Inside the Ring

Washington Times ^ | 12-13-06 | Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough

[JZelle]

Study this We have tapped the special-operations community and found some sour words for the Iraq Study Group's 79 recommendations for getting out of Iraq. An Army Green Beret told us: "The Iraq Study Group has taken a chapter out of our old playbook in Vietnam known as "Vietnamization." It predictably failed then, as this will now. The Democrats and Republicans now have a policy which will protect their candidates in future elections. As a bipartisan document, it is a politically marvelous way of abandoning Iraq without paying the political price at home as the party that lost the war.

[JZelle]

Iraq will not be capable of fielding a national army capable of providing security in three years, regardless of how many advisers we provide. The supposedly secret 'three courses of action' to 'go big, go long, or go home' have been discussed for years at all levels. The only politically viable solution to stabilizing Iraq has always been to 'go long' and dig in for a decade of nation building. That course of action is contingent upon the will of the American people, however, and the report represents the belief that we have already lost our will. "The report proposes a politically palatable method of disengaging and going home without paying the full political price at home. The tragedy is that we chose to destroy that country and are now choosing to leave it in ashes. It is shameful. When the jihadis arise from this debacle and once again bring terror to American soil, as they rose from the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan and delivered us 9/11, we will have only ourselves to blame."

[stop_fascism]

I'm beginning to think the ISG was strategery. They came up with a report, so craven and stupid, that it would be rejected by the American people who would find a new resolve to complete the mission. Was Baker taking one for the team?

It should be remembered that Vietnamization failed when the Democrat controlled congress refused to fund the S. Vietnamese army.

[MNJohnnie]

Utter total nonsense. I suspect this supposed "SOF" source is a total Pentagon warrior with utterly NO experience in Iraq. This is the same old Dinocon nonsense these two butt clowns have been screaming for years.

1st off, Vietnamization worked just fine. What failed was the Democrat Congress. The South had stopped the North cold then in 1974, in the aftermath of Watergate, cut off all funding to the South. Pretty hard to stop and NVA armor column when you have about 3 clips per man of M-16 Ammo and are having to wash and reuse bandages.

Frankly this whole article is pure nonsense. Just more Dinco screaming on an issue they clearly know NOTHING at all about. 1 of three things happened with this. The source doesn't know what he is talking about, the Junk Media types here cherry picked what he said to get the spin they wanted. The Source knows what he is telling them is full of crap but it suits his domestic political agenda to spew this nonsense.

Just another attempt by the McCainiacs to triangulate for their lord and Master John McCain. Spew garbage so the notion that McCain can be both for the Iraq war but against the way we are winning it can be sold to the American Voters. This article is all about domestic politics, it has utterly no insight in Iraq at all. Rather then screaming the same Know Nothing dogmas and terrorists cheerleading propaganda maybe the Dincons might actually TRY to find out something about Iraq? What are you all so afraid of? Afraid you might have to admit "that idiot Bush" has been right all along about Iraq and you Neo Isolationists totally wrong?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Security_Force

[GoldCountryRedneck]

W said early on that "it might take ten years or longer...". We've been in Japan and Europe since the end of WW2.

I view the ISG with even more disdain than the 9/11 Commission. Both were largly self-serving, but the ISG was a slam at the troops on the ground, killed, and those wounded.

[stop_fascism]

I once worked with a Vietnamese engineer. After a long day he sighed and said, "This is such a wonderful country, and I'm fortunate to be here, but I'll never understand why you let my country down."

I was offended and said, "What the hell do you mean, we lost 50,000 people standing by your country."

He said, "I know, that's why its so hard to understand. You stood by us until our army could defend the country. Then, just when we were getting on our feet, your congress cut off all military aid."

[Vetdude07]

"A Vietnam lesson for Iraq" an Op-Ed by Quang X. Pham, The Orange County
Register, 3/19/06


Former U.S. Marine and entrepreneur Quang X. Pham is the author of "A Sense
of Duty: My Father, My American Journey." www.quangxpham.com


The first Americans I met were military advisers, much like the ones who are
training security forces in Iraq. That year, 1970, the United States was in
the process of Vietnamization - turning the war over to the South Vietnamese
as U.S. troops simultaneously departed.

I remember as a boy visiting my father's South Vietnamese Air Force squadron
and shaking hands with U.S. pilots who wore reassuring smiles, green flight
suits and pistols.

Today, three years into the war in Iraq, memories of Vietnamization come
back when I hear President Bush talk about his eventual plans to withdraw
U.S. troops. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," he has said. Yet,
Vietnamization is not the model for Iraq.

If U.S. troops cannot extinguish the insurgency and end the carnage from
improvised explosive devices (IEDs), should we expect the Iraqis to fare
much better with less than two years of training? Today, not one Iraqi
battalion is capable of fighting independently. Now, as more members of
Congress clamor for withdrawal of U.S. troops, the lessons of
Vietnamization appear to have been forgotten.

Last month, an unprecedented conference took place at the JFK Presidential
Library in Boston, featuring American historians, journalists and leaders
from the Vietnam era. Not a single Vietnamese was invited to speak.

How we got into Iraq should not matter as much for now as how we will exit.
Two of the key participants in Boston, Jack Valenti, a special assistant to
President Johnson, and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and
national security adviser for President Nixon and the mastermind behind the
"peace with honor" strategy in Vietnam, offered no solutions for Iraq.
Kissinger lamely reflected, "I know the problem better than the answer."

In 1961, U.S. pilots began training South Vietnamese pilots, including my
father, when President Kennedy dispatched advisers en masse to Vietnam. They
didn't leave until the cease-fire agreement 12 years later.

The Iraqis, too, are doomed as an independent military force if the United
States makes the same critical mistakes made with the South Vietnamese:

* Vietnamization failed because U.S. advisers trained the South Vietnamese to
fight the American way - with heavy firepower and air support, which
vanished with our troops. James Willbanks, author of "Abandoning Vietnam"
and an Army adviser, recalled: "Advisers were needed for so long because we
had trained the Vietnamese to fight the same way that we did, using massive
firepower."

* U.S. advisers stayed too involved for too long, eroding the national
identity of Vietnamese soldiers. Buu Vien, a personal aide to South Vietnam's
president, recalled: "The presence of American advisers at all levels of
the military hierarchy created among the Vietnamese leadership a mentality
of reliance on their advice and suggestions."

Lewis Sorley, author of "A Better War," wrote about one Vietnamese officer
who had 47 different U.S. advisers. The United States essentially
micromanaged South Vietnamese military and political affairs while
Vietnamization's key assumption - that the South Vietnamese could
successfully fight entirely on their own without U.S. advisers and air power
- was never tested until the very end of the war.

In this war, we should hand over responsibilities to the Iraqis at a faster
pace and put them to the test while U.S. troops are still in country. U.S.
air power will not be available forever so we should not train the Iraqis to
depend on it the way U.S. troops do.

In 1975, when North Vietnam invaded the South in violation of the
two-year-old cease-fire agreement, Congress rejected President Ford's final
plea to resume military support. The B-52s were no longer on call. Despite
sporadic heroics, Saigon's million-man military, including an air force that
ranked fourth in the world numerically, crumbled in two months.

There is no similar large-scale invasion threat in Iraq, yet taxpayers have
to wonder what our trillion-dollar-war will bring to the American and the
Iraqi people. The war in Iraq requires more than partisan politicking in
favor of either "withdrawing our troops now" or "staying the course."
Congress has to stop shirking its duty and demand a rigorous review of the
Iraqi training program instead of just reacting to quarterly reports from
the Pentagon.

The last Americans I saw in Vietnam were those who evacuated my family
before Saigon fell. One of them had served as an adviser alongside my
father, who did not make it out. I wish the Iraqis better luck than the
South Vietnamese. One can hardly imagine a scarier scenario than that of
U.S. and Iraqi troops taking the fight to Iran or Syria. Or Iraqis killing
each other using American know-how.