THE FINAL FRANTIC ESCAPE FROM THE ROOF OF THE SAIGON US EMBASSY (1975).
IS A REPEAT FROM THE GREEN ZONE IN THE CARDS?--- Tony Sayegh
By Ivan Eland
"The real surprise in Woodward's book has received less attention: The Bush administration's main adviser during the war has been Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger, according to Woodward's book, apparently has convinced the Bush White House that any troop withdrawals from Iraq will start a wave of public pressure to pull out all U.S. forces from Iraq. He is probably right in this analysis. But Kissinger missed the main lesson of Vietnam and is now missing it in Iraq. As the U.S. generals in Iraq know, killing more Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militiamen than the United States loses of its own troops will not win a war that is fundamentally political. As Lt. Gen. William Odom (ret.), former Director of the National Security Agency and opponent of the war, has noted, the Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate and the United States will eventually be forced to withdraw from Iraq. So withdrawing sooner, rather than later, according to Odom, will save U.S. lives and money and salvage what international prestige the United States has left. If Nixon and Kissinger had followed similar advice in Vietnam, the United States, its military, and its international standing would not have been tarnished by four additional years of war. And even worse than Vietnam, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq is fueling and worsening the Islamic terrorist threat to the United States, according to an estimate from Bush's own intelligence agencies.
Even if Congress and the American people were to blame for the loss of the Vietnam War, as Kissinger contends, politicians should take into account that democracies will not allow an indefinite waste of lives and money to win a war that has little to do with national security. And the Bush administration, after the Vietnam experience, should have known that the public tires quickly of such unneeded military adventures."
No comments:
Post a Comment