Top Ten Mistakes the Bush Administration is repeating from Vietnam

catstevens · Apr 29, 2006

by Ivan Eland

(Tuesday March 28 2006)

Source

"The Bush administration is now suffering for its shocking failure to learn the lessons of the tragedy of Vietnam."

Because the Bush administration, almost from the start, has eschewed any comparison of Iraq with Vietnam, officials apparently never read the history of the nation’s heretofore worst war and have made the same 10 major mistakes:

Underestimating the enemy. As in Vietnam, the superpower’s potent military has been astounded by the tenacity and competence of a nationalist rebellion attempting to throw a foreign occupier from its soil. For example, the U.S. military, a hierarchical organization, views the Sunni insurgency as disorganized and without a central command structure. Yet the insurgents are using this decentralized structure very effectively and are not threatened by any U.S. decapitation strike to severely wound the rebellion by killing its leaders.
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Deceiving the American public about how badly the war is going. President Bush continues to talk of victory, and his chief military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, argued that the United States was making “very, very good progress” just two days before the more credible U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that a civil war was possible in Iraq. President Lyndon Johnson painted an excessively rosy picture of U.S. involvement in Vietnam until the massive communist Tet offensive against the south in 1968 created a “credibility gap” in the public mind. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries successfully beat back the offensive, but the war was lost politically because the U.S. government lost the confidence of its own citizens. The Bush administration has fallen into the same trap by trying to “spin” away bad news from Iraq. Polls ominously indicate that Bush’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the American public has plummeted more than 20 points since September of 2003 to 40 percent.
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The Bush administration, like the Johnson and Nixon administrations, blames the media’s negative coverage for plunging popular support of the war. Yet the nature of the press is that it would rather cover extraordinary negative events, such as fires and plane crashes, than more mundane positive developments. Vietnam demonstrated that normal media coverage of mistakes in war could undermine the war effort. The Bush administration should have expected such predictable media coverage.
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Artificial government statistics cannot be used to measure progress in a counterinsurgency war. In Vietnam, the body counts of North Vietnamese/Viet Cong were always much greater than U.S./South Vietnamese deaths. Lately, the Bush administration has touted that fewer U.S. personnel are dying in Iraq. But U.S. forces have been pulled back from the fight to reduce U.S. casualties and to train Iraqi forces. In guerilla warfare, despite unfavorable statistics, as long as the insurgents keep an army in the field, they can win as the foreign invader tires of the occupation.
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The initial excessive use of force in counterinsurgency warfare instead of a plan to win hearts and minds. The U.S. military, since the days of U.S. Grant, has used superior firepower to win wars of attrition against its enemies. In Vietnam, the U.S. military used such tactics initially, but later adopted a softer counterinsurgency strategy only after it was too late. The Bush administration initially blasted towns like Falluja into rubble and only now, in an attempt to reduce support for the guerillas among the already angry population, is converting to a strategy aimed at winning Iraqi hearts and minds.
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Failed “search and destroy” tactics belatedly gave way to the “inkblot” approach of clearing and holding ground. In both Vietnam and Iraq, after search and destroy missions, enemy fighters merely returned to areas when “victorious” U.S. forces left. But not enough U.S. forces are in Iraq to make the “clear and hold” method work.
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“Iraqization” of the war parallels the unsuccessful “Vietnamization” in the 1970s. The Nixon administration never fully explained how the less capable South Vietnamese military could defeat the insurgency when the powerful U.S. military had failed. The same problem exists in Iraq.
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As in Vietnam, there has been no “date certain” for withdrawal of U.S. forces. President Bush recently implied that U.S. forces would be in Iraq when the next president takes office. Such an indefinite commitment of U.S. forces convinces more Iraqis that the United States is an occupier that needs to be resisted.
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Retention of incompetent policymakers. Lyndon Johnson retained Robert McNamara, the inept architect of the Vietnam strategy, as Secretary of Defense until McNamara himself turned against his own war. Bush has kept the bungling Donald Rumsfeld on too long in the same position.
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Most important of all, starting a war with another country for concocted reasons, which did not hold up under scrutiny. Lyndon Johnson used a questionable alleged attack by Vietnamese patrol boats on a U.S. destroyer to escalate U.S. involvement in a backwater country that was hardly strategic to the United States. Bush exaggerated the dangers from Iraqi weapons programs and implied an invented link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. In a republic, the lack of a compelling rationale for sending men to die in a distant war can be corrosive for the morale of the troops and public support back home.
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Source:
by courtesy & © 2006 Ivan Eland

Peace and love

Yours Sincerely,

Cat Stevens

Note: Silly, repeated, Irrelevant, and the like, responses, posts, comments will be ignored (it depends on my mood and time if I won't ignore them), taking off the topic is losers' style losers' fate , ask yourself: will you write such response if the writer wasn't a Muslim!

rangerdanger · Apr 29, 2006

I agree 100% with cat stevens.

Back when jr. started banging the war drums and it seemed that he was going to invade Iraq no matter what (remember saddam offered to step down the weekend before the invasion), I voiced my concerns that the war could well turn into another Vietnam.
Of course I was villified and called crazy.
Iraqi is considered the cradle of civilization (and bible historians considered it the location of the legenday Garden Of Eden); no one has thrown out more invaders than the people of that area.
They're very good at it.
Here the U.S.-led forces invade with over a hundred thousand men and billions in bombs, bullets, napalm and other weapons to kill the citizens of Iraq.
And a rag-tag army with i.e.d.'s and martyers (suicide bombers) are able to fight for years.
And they will, I believe, be victorious.
Cripes jr. had to send rummy & condi to Bhagdad TWICE to twist arms to get the puppet gov't to pick an interim leader after the "historic" elections (although Iraq had regular elections during saddam's time in office).

Now you've got death squads and a majority of Iraqi's saying they were better off under saddam.

This equally unjust illegal and immoral war waged by the west will end the same way the war in Vietnam did--with desperate lacky's clinging onto the struts of the last chopper as America once again tucks its tail between it's legs and gives up/surrenders (although we won't call it that--we'll call it "withdrawal").

bushco won't mind that much. They still got 90% of what they wanted--billions for the arms dealers, billions for the cia and fbi, fewer civil rights for Americans, people cowering in fear, Iraq looted of it's $$ and antiquities, 100,000 dead.
What is scarier is what they learned--how they can manipulate the media (and send anthrax to those who aren't buckling under) and mislead/lie to the point where 50% of Americans believe there is saddam and 9/11 link.

Even if bushco has to leave before stealing Iraq's oil, they won. 100,000 dead but hey they're rich.

skip · Apr 29, 2006

America loses more wars than it wins these days. Iraq will be no exception. And with Iran looming as a much greater threat than saddam ever was, I'm sure we're about to do it once again. But this time there will be NO ROOM for error. And of course the incompetent Bushit administration will surely fuck it up, as they've done everything else.

Gee I don't know who said Iraq would be like Vietnam.
Was it THIS GUY below?

T.S. Garp · Apr 29, 2006

Nearly all of the United States' attempts to overthrow governments have had negative outcomes in the long run. Hawaii and Puerto Rico are exceptions; Hawaii was made a state and Puerto Rico has been largely successful, although it has a significant number of citizens who want independence from the U.S. Panama, Cuba, Iran, Iraq--all of our attempts to remove governments to install ones sympathetic to the United States have caused more problems than they have solved.

I would add that our military is not as experienced at handling insurgents as some other forces are. The military and civilian planners also completely misunderstood the insurgency in Iraq as all outside instigators, instead of the local population resisting occupation. Tactics would certainly be different if you thought you were killing local Iraqis instead of outside agitators. These outside forces are another facet of what has become a remarkably difficult situation to handle.

You are dead on about not having a more certain exit date. It sends the message that we are not leaving. This is one of the main concerns of many Iraqis; many are happy we have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, but they will also be happy when our forces leave. Having an uncertain timeframe for when we will leave is just one more recruiting tool for the insurgency.

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