What Game Does McCain Think He's Playing?

…we need to pull the plug on the media's disturbing habit of acting as if foreign policy and domestic policy are completely separate entities -- a pair of high stakes board games that can only be taken off the shelf and played one at a time. To hear the media tell it, combining the two would make about as much sense as using your Monopoly pieces to play Risk.

--- Arianna Huffington

The 100-Year-War man wants his electorate to imagine staying in Iraquagmire just like we stayed in the Phillipines and Korea:McCain has no clue about the domestic consequences of his open-ended occupation of Iraq. He says he doesn’t know anything about economics. In Jan 2000, McCain claimed:

I didn't pay nearly the attention to those issues in the past. I was probably a 'supply-sider' based on the fact that I really didn't jump into the issue.

In November 2005, McClain said,

I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

And in December 2007, McClain said

The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should, I've got Greenspan's book.

When McCain confesses his ignorance of economics, that is one place where I take him at his word. You can’t keep on going on having both guns and butter forever. The American way of war has always been to call on the current generation to make their sacrifices along with the troops in the field and their families. That’s because most wars in American history were explainable to the people as war forced on us. Most of them weren’t unprovoked, elective or vanity invasions of nation-states who had no inclination or capability to attack us. So, the current generation of our people understood their war was born of dire necessity and were willing to carry the burdens of shortages and taxes to sustain the national effort. Not so with the Bush-Cheney-McCain war occupation or pacification of Iraq. Our government fudged and lied about the casus belli; then they lied and fudged about how much it would costs us; and in the upcoming presidential campaign of John McCain they will lie and fudge about how much longer it will go on.

McCain doesn’t understand much about economics, by his own admission, but Joseph Stiglitz does know a tad. He’s a Nobel Prize-winning economic professor at Columbia. A Harvard colleague of Stiglitz is Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Customs Department. Together, they have published a monograph with the self-explanatory title The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of The Iraq Conflict. Stiglitz says of Iraq that

. . . the big picture is that, by our most conservative estimates, this war has cost an almost unimaginable $3 trillion. A more realistic estimate, however, is closer to $5 trillion once you include all the downstream "off budget costs" of long-term veteran benefits and treatment, the costs of restoring the now depleted military to its pre-war strength, the considerable costs of actually withdrawing from Iraq and repositioning forces elsewhere in the region.

I have a lot of trouble imagining even how to write a Trillion dollars out, numerically. It’s 3,000,000,000,000

A trillion dollars wasn’t what it was supposed to cost was it? Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billions, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. (Adjusting for inflation, in 2007 dollars, they were projecting costs of between $57 and $69 billion.) The tone of the entire administration was cavalier, as if the sums involved were minimal. Even Lindsey, after noting that the war could cost $200 billion, went on to say: “The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.”

But where are we? Stiglitz and Bilmes argue the true costs are at least $3 trillion under what they call an ultraconservative estimate, and could surpass the cost of World War Two, which they put at $5 trillion after adjusting for inflation. The direct costs exclude

• interest on the debt raised to fund the war,
• health care costs for veterans coming home, and
• replacing the destroyed hardware and degraded operational capacity caused by the war.

Well, according to the authors, the cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans –

• already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected

• to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War,
• almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and
• twice that of the First World War.

Stiglitz and Bilmes write that the only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion. With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese,

• the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars.
• the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.

In two weeks’ time the fifth year of McCain’s 100-year war occupation will draw to a close. Operating costs (spending on the war itself, what you might call “running expenses”) for 2008 are projected to exceed $12.5 billion a month for Iraq alone, up from $4.4 billion in 2003. That’s almost four times what we’re spending on the Afghanistan theater of the war on terror – the locus of the planning for the 911 attacks on our cities.

I excuse myself from the inability of fathoming the unfathomableness of the eventual cost of $3,000,000,000,000, or its monthly price tag of $12,000,000,000. Reading through previews and reviews of the work of Stiglitz and Bilmes as well as their Congressional testimony, I can begin to grasp the reaches of this nightmarish loss in blood and treasure. The money spent on the war each day is enough to

• enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year,
• make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants,
• pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

A trillion dollars could have

• hired 15 million additional public school teachers for a year or
• provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships to public universities

It doesn't matter whether it's George McCain or John McBush. Both are playing risk with funny money. Robert Borosage says

John McCain enjoys a fawning press and a maverick reputation. He likes to describe himself as a conservative populist. Straight talk is his boast. But when it comes to the economy, he's peddling the same poisonous brew that is sapping this country's strength. That is why even though John McCain is a decent man, the campaign this fall will be ugly and mean. McCain couldn't survive a straight up policy debate.

Clearly, if John McCain doesn't understand the economy, he doesn't understand security. If we had infinite resources, we might be able to have perfect security. But America, like every other country, has resource constraints. That means you need to be smart -- that is, economic -- about the money we spend. If you weaken the American economy, you won't be able to find the resources you need for security. The two cannot be separated.

Come this fall, when Senator Obama demonstrates to America that Senator McCain can’t cash his rubber checks with funny money, it’s not going to be pretty.

Bridging the Troubled Waters Between Vietnam and Iraq?

Applying Half-Assed Ruminations About History and Historical Analogies...

Historical analogies deserve a certain skepticism. They represent the artifice of simplifications intended to deepen our understanding of events which are unfolding before our eyes, as -maybe - we imagine future historians will explain our present to our progeny. In order to highlight certain threads of history, they are defensible as long as we remember they are simplifications, and not at all to be considered above suspicion.

In fact, simplistic historical analogies can become quite malevolent in their effects on policy.

Consider, for example, the meticulously careful and conservative lessons drawn by George Kennan as he drafted his doctrine of Containment of the Soviet Union. He was drawing from the disastrous consequences of the Munich syndrome - appeasement of totalitarian states in Europe. His writing served Truman and subsequent American presidents well as they negotiated through the years of the Cold War.

Contrast Kennan's craft with the misconceptions of Dean Rusk and the rest of JFK's "Best and the Brightest" as they greedily snatched up the reins dropped by the French in South East Asia. Vietnam looked like a repeat of Korea. (However, the Sigman Rhee (George Washington) of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, was ensconced in the North).

And, as I thought at the time, Rusk's State Department even thought Vietnam looked a little like the pre-Franco Spanish Civil War in the 30's [into which Hitler had dipped his hands], and needed to be bolstered up, else it fall like the dominoes of Eastern Europe under Nazism. (Are you beginning to get the sense of how historical analogies can jerk you around?)

But instead, SE Asia turned out to be quite different than SE Europe, huh? It turned out that to the local inhabitants (never consulted), totalitarianism wasn't such a big deal as was nationalism. Had that thought struck Rusk, might he have not seen the French Indo-Chinese syndrome as a variant of the French-Algeria syndrome? But Rusk was an errant heir, driven to see that JFK inherited Saigon from the French, and that LBJ inherited the same from JFK. Had not Indochina been so polarized with such a bloodletting, Ho could have emerged as an Asian Tito: communist, but non-aligned. (Actually, he did.)


By now, you can tell where I'm going with this.

Since Bush announced his mission accomplished there has been too much spilled ink and torn paper about similarities and dissimilarities between Vietnam and Iraq not to insert a caveat at this point: this is a working paper and I fully intend to accommodate, by editing, some of the comment it attracts. With that said, here goes:

1. Casus Belli: LBJ’s decision to augment a detachment of American advisors in Vietnam with troops was the result of a fraudulent allegation that the Vietnamese Navy had attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tomkin. As we learned later through the Downing Street Memo, GWB attempted something of the same nature: painting American war planes with U.N. insignia and sending them over Iraq in sorties designed to draw anti-aircraft fire. In the end, Bush and Cheney stampeded our country into war in the post-9/11 hysteria and on the pretense that Saddam’s dictatorship had weapons of mass destruction and was associated with al Qaeda.
   
   
2. Origins: In Vietnam, JFK and LBJ serially inherited a half-completed war of national liberation against the French and turned it into a sectional (north-south) Vietnamese civil war, while all the time managing to call it a case of international aggression. In Iraq, GWB impulsively re-ignited a half-completed war (halted a dozen years prior) with a cold-blooded invasion, followed by an unplanned occupation resulting in a civil war, the warnings of which had been ignored.
   
   
3. Legitimacy of War Time Presidents: Presidents with dubious personal mandates waged both bloody fiascoes. LBJ became president by way of assassination, GWB by way of a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court after having lost the popular vote to an opponent vastly more qualified.
   
   
4. Length: The Vietnam war lasted twice as long as the Iraq war, but the latter quagmire is still counting days, months, and years.
   
   
5. Escalations: The Vietnam war escalated in terms of external air strikes against North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; GWB's adventure has threatened/is threatening to spillover into Syria and Iran.
   
   
6. Regional Instabilities: Nixon’s politically destabilizing of Cambodia resulted in the Khmer Rouge and genocide. In Iraq, a separatist Kurdistan could result in ethnic cleansing battles with the Turks.
   
   
7. Dominoes: Vietnam was basically sold as a domino, which had to be held up else others in South East Asia, would fall. The Iraq misadventure metamorphosed in terms of mission creep. It was originally sold as a war to prevent an attack of weapons of mass destruction, which were often undefined. Its mission crept up to include al Qaeda, regime-change, a democratization of Iraq, and a domino process throughout the Middle East. So, in Vietnam, the domino theorizing initiated the project; in the latter case of Iraq, domino-izing was thrown in when other casus belli proved to be too leaky to hold water.
   
   
8. KIA's & MIA's: The death toll in Iraq remains well short of Vietnam's numbers. The wounded-in-action statistics of both wars were marked by 'improvements' in the technology of emergency medical care: more soldiers survived with critical, life modifying wounds. This means that one of the hidden costs of Iraq will be the continuing costs of lifetime medical care, psychological trauma and occupational support of veterans.
   
   
9. Draft/No Draft: There's no draft at this point in Iraquagmire. The Vietnam effort required drafting of an increasingly reluctant civilian military, susceptible to declining morale and political support. In Iraq, the invasion was carried out by a professional military that was supplemented by hired mercenaries in the subsequent occupation. In the latter case, the military has been able to reduce desertion rates to a trickle by offering the carrot of benefits rather than the stick of incarceration. However, also in the case of the case of Iraq, the need for boots on the ground has required the mis-use of personnel for ground combat: the elevation of the National Guard units; the use of support personnel for ground combat; and the stop-loss process of overuse of certain personnel.
   
   
10. Combat: In Vietnam, our opponents were known colloquially as the Vietcong, but were indistinguishable from the People's Army of Viet-Nam (PAVN). Warfare was initially asymmetrical guerilla-counter guerilla warfare and evolved towards the use of air power and armor on both sides. Our enemy was a single ideology-driven nationalist group operating from a known secure base. They were supported by two members of the nuclear club (who weren't themselves that friendly.) Our Iraqi adversaries are multiple and shadowy: insurgents, terrorists and street criminals sponsored by Baathist 'dead-enders', foreign terrorist 'beheaders', and indigenous militias with no secure terriorial sanctuary. Warfare has evolved from the conventional battle between two standing, formally structured militaries to entirely an asymmetrical insurgency-counterinsurgency hostility in which pitched battles are rare. Whether our adversaries have possession of secure bases of operations is not a settled issue: Shiite militias (not united among themselves) are said to be supported from Iran, a future nuclear power; Sunni insurgents are suspected to be supported through patrons throughout the Middle East, traversing through Syria and Jordan.
    
    
11. Terrain: The United States had to resort to napalm and Agent Orange to deal with the concealment their jungle offered the VC. In Iraq, the mere scent of white phosphorous in a dramatically more urban theater was spontaneously and universally condemned. Also, it has been argued that the urban warfare in Iraq has rendered the maintenance and repair of national infrastructures a larger issue than it was in South Vietnam. However, in both cases, infrastructure and economies suffered greatly. The net effect was that America had to destroy these theaters in order to save them.
    
    
12. Guns and Butter on the Home Front: During LBJ’s presidency we had an attempt to unify the country through the War on Poverty and the Great Society; nowadays, we have the 'Compassionate Conservatives' waging a war against the middle class through wartime tax relief for the rich.
    
    
13. Opposition: In the case of Vietnam, protests increased as the war went on. The Iraqi war was the first war in which the largest protests occurred before the American invasion which had been telegraphed for a year or more.
    
    
14. Loyalist Reaction to Dissent: The same phraseology has been used in both cases: there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and the need to see it through and settle for nothing less than complete victory and more fighting and sacrifice and winning hearts and minds. These expressions give us more than twinges of deja vue.
    
    
15. The Vietnam-Iraqi Syndrome(s): In both cases, the double-edged sword of a historical blame game is played. The military blames their civilian leadership for sending troops to their deaths without deploying sufficient forces at the same time micro-managing them from afar. The other side of the syndrome is the liberal democratic complaint: don’t send our servicemen out into foreign lands unless you are prepared for us to talk about what they are doing and why they are there.

There you have it: a working list of the comparisons of the Two Vietnams or of the Two Iraqs, however you want to think of it. They are not identical, but definitely they are the fraternal twins of American self-delusion.

Update (21-May-06): I have just fallen upon comments of a historian who has lived through both 'twins'. From his blog, History Unfolding, here are David Kaiser's 'money' conclusions:

What got me thinking, however, as one old enough to remember these events vividly, was the obvious, deep division between the leadership of the Administration on the one hand and the Congress and opinion leaders on the other. After the very heavy fighting of 1968 (which was not confined to the Tet offensive, but continued through the year), the bulk of Americans had concluded that we were not going to achieve our original objectives. Nixon had not. And so began a tradition that has persisted, off and on, for 36 years: that of an Administration more or less secretly pursuing a policy in which the American public does not believe, because it has convinced itself that such a policy is necessary and dissenters are simply playing politics, showing naivete, or working against their own country.

Something similar certainly seems to be happening today. President Bush and Secretary Rice remain totally committed to their idea of a democratic, pluralistic, relatively secular Iraq, despite the lack of any evidence that such an outcome is getting nearer. (It is not clear, on the other hand, that Vice President Cheney or Secretary Rumsfeld, the other major powers in the Administration, have ever cared much about the future of Iraq once Saddam was gone.) Realism in 1970 would have involved agreeing to a coalition government or acknowledged partition in South Vietnam, allowing the troops to come home, the American defense establishment to rebuild (clearly, based on the new documents, the main concern of Defense Secretary Laird), and the people of Vietnam at least to live in peace. A great deal of suffering might have been avoided, and it is possible that Communists would not have taken power in Laos (whose Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma told Nixon in the spring of 1970 that a coalition government was the answer in South Vietnam) or in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge were not yet a significant factor. Realism today, in all probability, would involve recognizing that Iraq is almost certain to fracture into three parts, and trying to start negotiations to make that process as painless as possible. But within the Green Zone, the American authorities still seem committed to the vision of impartial security forces, disarmed militias, and law-abiding Iraqis. Events seem be happening on two entirely different planes. And it seems, as under Nixon, that no one can serve in the upper reaches of this Administration who does not officially believe in the happy ending to come. (A Washington Post article indicates that some American military officers are advocating partition, but they appear to be in a minority and do not yet include anyone of high rank. (See Washington Post)

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld apparently believed Saddam had to be eliminated, and did not much care about the consequences. Regime change--or rather, regime elimination--was the sum and substance of their policy. They seem to be, essentially, conventional military thinkers who are only intermittently interested in broader political trends. (Rumsfeld's leaked memo in 2003 or 2004, I believe, was one example of momentary interest.) And now they are fixated on Iran, which is more of a conventional threat than Iraq was. Nixon reacted to stalemate in Vietnam by opening a new front in Cambodia--one that ended even more disastrously--and deepening our involvement in Laos. When South Vietnam fell in 1975, Kissinger, now under Gerald Ford, reacted by trying to get the United States involved in a civil war in Angola to show we had not lost our will. If the Congress wants to stop an air campaign against Iran, it had better move pre-emptively to do so.

I'll digest this later!

George Bush Has Put a Bigger Hurt on America than Has Osama bin Laden

When the history of the 21st Century is written,
19 March 2003 will be a bigger date than 11 September 2001.

It will be seen that Bush's needless invasion and endless occupation of Iraq began America's slide from being the preeminent leader of the free world.

I have been posting on this theme at least twice a year for years. And every year, doing the simple arithmetic paints an increasingly uglier picture.

Now that George Bush has had half a decade to drive America to I-wreck and I-ruin, the truth is incontrovertible: Bush's illegal, un-provoked, unnecessary, and largely unilateral invasion and unplanned occupation of Iraq has cost our nation more in blood and treasure than has Osama bin Laden.

First, contrast the bloodshed by al Qaeda in America six years ago today with the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq, beginning on 19 March 2003 through today.
OBL: Total Deaths - All 9/11 Attacks: 3,030
OBL: Total Injuries - All 9/11 Attacks: 2,337
GWB: Total US KIA in Iraq: 4,155
GWB: Total U.S. WIA in Iraq: 30,324

What I failed to consider when I initially posted this graphic a year or so ago, is that it can be argued - as I vehemently have argued - that massive American retaliation against Afghanistan was not only justified by the 9-11 attacks, but mandated. Therefore, our costs sustained there in Operation Enduring Freedom are costs which are directly attributable to the 9-11 attacks against us. Therefore, they should be added to the lives lost in the crash of four airliners on 9-11-01.

In Afghanistan, we have lost 584 KIA in the seven years beginning in the last couple of months of 2001. So, adding the Afghanistan theater's 584 to Osama's toll, we derive an al-Qaeda total of 4,358.
So, counting our Afghanistan sacrifices, Bush has pushed through to a break-even point with Osama bin Laden.

It has to be added that Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq has sapped resources from the pursuit of bin Laden (and corrupted the anti-Taliban cause). Officials with the CIA and the U.S. military said they began shifting resources out of Afghanistan in early 2002 and still haven't recovered from that mistake.

John O. Brennan, a former deputy executive director of the CIA and a former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center was quoted in the Washington Post only yesterday:

Iraq was a fundamental wrong turn. That was the most strategically negative action that was taken. The collective effort in the government required to go after an individual like bin Laden -- the Iraq campaign consumed that.

The WP reminds us that in late 2005, Bush had the CIA disband Alec Station, its special unit dedicated to tracking bin Laden. But a year later, after the disruption of the airliner plot in London was uncovered it was clear that al-Qaeda's core command had made a comeback.

On the financial ledger, the financial losses due to the four airliners' attacks on 9-11, estimated up to $ 40 billion, (Costs of economic recovery from 9-11, are generally accepted as being less than those of Katrina.) The Department of Defense has not provided Congress with the individual costs of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) as opposed to Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Further discussion of economic costs on my part would be redundant, given the recent authoritative work of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economic professor at Columbia and Bilmes is at Harvard. They have co-authored a monograph with the self-explanatory title, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of The Iraq Conflict. Stiglitz and Bilmes say of Iraq that

. . . the big picture is that, by our most conservative estimates, this war has cost an almost unimaginable $3 trillion. A more realistic estimate, however, is closer to $5 trillion once you include all the downstream "off budget costs" of long-term veteran benefits and treatment, the costs of restoring the now depleted military to its pre-war strength, the considerable costs of actually withdrawing from Iraq and repositioning forces elsewhere in the region.

I'm going to take their word for it. The economic evidence is conclusive and the jury's verdict is in.

Let's add to the ledger, that as a result of Bush's reckless adventure in Iraq, our military is stretched to the breaking point. Finally, of penultimate importance to our global war on terror, would be an international consensus on how to wage it. Al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington gave us an overwhelming groundswell of sympathy throughout the world. By the time Bush mobilized for his unprovoked and unwarranted invasion of Iraq 4½ years ago, he had squandered that foundation of support. In fact, Bush's war was the first war in history to garner world-wide demonstrations against it on the day before his invasion of Iraq began.

It is George W. Bush, who has put the biggest hurt on Americans, in squandering our blood, our economic resources, our military assets, and our international esteem.

Source for statistics:
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

The League of Extraordinarily ‘Disgruntled’ Ex-Employees

It’s not a feature movie, but a documentary with a growing cast of distinguished public servants.

No one has lost a job over the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 or the invasion & occupation of Iraq that was trumped up and velcroed to 9/11. The reason is that firing someone will only induce him/her to speak up and tell the truth. There is safety in numbers, and those numbers are growing daily. Now, more than before, whistle-blowers have less reason to fear that the Karl Rove machine will call out the dogs of personal destruction. Also, there is a growing awareness of the veracity of the critics’ messages.

Richard Clarke has stayed in the news is because he does not stand alone; he has joined a long and prestigious line of people who have come forward to bear witness against this White House. Eventually, the numbers in this League of Extraordinarily Disgruntled Ex-Employees will reach a critical mass.

Paul O'Neill: Former (fired) Treasury Secretary for George W. Bush. O'Neill was afforded a position on the National Security Council because of his job as Treasury Secretary, and sat in on the Iraq invasion planning sessions which were taking place months before the attacks of September 11. Along with Ron Suskind, O’Neill has published his memoirs The Price of Loyalty. O’Neil & Susskind document Bush’s obsession about getting Iraq from the first week of the administration:

It was all about finding a way to do it,…That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this….From the very first instance, it was about Iraq,….It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed.

Richard Armitage: Ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on the disappointments of the first Bush term.

I'm disappointed that Iraq hasn't turned out better. And that we weren't able to move forward more meaningfully in the Middle East peace process... The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot.

The late Robin Cook: Culminating a career that began in 1974 with his election as a Member of Parliament, Robin Cook served as Foreign Secretary 1997-2001, and as Leader of the House of Commons, 2001-2003. On the evening before Parliament voted on the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq (18 March 2003), he resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet, saying in part:

Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council. To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse. . . . . Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.

History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition. Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired. What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops. . . . . I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.

Carne Ross: Britain’s Iraq expert and first secretary in Britain’s delegation to the United Nations, involved in the initial preparation of Blair’s dossier on weapons, before the war resigned last week (15-Oct-04). He quit only recently because he was due to return to the Foreign Office from the UN where he had been serving as head of conflict resolution. Ross declined to expand on why he resigned, saying he had been advised he might face legal action if he did so. All he would say to The Independent was

I had lost trust in a Government that I believe did not tell the whole truth about the alleged threat posed by Iraq before the war. . . .I am happy to confirm that I resigned because of the war, but I cannot comment further.

Richard A. Clarke: has worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, serving as counterterrorism chief for the last two—apologized to the families of 9-11 victims for his failures in fighting al-Qaeda. In testimony before the Commission he slammed the Bush administration for paying insufficient attention to the terrorist threat in the summer of 2001. His new book, Against All Enemies, makes similar points at greater length. Clarke argues (page 246): that the war diverted resources from the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan and riled up potential al-Qaeda recruits:

It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'

David Kay served as the IAEA/UNSCOM Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector, leading numerous inspections into Iraq following the end of the Gulf War to determine Iraqi nuclear weapons production capability. During the Bush II administration, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency appointed Dr. David Kay to lead that search and direct the activities of the 1,400 hundred member Iraq Survey Group, the hunting for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. David Kay resigned from the CIA in January 2004. Currently Dr. David Kay is a Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies with a concentration on counterterrorism and weapons proliferation. In an interview on 18-Jul-04, Dr. Kay said:

What really happened for the analysts is they had two levels of evidence. Anything that would confirm WMD in Iraq – very little scrutiny. Anything that showed Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, had a much higher gate to pass because if it were true, all of US policy towards Iraq would have fallen asunder. . . . I think what you have in both the Senate Report and in the Butler Commission Report is a disturbing merger of the lines between intelligence, whose real role was to speak truth to power, and power whose real role is to influence the public to do the course of action that they’ve decided upon. That line blurred and blurred on both sides of the Atlantic with regard to Iraq. . . . I think the Prime Minister as I would say the US President should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exit for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction. . . . That was not something that required a war and inspectors like myself going in if you’d fairly interpreted the evidence that existed. WMD was only one and I think in their mind, not really the most important one. And so the doubts about the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was not as serious to them as it seemed to be to the rest of the world . . . If you hold that everyone is responsible, therefore no one is responsible, you don’t reform the system. You just go and wait for the disaster to occur next time . . . The politicians, the political leaders had their conclusions ready and they looked for evidence to support it and the civil servants’ error was to give it to them and allow their evidence to go forward without the caveats and the question marks they should have had.

Brian Sheridan: Pentagon's top counterterrorism official, its assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict under Clinton. Incoming Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld never arranged a briefing from Sheridan. Colin Powell did. Powell took the unusual step during the transition of asking to meet with the CSG, the senior counterterrorism officers from NSC, State, Defense, CIA, FBI and the military. He wanted to see them interact, respond to each other's statements. When they all agreed at the importance of the Al Qaeda threat, Powell was obviously surprised at the unanimity & took detailed notes. Brian Sheridan, Assistant Secretary of Defense who wasn't fired until after 9-11, summed it up:

General Powell, I will be leaving when the administration changes. I am the only political appointee in the room. All these guys are career professionals. So let me give you one piece of advice, untainted by any personal interest. Keep this interagency team together and make al-Qaida your No. 1 priority. We may all squabble about tactics and we may call each other assholes from time to time, but this is the best interagency team I have ever seen and they all want to get al-Qaida. They're comin' after us and we gotta get them first.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni: For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S. interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that would be unleashed. Known as the "Warrior Diplomat," Zinni is not a peace activist by nature or training, having led troops in Vietnam, commanded rescue operations in Somalia and directed strikes against Iraq and al Qaeda. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni (a Marine for 39 years) and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. wondered aloud how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned.

I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus. Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?. . . .I think that some heads should roll over Iraq. I think the president got some bad advice. , , , We're betting on the U.N., who we blew off and ridiculed during the run-up to the war. Now we're back with hat in hand. It would be funny if not for the lives lost. . . . .I've been called a traitor and a turncoat for mentioning these things.

Tom Maertens: National Security Council director for nuclear non-proliferation for both the Clinton and Bush White House. Colleague of Clarke’s for 15 months in the White House, under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Subsequently, He moved to the U.S. State Department as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, and worked with Clarke and his staff before and after 9/11.

The Bush administration did ignore the threat of terrorism. It was focused on tax cuts, building a ballistic missile system, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and rejecting the Kyoto Protocol. Clarke's gutsy insider recounting of events related to 9/11 is an important public service. From my perspective, the Bush administration has practiced the most cynical, opportunistic form of politics I witnessed in my 28 years in government: hijacking legitimate American outrage and patriotism over 9/11 to conduct a pre-ordained war against Saddam Hussein….I personally believe that Clarke was one of the most effective government officials I have ever worked with — most effective, but not the most loved. Unfortunately, he suffered the fate of Cassandra: He was able to foresee the future but not convince his leaders of the threat.

Donald Kerrick: A three-star General who served as deputy National Security Advisor under Clinton, and stayed for his last four months in the service in the Bush White House. According to a report by Sidney Blumenthal from March 25, Kerrick wrote Stephen Hadley, his replacement in the White House, a two-page memo. Kerrick told Blumenthal. Hadley has since become a White House front man in the attacks against Rickard Clarke. He sent a memo to the NSC's new leadership on "things you need to pay attention to." He wrote about Al Qaeda: "We are going to be struck again." But he never heard back.

I don't think it was above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen,… [my memo] It was classified [and] said they needed to pay attention to al-Qaida and counterterrorism. I said we were going to be struck again. We didn't know where or when. They never once asked me a question nor did I see them having a serious discussion about it. They didn't feel it was an imminent threat the way the Clinton administration did. Hadley did not respond to my memo. I know he had it. I agree with Dick that they saw those problems through an Iraqi prism. But the evidence wasn't there.

Gen. Henry H. Shelton: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until Oct. 1, 2001.

There are other serious threats out there in addition to that posed by ballistic missiles. We know, for example, that there are adversaries with chemical and biological weapons that can attack the United States today. They could do it with a brief case B by infiltrating our territory across our shores or through our airports.[Under Bush administration antiterrorism was moved] farther to the back burner The squeaky wheel was Dick Clarke, but he wasn't at the top of their priority list, so the lights went out for a few months. Rumsfeld's attitude was this terrorism thing was out there, but it didn't happen today, so maybe it belonged lower on the list.

Greg Thielmann: Former Director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in the State Department. Thielmann, like Ambassador Wilson, was involved in investigating whether the Niger uranium claims had any merit. Thielmann told Newsweek at the beginning of June 2003 that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research had concluded the documents used to support the Niger uranium claims were "garbage." In fact, they were crude forgeries. Thielmann was stunned to see Bush use the claims in his State of the Union address eleven months after the charge had been dispensed with as nonsense. "When I saw that, it really blew me away," Thielmann told Newsweek. He watched Bush use the claim and said, "Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"

From my perspective as a former mid-level official in the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of State, I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided.

Karen Kwiatkowski: Lt. Colonel in the Air Force and a career Pentagon officer. Kwiatkowski worked in the office of Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and worked specifically with the Office of Special Plans. Kwiatkowski's own words tell her story:

From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.

Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador and career diplomat who received lavish praise from the first President Bush for his work in Iraq before the first Gulf War. Wilson was the man dispatched in February 2002 to Niger to see if charges that Iraq was seeking uranium from that nation to make nuclear bombs had any merit. He investigated, returned, and informed the CIA, the State Department, the office of the National Security Advisor and the office of Vice President Cheney that the charges were without merit. Eleven months later, George W. Bush used the Niger uranium claim in his State of the Union address to scare the cheese out of everyone, despite the fact that the claim had been irrefutably debunked. Wilson went public, exposing this central bit of evidence to support the Iraq invasion as the lie it was. A few days later, Wilson's wife came under attack from the White House, whose agents used press proxies to destroy her career in the CIA as a warning to Wilson and anyone else who might come forward. For the record, Wilson's wife was a deep-cover agent running a network which worked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. The irony is palpable.

Now understanding that they would come after me, I didn’t feel that I had anything personally to worry about. After all, the former President Bush had called me an American hero and had written me any number of laudatory handwritten letters. What did shock me and I think shocks most Americans was what this administration decided when they couldn’t discredit me to their satisfaction.

Somebody close to the president of the United States decided that in order to defend Bush’s political agenda, that individual or individuals would violate the national security of the country and expose my wife’s name and her profession. . . . .That was absolutely unexpected, that this government would take a national security asset off the table, working in an area that is of primordial importance to the national security of the United States—the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of rogue states and non-state actors. Yet for some reason, either because they wanted to discourage other people from stepping forward and telling the truth, or out of simple revenge, as was reported in The Washington Post, this government decided that it would go ahead and take that national security asset off the table.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" (Brassey's Inc., 2004) under the pseudonym Anonymous:

I cannot state these facts more clearly, and I fiercely deny the accusations that I am a disgruntled former employee. I am, however, a disgruntled American — one who decided that being a good citizen was no longer compatible with being a good member of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service. . . .The 9/11 commission report documents most of the occasions on which senior U.S. bureaucrats and policymakers had the chance to attack Bin Laden in 1998-1999. It is mystifying that the American public has not been outraged over these missed opportunities. . . . .Clarke had the duty to apologize for the government's ineffectiveness as regards terrorism, but I reject his intimation that the clandestine service failed the nation. . . . .I must add that I was never charged with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belongs solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American citizen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the protection of Americans — most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren — was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunities to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. . . . .At day's end, it may be worth pausing the intelligence reform process long enough to determine what role personal failure, bureaucratic warfare — which the Department of Defense continues waging today — and a lack of moral courage played in getting the United States to 9/11. Lacking this accounting, the debate over intelligence reform will, I believe, simply lock into place a bureaucratic mind-set that believes intelligence is never "good enough" to take a risk to protect the lives of Americans.

Maj. Isaiah Wilson III: who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. During the period in question, from April to June 2003, Wilson was a researcher for the Army's Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group. Then, from July 2003 to March 2004, he was the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division, which was stationed in northern Iraq.

There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations. . .In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative . . . gained over an off-balanced enemy. The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since. [Because of] stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt. . . . the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness. . . . Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it . . . .perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it. The scarcity of available 'combat power' . . . greatly complicated the situation. . . This overly simplistic conception of the 'war' led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies . . . and too little allotted time to achieve 'success'.

Richard Armitage:The outgoing Deputy Secretary of State to his best friend and boss Colin Powell. According to Bob Woodward's account of the period leading up to the war in Iraq, Armitage was one of the members of the Bush administration urging the greatest caution in going in to Iraq:

The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot.

John Brown: former Foreign Service officer who resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq, is affiliated with Georgetown University.

If there's one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it's that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neocons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment. (The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude). The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians par excellence, with essentially one long-term plan, rudimentary but focused: Republican -- as they interpret Lincoln's party -- domination of the United States for years to come.

John Brady Kiesling: A career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan:

When I faxed my resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 25, the United States government was on the verge of its most costly foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. The primary goal the president had announced, protecting the American people from terrorism, could not be achieved through war with Iraq. The goal of establishing democracy in Iraq was one the United States had, alas, no effective legitimacy to achieve. The costs of our attainable goal — cleansing Iraq of a genuinely monstrous Saddam Hussein and his likely arsenal — had been concealed from the American people and their elected representatives for an excellent reason: As two previous presidents had recognized, the material, moral, human, and political costs would be so great as to cancel out the probable benefit.

Mary Wright: the second highest-ranking diplomat at the US embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, resigns from her post after serving 15 years at the State Department. Wright's letter of resignation (19-Mar-03):

In our press military action now, we have created deep chasms in the international community and in important international organizations. Our policies have alienated many of our allies and created ill will in much of the world.... I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them.... I believe the administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer place.... This preemptive attack policy will ... provide justification for individuals and groups to ‘preemptively attack’ America and American citizens.

John J. DiIulio: Renowned academic, New Democrat policy innovator, and former head of the Administration's faith-based organizations initiative, was interviewed by Esquire for an article about the Bush White House. In addition to the interview, he also supplied Esquire with a five-page memo about his experiences in the Administration.

What was needed… was more policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation. . . .In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, non-stop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue. . . . This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. . . .Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove. . . . some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. . . . They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him. . . . Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office.

General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon's top operations officer, voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war. Here, for the first time, Newbold goes public with a full-throated critique.

Newbold is not opposed to war.

I would gladly have traded my general's stars for a captain's bars to lead our troops into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda.... I don't accept the stated rationale for invading Iraq....

In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won't Get Fooled Again. To most in my generation, the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation's leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture--who became career members of the military during those rough times--the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it. Never again, we thought, would our military's senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It's 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.

From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq--an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat--al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough.

I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals. In those places, I have been both inspired and shaken by the broken bodies but unbroken spirits of soldiers, Marines and corpsmen returning from this war. The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice.

With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't--or don't have the opportunity to--speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important.

.... I will admit my own prejudice: my deep affection and respect are for those who volunteer to serve our nation and therefore shoulder, in those thin ranks, the nation's most sacred obligation of citizenship. To those of you who don't know, our country has never been served by a more competent and professional military. For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that "we" made the "right strategic decisions" but made thousands of "tactical errors" is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.

.... What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort.

Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

They were enthusiastic because they said they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.

He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

No doubt in my mind at all...The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.

60 Minutes (23-Apr-06)

Originally Published on April Fools' Day 2004,

and updated Constantly!

Vietnam vis-a-vis Iraq in Congressional Debate

Lessons Learned? Or Biases Deeply Ingrained?

What, if anything, can be made of the fact that contemporary warhawks rely less on pragmatic analysis of current facts on the ground in Iraq than their prior personally traumatizing experiences in Vietnam?

Whether or not you think there are parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the significance cannot be denied of the Vietnam experience nearly 40 years ago in producing two very opposite schools of thought among current congressional leaders. Views on what to do about Iraq seem to divide members of congress substantially based on how they processed their Vietnam experience, since each side's set of "lessons learned" is in direct opposition with the other's.

Vietnam was a terrible mistake

The majority camp consists of many who, having served in Vietnam, now view that war as a terrible mistake, from its inception based upon false reporting about the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident through the fallacy of the "domino theory" and the continuing "fog of war" public deception that lengthened U.S. involvement and casualties. A good example of the majority opinion came from Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), an Army infantryman in Vietnam in 1968, who recently called the President's summons for more troops in Baghdad "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Senators John Kerry, Jim Webb and Congressman John Murtha are among those who have voiced similar sentiments.

The majority also includes those who, like Senator John Warner (R-Va) might not be willing to go so far as to call Vietnam an outright mistake but who, as a result of that war, have developed mature, sober assessments of the dangers and costs of war, including the blowback problem of veterans suffering for years from their physical and psychological wounds. A Washington Post news article recently described the guilt that Virginia Sen. John Warner still carries about the Vietnam War which explains "why this pillar of the Republican establishment is leading a bipartisan revolt against the (current) war plans of a president in his own party." The former Navy secretary said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office,

I regret that I was not more outspoken during the Vietnam War. The Army generals would come in, 'Just send in another five or ten thousand.' You know, month after month. Another ten or fifteen thousand. They thought they could win it. We kept surging in those years. It didn't work.

Beginning with the "Pentagon Papers," and other revelations, admissions of error and public apologies like those made by former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, the majority viewpoint had long ago gained substantial acceptance in popular culture and from historians. As a result of the commonly-held "Vietnam syndrome" mindset which began to take root (almost 30 years prior to the commencement of the Iraq War), it was believed leaders would be cautious of military engagement unless "Powell Doctrine" factors of justification, international support and winnability could be met.

Vietnam--the only mistake was in leaving

A minority viewpoint about Vietnam, however, has always quietly seethed, just below the surface, amongst the other camp of Vietnam veterans who turned their anger and shame at "losing" the war and perhaps even some of their "survivor's guilt" upon peace protesters like Jane Fonda, "traitors" like Daniel Ellsberg, the "liberal media" and the American public. According to this view, the United States did not fight long or hard enough despite devoting nearly ten years and sacrificing the lives of 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese. This group seems to believe that the U.S. could have "won the Vietnam War" had the American media and public opinion not turned against the war and had the presidents at the time not bowed to public and media pressure. In this category, you find Vietnam vets who have become congressmen like Duncan Hunter (R-California), Sam Johnson (R-Tex), John Kline (R-Minn), and former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-California) who apparently lamented they were not given the heroes' welcome home from Vietnam they were due. Some seem to think their early military careers were unnecessarily tarnished as a result. Rep. John Kline flew Marine Corps helicopters during the Vietnam War. In January 2007, while unveiling a resolution opposing any cutoff of funds to troops, Kline said,

I served at a time when we saw the Congress reduce funding for the military. We served at a time when the military did not have the support of the people, the press or the Congress. I don't ever want to see that again.

Recently asked what he thought for an opinion piece on "Lessons of Vietnam--How to Avoid a Repeat," Congressman Kline mentioned

. . . that while the nation was on the retreat in Southeast Asia, disdain for American military power abroad trickled down to disdain for American military personnel at home. And it wasn't only antiwar protestors. In the wake of Vietnam, military personnel were discouraged from wearing uniforms while off duty within the city limits, and the feeling in the ranks was that even senior officials in the government viewed the military as an embarrassment.

Swiftboating other Vietnam vets who learned different lessons

Hunter, Kline and others have consequently turned their anger and swift boat efforts upon the other Vietnam Veteran congressmen in the majority camp. In April 2004 Rep. Sam Johnson denounced Massachusetts Senator Kerry on the 33rd anniversary of his testimony before a Senate panel in which he (Kerry) had sharply criticized the conduct of some U.S. troops in Vietnam. (Kerry, a decorated Navy officer in Vietnam, had emerged as a prominent antiwar spokesman after his discharge.) Johnson, who spent seven years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, compared the young Kerry to former antiwar activist Jane Fonda:

. . . blasted our nation, chastised our troops and hurt our morale. . . . What he did was nothing short of aiding and abetting the enemy. . . He's called Hanoi John.

Other Republicans then poured it on with Rep. John Kline saying Kerry's service in the war "does not excuse his joining ranks with Jane Fonda and others in speaking ill of our troops or their service, then or now." Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (Calif.), whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam, said Kerry's 1971 remarks angered Cunningham and his comrades at the time. "We do not need a Jane Fonda as commander in chief," he said.

In May 2004, Rep. John Kline was quoted in a news report about Democrats' criticism of Donald Rumsfeld and the administration's failing policy in Iraq, including its handling of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, saying, "I am furious (with Murtha). Because when that message gets out to our forces they won't feel love and support. They'll feel betrayal." Kline later made further, similar comments to these in a lengthy interview on the Powerline Blog about his view that progress was being made in Iraq in December 2005. Duncan Hunter was also linked via his staff and a group called "Vietnam Vets for Truth" to the later swiftboating of John Murtha after Murtha's 2005 stance to redeploy U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Rep. Sam Johnson emerged again as the GOP's point man in mid-February's debate in the House of a non-binding resolution expressing disapproval of President Bush's buildup of U.S. forces in Iraq. Using his POW experience in Vietnam for almost the entire time he was allotted, Johnson linked support of Bush's "surge" strategy with support for the troops. Rep. Sam Johnson was then chosen to give a second impassioned closing speech again linking the Iraq War with Vietnam: "Let my body serve as a brutal reminder that we must not repeat the mistakes of the past." Rep. Kline just took the lead in drafting the letter to House Leader Nancy Pelosi in March in which he and five other Vietnam veteran GOP congressmen argue against setting any timetables for withdrawing our troops from Iraq. His letter apparently blames congressional interference for hurting troop morale which in turn led to the lack of victory in Vietnam.

Fighting to write history

It should be acknowledged that a smaller number of historians who back this minority view may be gaining more prominence in military establishments. In his book Abandoning Vietnam, James Willbanks, a historian at the Combat Studies Institute at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, digs through the Nixon administration's series of decisions that finally resulted in the fall of Saigon in 1975. Mr. Willbanks, a military veteran who saw combat as an infantryman during North Vietnam's 1972 Easter Offensive, tries to show that the Nixon administration was focused more on ending the war than on winning it and that the U.S. came a lot closer to "winning" than many people believe today.

There are, of course, all kinds of other parallels being made between Vietnam and Iraq including the wild overstatements of the threat to the U.S. (LBJ said that if we didn't fight them over there, then we would have to fight them in Hawaii. Bush and McCain likewise claim the Iraqi terrorists will attack us here if we leave Iraq.) And in both wars, the advocates urged staying the course to achieve some unspecified goal of 'winning.' (What a victory in Iraq, however, would look like is hard to say, but most sober analysts think anything that could even be remotely portrayed as a victory in Iraq is receding over the horizon.)

Merging "Vietnam Syndrome" into "Iraq Syndrome"

In any event, we may have to wait to reach some cooler and saner point down the road before social psychologists, historians and/or military strategists are able to make sense of the difference in the radically different "lessons learned" of the two different camps of Vietnam veterans turned Congressmen. I did however recently see the following comment posted to a thought piece by Norman Soloman which might explain things:

As for Senator McCain, he typifies the major enduring difference between many infantry and air power guys, enlisted men and officers, where "learning the lessons of Vietnam" are concerned. . . men who drop bombs from on high are distanced from the sober political realities on the ground. In victory, they tend to take too much credit, and in stalemate or defeat, it's always because the bombing campaign was not intensive enough, or else it was imprecisely targeted. A winning strategic or tactical mix lies always just beyond the horizon, if only the civilian policymakers would just hunker down and persevere.

Exploitation of Vietnam has already taken on such importance in the debate in Congress, that it would be better if the experts could weigh in sooner rather than later. In an odd twist, comparisons of Iraq with Vietnam are now being used more by pro-Iraq War than anti-Iraq War figures. But even now one thing can be discerned about the group who, instead of talking about the harsh, current reality of facts on the ground in Iraq, constantly falls back, in a highly emotional way, on their Vietnam experiences as justification for their insistence upon "staying the course" to achieve "victory in Iraq" no matter the cost. One must question whether this group is being honest with themselves. Ego defense mechanisms do have a way of turning old psychological wounds into deeply ingrained biases. To quote Norman Soloman,

. . .the Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the first place.

Better than Impeachment!

Branding Bush as the Defeat Chimp before he leaves the White House!

Few themes have I pounded on in these pages more than the idea that we are and have been in occupation mode in Iraq. We 'won' the war - Gulf War II - when Bush launched his unprovoked and unnecessary invasion of Iraq and toppled its dictator, Saddam Hussein. But then Bush elected to stay in Iraq, following our successful blitzkrieg, following the conclusion of major military operations, which Bush called 'shockandawe'; and we even stayed after the capture and killing of Hussein and sons. Nevertheless, we have persisted in calling our presence in Iraq, a war.

I understand why Bush wants to prolong the myth of the 'Iraq war': he has always lusted after the mantels worn by Churchill and Roosevelt. Bush is a wannabe war-time leader. It simply won't do for him just to preside over an occupation. He needs a vanity war. Perpetuating this myth of being a war-time president, allows him to pretend that he is pursuing "Victory". Everyone understands this fraudulent spell which he has been able to cobble together and cast upon the nation. What's more difficult for me to understand is why the loyal opposition, including much of the Democratic Party and even some of my closest blogging friends, have swallowed this toxic fiction.

It is a fatal attraction, this attachment that Americans have to waging wars. We have a war on illiteracy; a war on crime; a war on drugs; a war on poverty; a cultural war; a war on Christmas; even a War of Words. Whenever we are faced with a challenge in which failure is unthinkable, we have to dub it a war. Thus, it's not an accident that we use a three-letter, mono-syllabic word to describe our Iraqi misadventure; it is by design. Bush wants his war because he knows Americans do not like to settle for anything other than victory.

By chance this past weekend I hit upon C-SPAN2's BookTV interview of Jonathan Steele. He is the author of Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq. During the interview, he pimped his recent column on the Huffington Post which made me think I've been pushing and pulling a Sisyphean load up the wrong mountain.

I've always argued that, unlike wars, you can't win or lose in occupations: you can only end them. Not so, Steele argues. Bush has overcome all the odds and managed to lose an occupation. Moreover, he argues, the Democrats need to brand Bush with that defeat while he is still in office.

Below, I have excerpted (and tuned up!) the conclusion of Steele's essay, Why the Democrats Should Use the "Defeat" Word now!

Better therefore to get the "defeat" word on the table now, in 2008. Make a pre-emptive strike this year, while the Republicans still control the White House. They are the ones who took the U.S. into a doomed occupation of Iraq. They are the people who deserve to take the blame.

Defeat is a powerful word, and no country or person likes to use it. Even to mention it invites the charge of being unpatriotic. So it is no accident that in Washington, critics of the war occupation prefer the F-words -- failure, fiasco, and folly. But the decision to stay in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein was worse than that. It was bound to lead to defeat. The U.S. did not lose on the battlefield, but every political goal that the Bush administration set for itself has been thwarted. So the verdict on the U.S. adventure has to be "military stalemate, political defeat."

1. Bush sought to justify the occupation as a vital element in the war on terror. Yet al Qaeda is now implanted in Iraq where it never was before, and thousands of new jihadi recruits are getting valuable training and experience in provoking death and destruction. That is Defeat number one.


2. Bush wanted to mount a demonstration of overwhelming U.S. power in the region so as to reduce Iran's influence. Instead, he put U.S. troops into a quagmire that has already cost 4,000 4,101 lives and helped to install a Shia Islamist government in Baghdad that has close links to Tehran. That is Defeat number two.


3. Bush and the neo-cons wanted to turn Iraq into a secular pro-Western democracy that would be a model for other Arab states. Iraq has become a humanitarian catastrophe that no sane nation or people would wish to copy. Defeat number three.


4. Finally, by toppling Saddam Hussein Bush hoped to enhance the feelings of sympathy, respect, and solidarity which many people around the world expressed for the United States after 9/11. Instead, by occupying Iraq and denying it genuine sovereignty, he has undermined America's image and reputation, not just in the Middle East but in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Defeat number four.

The Republicans should not be allowed to escape the blame. It is not the U.S. forces and the American people who have been defeated, though they have had to bear the costs of Bush's disastrous decisions. As the country's official opposition, the Democrats should have the political courage to use the D-word and pin on it on those who led the country into political defeat.

The Democrats control both Houses of Congress. Why don't the chairpeople of the relevant committees call hearings this spring and fall to call administration officials to account for what has gone wrong? Label the hearings "The Lessons of Defeat" or "The Reasons for Defeat", and get Bush's past and present people -- the Wolfowitzes, the Feiths, the Rumsfelds, the Cards, the Roves, and all the others -- to explain why they did no analysis of the political consequences within Iraq and the region of occupying the country.

• Did any official prepare pre-war option papers that assessed the Iraqi mood, or were the assurances from Cheney and Wolfowitz that the troops would be met with flowers simply propaganda?


• Why did the intelligence community not recognize the strength of political Islam in Iraq, or foresee that the forces that would inherit the post-Saddam vacuum would not be the secular pro-Western exiles who paraded through Washington before the war?


• Why did Bush's advisers not realize that jihadi militants would flood Iraq if the United States stayed too long?


• How could Bush imagine that the U.S. and Britain -- the two countries with the longest recent history of intervention in the Middle East and the Gulf -- could send troops to occupy an Arab country on an open-ended basis and not meet Iraqi suspicion, resentment, and opposition?

Blunders made by the Coalition Provisional Authority -- disbanding the Iraqi army, dissolving the Baath party, failing to stop the looting -- are not the main problem. The very concept of occupation was doomed. Once Saddam was toppled, Iraqis should have been given control of their own country.

Of course the Democrats are divided on Iraq .... Some support Obama. Some think the "surge" is working. Others doubt it. But the best way to forge party unity is to hold hearings on the recent past. Otherwise Bush may get away with his absurd claims of looming victory.

Holding such hearings would also help to focus the presidential campaign on Iraq as an issue. After five years of war it seems absurd to think the Republicans can mount a better case than those who want to end it. Can a candidate who suggests keeping US troops in Iraq for another hundred years (with 4,000 dead in the last five years, that means condemning another 80,000 to death over a century) and who thinks Iran is training al Qaeda really convince Americans he understands security issues? Iraq is the Republicans' weakest link. Are the Democrats really unable to exploit it? Iraq needs to be at the center of the Democrats' campaign. Holding Congressional hearings over a series of weeks is the best way to lift the Iraq debate above the level of sound bites, and keep the public spotlight on what went wrong, and why.

Some American analysts to whom I have been making this case in Washington in recent days say the strategy may be too risky in domestic political terms because defeat is such an explosive concept. Yet they also concede that the Republicans will have no compunction about using the D-word if the Democrats regain the White House. On balance, therefore, it looks best to seize the moment now. In 2009, for the Republicans to accuse the Democrats of defeat in Iraq would be pure political spin. In 2008, for the Democrats to accuse the Republicans of defeat is a charge that carries the weight of irrefutable evidence. The fingerprints on the Iraq disaster belong to Bush and those who worked with him.

Sounds like a fucking good idea to me! Barry and Wesley, are you listening?