vietnam is the fact that in Iraq, the enemy has no regard for life--their own or their countrymen/women and what we seem to refuse to deal with is a religious fanaticism centered in tribalism. In Vietnam, the enemy, based in Ho, had one goal: unify Vietnam." They were "nationalist" goals. In Iraq, the one consistent goal of the enemery is "kill Americans" and therein, we have to figure out a way to "quit the table."