Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Rick Hampson, in USA Today (April 20, 2004):
For three weeks the nation has been battered by the worst news from Iraq since the war began 13 months ago. But despite the shootings, bombings, sieges, ambushes, kidnappings and combat deaths, most Americans still support the war. And an increasing number think it should be stepped up.
Historians say that's a common reaction to attacks on U.S. forces. During the Vietnam War, for instance, polls taken immediately after the Tet offensive in 1968 showed increased support for escalating the conflict. Eventually, however, Tet was taken as a sign that the United States was not winning the war, and public opinion shifted against it.
John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State University, says he thinks the same pattern will prevail in Iraq. "There won't be an abrupt drop in public support," he says, "but over time it will slowly erode." The percentage of people who describe the war as a mistake has risen in the past 12 months from 23% to 42%.
In a speech to the nation last week, Bush said a strong U.S. troop presence is needed "to protect the (interim) government from external aggression and internal subversion." He again said he would send more troops to bolster the 135,000 there if commanding Gen. John Abizaid asks for them: "If that's what he wants, that's what he gets."
Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist, says the support for an increasingly difficult war is partly explained by the fact that "unlike Vietnam, you have to look hard to find prominent voices saying 'Get out.' "
"People in the middle are taking a gut check on Iraq, but they're not in a political vacuum," he says. "They look at the president and other leaders and ask, 'Are there any other ideas out there?' "
"Even John Kerry says we should send more troops," Mueller says.
Joseph Persico, in the Montreal Gazette (April 19, 2004):
The U.S. president was receiving intelligence that an attack might occur imminently, probably not on the American mainland, but abroad.
Intercepted communications pointed to an adversary with a deadly history of surprise attacks. And, it did happen, the most horrific assault ever on U.S. territory, and one that would lead to war.
An investigation as to how so large a blow could have gone undetected was begun while the U.S. was still fighting the war.
One objective was to find out what the president knew about the threat, when did he know and what did he do to counter it?
The date in question, Dec. 7, 1941; the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Today, a commission is investigating another surprise strike against the U.S. while the earlier disaster still foments speculation and controversy 63 years later. Did Roosevelt, as conspiratorialists maintain, know that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he fail to head off the assault to bring the U.S. into the Second World War?
How could FDR not have known? For more than a year, U.S. cryptanalysts had been breaking a key Japanese code.
In the six months before Dec. 7, 239 messages between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been deciphered.
Given the information in his possession, if asked if Japan was going to attack, Roosevelt would doubtless have answered yes. Indeed, the latest decrypted data reaching him on the eve of Pearl Harbor had prompted Roosevelt to conclude: "This means war."
But if asked if he knew where an attack would occur, he would have had to say no. The intercepts had suggested strikes against the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya and the Russian maritime provinces. But not one of the 239 messages or any intelligence source available to FDR mentioned Pearl Harbor.
The charge that Roosevelt, by failing to repel the attack, found a back door into war raises this question: which war? It was not a secret that Roosevelt wanted to join Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany and that he had essentially launched an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. The president had told the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, however, that a fight against Japan would be "the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time."
Churchill added: "We certainly do not want an additional war." What is often overlooked is that to get into the war that he did want, FDR had to depend on Hitler. It was Germany that, four days after Pearl Harbor, declared war on the United States. Roosevelt had no motive for war against Japan.
Still, conspiracy theories suggest, for example, that radio signals had been intercepted from the Japanese task force bearing down on Pearl Harbor. Commanders of this force, with no reason to protect Roosevelt's place in history, deny they ever broke radio silence. An historian as distinguished as John Toland has written that he interviewed the Navy radioman who picked up such signals, a claim the radioman has denied.
Pearl Harbor was an intelligence failure of stunning magnitude. The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, is equally so.
Whether in 1941 or 2001, the commander in chief must bear responsibility for intelligence debacles. To assign treasonous chicanery to FDR, however, is dead wrong.
James T. Madore, in Newsday (April 18, 2004):
... [F]or more than a year, the Bush administration has strictly enforced a ban on media outlets taking pictures of soldiers' coffins being returned to U.S. military bases on grounds that it upsets mourners.
Critics say it's part of the White House's attempt to downplay the human cost of the war, which this month alone has killed at least 89 U.S. troops. As the casualties mount, the prohibition, whose origins date to 1991, has come under renewed scrutiny.
"We are disappointed and we protest the government denying news organizations access to those events of returning caskets," said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC News' "World News Tonight." "We all remember when the various attacks against the United States occurred and the pictures of those coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base were something no one easily forgets. It's difficult to try to match that emotion and visual" with other footage, he said.
At the Washington Post, executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. also decried the news blackout, saying, "We would like to provide our readers access to all aspects of the war in Iraq, including the photos of those who have given their lives for their country."
The current ban is in sharp contrast with recent history. During the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, the Pentagon encouraged coverage of its increasingly elaborate events for those killed in Egypt, Lebanon and Grenada. President Jimmy Carter was photographed praying over the remains of airmen killed in the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran, while his successor, Ronald Reagan, was shown pinning Purple Hearts to the caskets of Marines slain in El Salvador.
Publicity for such ceremonies continued until Jan. 21, 1991, when officials started to prohibit filming at the Dover base in Delaware, home to the military's largest mortuary and the primary arrival point for remains.
There is disagreement about the reasons for the ban. Historians say then-President George Bush was angered when TV networks used a split screen to air his news briefing with reporters, in which he was seen to laugh at one point, and the coffin ceremonies during the 1991 Gulf War.
Department of Defense officials, however, say the restrictions were to protect mourners.
"Over the years, the families [of deceased service personnel] have told us that their privacy is very important in the immediate aftermath of being notified of their loss," said an official, who requested anonymity.
Despite this, exceptions were made for the return of caskets from Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown's 1996 plane crash in Croatia and the 1998 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. Officials also permitted public distribution of photographs from the coffin ceremonies for those killed in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. And during the first two years of the current Bush administration, journalists photographed remains arriving at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
But the Pentagon now says those pictures violated a total ban instituted in November 2001 on casket pictures at all U.S. bases and led to reiteration of that ban in March 2003 - the month the Iraq war began.
Drew Brown, in the Montreal Gazette (April 18, 2004):
With fighting in Iraq now at its worst, the number of U.S. troops killed by enemy fire has reached the highest level since the Vietnam War.
The first half of April has been the bloodiest period so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. There were 87 deaths by hostile fire in the first 15 days of this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the "shock and awe" invasion, when 82 Americans were killed in action.
"This has been some pretty intense fighting," said David Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Centre for Research on Military Organization. "We're looking at what happened during the major battles of Vietnam."
The last time U.S. troops experienced a two-week loss such as this one in Iraq was October 1971, two years before U.S. ground involvement ended in Vietnam.
There are 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Nearly 700 American troops have died since the beginning of the war. As of Friday, 493 had been killed by hostile fire.
The Vietnam War started with a slower death rate. The United States had been involved in Vietnam for six years before total fatalities surpassed 500 in 1965, the year President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a massive buildup of forces. There were 20,000 troops in Vietnam by the end of 1964. There were more than 200,000 a year later.
By the end of 1966, U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam had reached 3,910. By 1968, the peak of U.S. involvement, there were more than 500,000 troops in the country. During the same two-week period of April that year, 752 U.S. soldiers died, according to a search of records kept by the National Archives.
U.S. officials say that comparisons with Vietnam are invalid and reject the idea that Iraq has become a quagmire.
But the two-front battle that U.S. troops have been waging against Sunni and Shiite insurgents for the past two weeks is the most widespread resistance U.S. forces have faced since the war in Iraq began.
Senior U.S. officials insist the current fighting is only a "spike" and not indicative of a widening war.
On Thursday, General Richard B. Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the current fighting as a "symptom of the success" U.S. forces are having in Iraq.
"The sole intent" of the insurgents is to stop Iraq's transition to self-governance and democracy, he said.
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the death toll was worse than he had expected a year ago.
He also announced that more than 20,000 troops, mostly from the 1st Armored Division, would remain in Iraq for three more months to deal with the insurgency instead of coming home after a year of duty.
Those killed represent a wide range of military specialties. Truck drivers and clerks are getting killed just as often, if not more often, than infantrymen and other combat specialties. That's an indication of the kind of battlefield environment in Iraq.
"Even Vietnam was a more conventional war than this," said Charles Moskos, a sociologist with Northwestern University who specializes in military issues and worked as a correspondent in the Vietnam War. "Here in Iraq, there are no battle lines. It's all over."
The average age of a casualty in Vietnam was 20 years old. The average age of a casualty in Iraq is nearly 27. The youngest American soldier killed in Iraq was 18; the oldest was 55.
More than 12 per cent of those killed have come from the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, which helps explain why the average age of the dead is higher.
"Reserve components tend to be older," Moskos said.
In a sharp departure from previous wars, 18 women have been killed, 12 of them by hostile fire, including a civilian lawyer working for the Army.
Since Vietnam, there was one attack on U.S. forces that inflicted a higher death toll than anything experienced since: 241 servicemen were killed in Beirut in 1983 when a suicide bomber from the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah drove a truck full of explosives into their barracks.
Many experts and historians cite that attack as the beginning of America's war with Islamic terrorists.
Tony Walker, in the Australian Financial Review (fApril 17, 2004):
History seems to offer no lessons for America as it repeats a number of the serious errors it made in Vietnam one of the most notable being the lack of an exit strategy.
On August 5, 1964, US president Lyndon Baines Johnson sent a message to Congress asking for war powers to confront a communist menace in Asia. "America keeps her word. Here, as elsewhere, we must and shall honor our commitments. Our purpose is peace. We have no military, political or territorial ambitions in the area," Johnson wrote.
Forty years later, the same words could just as easily have been uttered by US President George Bush regarding another conflict in another time and another place. Indeed, the Iraq war resolution of late 2002 exposed the same sentiments.
In the so-called Tonkin Gulf resolution (US warships had been attacked in the Tonkin Gulf in the summer of 1964) of the US Congress of August 7, 1964, the Senate and the House of Representatives backed the then president as commander-in-chief, to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States to prevent further aggression".
Eleven years and 58,000 American lives later, the US exited from Vietnam after being consumed by the sort of agonising debates swirling about Washington now regarding Iraq. But the difference between now and then, apart from the obvious distinctions between Vietnam and Iraq, is that America has a model to look back on the Vietnam example.
Unfortunately, it seems to be in the process of repeating some of the same errors, including a flimsy pretext for an invasion; lack of clarity in its objectives; gross miscalculation about attitudes on the ground to its role not as liberators, but as occupiers; unreasonable confidence invested in local surrogates; and finally lack of an exit strategy. This last error is, arguably, the most significant.
In the mantra of the moment that the US cannot afford to fail (Bush in his televised press conference this week described failure as "unthinkable"), that it must stay the course, that it cannot cut and run, that the whole future of Western civilisation is at stake, what tends to be subsumed in the debate is the "what if" question.
That question has to do with the "unthinkable", in George Bush's words failure. Of course, in such complicated circumstances failure is sometimes difficult to define. What constitutes failure? When might it be reasonable to assess (success or) failure? What criteria should be used to judge failure?
Back in 1964 there were not many voices either who were contemplating failure: it's sometimes forgotten that the American media and intelligentsia were overwhelmingly for the Vietnam war in its early stages.
In the Cold War atmosphere of the time, arguments about the need to contain the spread of communism, to impede the fall of dominoes, prevailed, more or less.
Then it was the contest with the Soviet Union (and China) which shadowed the debate and complicated perceptions. Today it is the war on terror, the threat of militant Islam in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US that burdens discussion.
When a country is at war, questions like "what if" tend to be muted.
To be sure, there were a few voices in 1964 who separated themselves from the pack: Walter Lippmann, the distinguished newspaper columnist, and Hans Morgenthau, the historian, made their reservations known, the latter in his 1965 book Vietnam and the United States.
It's interesting to read today Johnson's private taped conversations with senior aides about his views at that moment of history of various individuals, Lippmann included. Johnson was extraordinarily sensitive to criticism and quite fussy about details raised by individual columnists.
Those were the days when the press, as opposed to television, was relatively all-powerful. Now, the chatter of the news channels with their gargantuan appetite for talking heads tends to drown even the most thoughtful commentary.
Thom Hartmann, author of We The People: A Call To Take Back America, in CommonDreams.org (April 21, 2004):
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought they could bomb Vietnam into accepting democracy. George W. Bush thinks he can do it with Iraq.
But the first American president to consider how best to grow democracies - Thomas Jefferson - had some very different thoughts on the issue. LBJ and Bush would have done well to listen to his thoughtful words in a letter he wrote on February 14, 1815, to his old friend in France, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Discussing the French Revolution, the Terror that followed, and the reign of Napoleon, Jefferson noted that building democracy is an organic process: The democracy movement in the colonies had been fermenting for a century prior to Jefferson's birth.
"A full measure of liberty is not now perhaps to be expected by your nation," Jefferson wrote, about the democracy movement within France,"nor am I confident they are prepared to preserve it. More than a generation will be requisite, under the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people, and their habituation to an independent security of person and property, before they will be capable of estimating the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred adherence to the principles on which it rests for preservation."
He added that it's nearly impossible to force democracy on a people, and the consequences of trying could be disastrous."Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes, with an unprepared people, a tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one."
Lafayette, at the time of the French Revolution (1789), had expressed his concerns to Jefferson that the movement for democracy wasn't sufficiently widespread among the average people in France to take hold as it had in America, and they should thus make the transition via a constitutional monarchy much like today's United Kingdom. At the time, Jefferson had disagreed with his friend, but in this 1815 letter, he noted:"And I found you were right.... Unfortunately, some of the most honest and enlightened of our patriotic friends...did not weigh the hazards of a transition from one form of government to another."
Many in the revolutionary movement of France of that era opposed Lafayette's deliberate and careful push for an organic democracy, rather than a sudden lurch."You differed from them," Jefferson noted."You were for stopping there, and for securing the Constitution which the National Assembly had obtained. Here, too, you were right; and from this fatal error of the republicans, from their separation from yourself and the constitutionalists, in their councils, flowed all the subsequent sufferings and crimes of the French nation."
The lack of a truly widespread, average-citizen-based movement for democracy in France, Lafayette had privately argued to Jefferson two decades earlier, could simply lead to a transition from the tyranny of the king to another, perhaps worse, form of tyranny. While Jefferson had, at first, embraced the French revolution, in his letter to Lafayette he confessed that he had now come to agree that without a broader base of support, a sudden change of government was a disaster, and the primary beneficiaries would only be war profiteers and the rich, Frenchmen who were so opposed to democracy that they could even be called foreigners.
Thus, Jefferson wrote,"The foreigner gained time to anarchize by gold the government he could not overthrow by arms, to crush in their own councils the genuine republicans... and to turn the machine of Jacobinism from the change to the destruction of order; and, in the end, the limited monarchy they had secured was exchanged for the unprincipled and bloody tyranny of Robespierre, and the equally unprincipled and maniac tyranny of Bonaparte."
Comparing France to America, Jefferson noted how - unlike France - we had overthrown an external occupier all by ourselves. For American colonists, the repression and occupation of the English in the Colonies"has helped rather than hurt us, by arousing the general indignation of our country, and by marking to the world of Europe the vandalism and brutal character of the English government. It has merely served to immortalize their infamy."
And now Arab leaders like Egypt's Mubarak say that, across the Arab world, our infamy is being immortalized by Bush's unprovoked invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq. America, Mubarak says, faces"a hatred never equaled" in the Middle East, even as Iraq totters on the edge of civil war.
It's as if the cycles of history are repeating themselves, and Iraq may now suffer the Terrors that racked France in the 19th Century....
James Lilley, former ambassador to China, in the WSJ (April 19, 2004):
... Our experience tells us that Americans usually are not smart enough to master the intricacies of Chinese history. Our principles for shaping a framework have thus evolved from circumstances at the time: We supported One China because both Chinese sides wanted it in the 1970s when we first opened to China. Then, when China seemed to emphasize armed intervention if its demands were not met, we adopted the concept of peaceful resolution and we had the wherewithal to back this up. Later in the 1980s, we supported both sides working together to expand trade and exchanges. All of this has led to formidable progress in cross-Strait relations. In the 1950s, military action dominated; but by the 1990s millions of Chinese were crossing the Strait, investment was at an all-time high, and Chinese and Taiwan leaders were meeting and talking at the highest levels, both unofficially and through a formal arrangement worked out by them.
The implicit American premise was that a secure and stable Taiwan would be a more willing and successful partner in dealing with China. Judicious arms sales to Taiwan were part of this formula and in the past it has worked. The large arms sales package and President Reagan's personal support contributed to the breakthrough in 1987, when President Chiang Ching-kuo of Taiwan lifted martial law and agreed to the China opening. Our large arms sale to Taiwan in 1992 was followed quickly by the two sides agreeing to disagree on a One-China formula and then agreeing to meet in Singapore formally in April 1993 -- for the first time since the Chinese Communists took over the mainland in 1949.
If elements of this broader formula are disregarded by the current Taiwan authorities, however, then the successful historic pattern has been broken. U.S. military support and arms sales cannot be used by Taiwan to move away from China -- they were meant to make Taiwan feel secure enough to move toward accommodation with China. Our support should be conditional on upholding our successful pattern. The U.S. needs to continue to maintain a quiet deterrence to any mainland military action against Taiwan. But just as arms sales, deterrence and the Taiwan Relations Act are leverage for Taiwan, China has in its favor the Three Communiqués the U.S. signed with Beijing, military power and geographical advantage....
Mike Davis, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 19, 2004):
The young American Marine is exultant."It's a sniper's dream,' he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah."You can go anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are."
"Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies. Then I'll use a second shot."
"To take a bad guy out," he explains,"is an incomparable"adrenaline rush." He brags of having"24 confirmed kills" in the initial phase of the brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of 300,000 people.
Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate terror. According to independent journalists and local medical workers, they have slaughtered at least two hundred women and children in the first two weeks of fighting.
The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the"key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World city.
The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood militias inflicted 60% casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT:"Militarized Operations on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately, a National Defense Panel review in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World.
As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions."The future of warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared,"lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world."
Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to teach Marines, Rangers, and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics -- especially the sophisticated coordination of sniper and demolition teams with heavy armor and overwhelming airpower -- so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Artificial cityscapes (complete with"smoke and sound systems") were built to simulate combat conditions in densely populated neighborhoods of cities like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine Corps Urban Warfighting Laboratory also staged realistic war games ("Urban Warrior") in Oakland and Chicago, while the Army's Special Operations Command"invaded" Pittsburgh.
Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are graduates of these Urban Warrior exercises as well as mock combat at"Yodaville" (the Urban Training Facility in Yuma, Arizona), while some of the Army units encircling Najaf and the Baghdad slum neighborhood of Sadr City are alumni of the new $34 million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
This tactical"Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine has been accompanied by what might be called a"Sharonization" of the Pentagon's worldview. Military theorists are now deeply involved in imagining how the evolving capacity of high-tech warfare can contain, if not destroy, chronic"terrorist" insurgencies rooted in the desperation of growing megaslums....
J. Sean Curtin, a GLOCOM fellow at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications, in Japan Focus (April 2004):
The dramatic abduction of three Japanese civilians in Iraq -- hostage bargaining chips -- is reverberating throughout Japan, casting a long shadow over the future of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his Iraq policy of dispatching troops on a humanitarian mission to help the United States there. It evokes memories of hostage-taking during Lebanon's civil war, cases that dragged on for years with scant progress and abundant tears.
Koizumi is facing his darkest hour, and as one of the US' closest allies, is coming under tremendous pressure to withdraw Japan's 550 troops from Iraq, a move that would further, and very significantly erode the already shaky credibility of the US-led coalition in Iraq. Japanese public opinion -- divided over dispatching troops in the first place -- currently is split over whether Japanese soldiers should quit Iraq. Meanwhile, Japanese and most other foreigners are fleeing Iraq en masse as the country descends into what some fear may become a Lebanese-style quagmire of hostage-taking.
To most Japanese, the sudden explosion of violence and hostage-taking has made their country's strictly humanitarian mission seem futile, since nearly all their troops are now tightly barricaded in a heavily protected fort about 10 kilometers outside the southern city of Samawah. Some commentators are even describing the current situation as Lebanon, Vietnam and the Palestinian intifada all rolled into one.
Dr Pierre Serhal, a leading Beirut surgeon and son of a prominent lawmaker, is pessimistic about the hostage crisis. He believes that the foreign captives may be in for a protracted ordeal because US foreign policy is creating instability in the entire Middle East.
"From a Lebanese perspective, Iraq is turning into the same kind of hostage nightmare we had in Beirut during the 1980s," he told Asia Times Online."I am very worried for the Japanese and other hostages, because I can only see things getting worse. I am a Christian, not a Muslim, but I feel American policy is a complete disaster for the whole region. The occupation of Iraq and the total neglect of any meaningful advances in the Israel-Palestine conflict are inflaming Arab opinion so much that it threatens the stability of every country in the region. Unless things radically change, there is little hope for the hostages, or indeed for the people who live here."
James Bennet, in the NYT (April 10, 2004):
Americans struggling to make sense, or maybe political hay, out of the violence convulsing Iraq turn almost reflexively to the searing experience of the Vietnam War.
Israel is haunted by another parallel: its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which for Israelis of a certain generation was their Vietnam. It, too, was envisioned as a bold mission to combat terrorism and reshape part of this region to be stable and friendly to the West.
"In Lebanon, we tried to figure out what was similar to what went on in Vietnam," said Avraham Burg, a member of the Israeli Parliament who went to Lebanon as an officer in the paratroopers and returned to lead a movement against that war."You have a circle here: it's Vietnam, Lebanon and Baghdad."
The uncertain combat zones of Vietnam and Lebanon posed nightmarish challenges to soldiers. Those challenges may seem familiar to marines in Iraq as they try to sift enemies from civilians, without alienating most Iraqis.
"People look at the map and they say, `This is a desert, this isn't a jungle,'" said Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University."The point is there are functional equivalents to jungles. In this case, they're cities. They're just as impenetrable to us as the jungles were 40 years ago."
Dr. Norton, an expert on the Middle East, fought in Vietnam and later served as a United Nations peacekeeper in southern Lebanon.
At a grander level, a level of global strategy and even myth-making, Iraq has echoes of Vietnam, which was presented by the White House as a test of American resolve against a rising international menace, Communism.
But in terms of specific, stated objectives for the application of military force, Iraq looks more like Lebanon.
In Vietnam the Americans had a clear if shaky client, the South Vietnamese government, and an enemy, North Vietnam, with a strong political structure.
In Lebanon the Israelis, like the Americans in Iraq, plunged into a vacuum — or more precisely into a maelstrom of political and religious rivalries.
"The problem of how to rule a society that is divided, a country that does not exist as a state with a central authority with legitimacy — this is a problem Israel faced in the 1980's in Lebanon, and the United States now faces in Iraq," said Menachem Klein, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv.
When they invaded, the Israelis were showered with rice by Shiites who lived in fear of Palestinian militants. Within a year, they were being bled by the Shiites, whom they failed to enlist as allies."In the Middle East — as in many places around the world — the enemy of my enemy can be my enemy as well," Mr. Burg said.
Noting that tens of thousands of Americans died in Vietnam, Dr. Norton said,"The Vietnam parallel is a bit of a stretch, in terms of scale. But I do think the Lebanon one is striking."...
Paul Krugman, in the NYT (April 16, 2004):
Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.
It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.
And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be called up for extended missions overseas. The training of these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to spend years fighting a guerrilla war.
Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army. But President Bush hasn't called for larger forces. In fact, he seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have.
A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today — the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year — would eliminate most of our budget deficit.
By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations.
This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern. Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of"Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers,"Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links."Hearts and minds," meet"welcome us as liberators.""Light at the end of the tunnel," meet"turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army.
Stephen Schwartz, an author and journalist, and the author of The Two Faces of Islam, in frontpagemag.com , in (April 14, 2004):
...Some wishful-thinking enemies of Iraqi liberation even sought to compare the disorders with the Tet offensive of 1968, when a massive North Vietnamese attack on South Vietnamese and American forces contributed significantly to domestic U.S. disaffection with the Vietnam engagement. But the "Shia uprising" had various aspects that, from its beginning, doomed it to failure.
It was nothing like Tet, which involved tens of thousands of North Vietnamese regulars, well-trained, well-armed, disciplined, and highly motivated. The so-called "Army of the Mahdi" cobbled together by the power-hungry young Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, and launched against the coalition, is an irregular militia.
In addition, the 30-year old al-Sadr lacks the political credibility of the North Vietnamese, to say nothing of the more charismatic figures in recent Shia Muslim history, such as Ayatollah Khomeini. Muqtada al-Sadr launched his bid for disruption precisely because he lacks religious credentials and public standing among the Iraqi Shias.
Shia Islam embodies a seniority system of leadership. Young aspirants count for very little in Shi'ism; all power, respect, and decision-making resides in the hands of the ayatollahs, who are greybearded, veteran scholars admired and even venerated for their learning, writing, and theological sophistication. In this regard, Shia Islam most resembles the Orthodox tradition in Christianity; Muqtada al-Sadr has no more capacity to mobilize a majority of the Iraqi Shias than a lone Greek priest from the island of Crete would have to challenge the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul.
Al-Sadr has only one asset: his family name. His father, uncle, and two brothers were prominent Shia clerics murdered by Saddam Hussein's minions. But although martyrdom is the central motif in Shia Islam, family glory is insufficient for the young al-Sadr to usurp authority from such figures as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the dominant figure in Iraqi Shiism, even though Sistani is Iranian, not Iraqi.
Al-Sadr has challenged Sistani's authority since the liberation of Iraq was accomplished. The younger man's lust for power is also now seen behind the tragic murder of another youthful Shia cleric, Abd al-Majid al-Khoei, in the holy city of Najaf a year ago. Al-Khoei was known for moderation and modernism. His father, Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim al-Khoei, who died in 1992, was best known in the Islamic world for rejecting Ayatollah Khomeini's scheme for clerical rule, known as "wilaya ul-faqih." Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei argued that religious and political leadership should remain separate from one another. The al-Khoei legacy supported reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran, and the al-Khoei Foundation maintains offices in New York and London.
Shawn Macomber, a staff writer at the American Spectator, in frontpagemag.com (April 16, 2004):
Louis Freeh was and remains an intelligent, talented man and a true patriot. But that cannot stop us from judging his performance at the helm of the FBI – and the verdict is dismal. The problem was Freeh identified too well with the rank-and-file agent, according to investigative reporter and author Ronald Kessler.
“Freeh viewed his job as directing major cases, which would be like the chairman of GE designing a jet engine or sitting in for Tom Brokaw on NBC's Nightly News ,” Kessler writes in, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI . “From procurement of computers to the services the bureau provides law enforcement, Freeh ignored what goes on in the rest of the bureau. With only six years as an agent, Freeh had never supervised a case, yet he considered himself the bureau's premier case agent.”
By ignoring the less glamorous duties of his post, Freeh put the FBI in a terribly disadvantaged position. The FBI's intra-office computer system was old and ineffectual. The 56k modems the agency used were so slow, agents frequently communicated using faxes instead. Inevitably, many of these memos were lost. There were so few around that numerous agents had to share computers. While Freeh diverted millions of dollars overseas to establish FBI bases (a desirable goal), the agency's headquarters here in America were falling into disrepair. The Information Technology programs the FBI did undertake went millions and millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. In the absence of results even by the pathetic standards of the U.S. Congress, further monies were withheld. Freeh himself, despite his pro-technology rhetoric, booted the computer out of his office on day one and, incredibly, never used e-mail during his tenure as Director.
Freeh, then as now, complained that the real problem was the stinginess of the U.S. government. But a look at the numbers suggests otherwise. Between fiscal year 1992 and 1997 the FBI's budget increased 45 percent, from $2 billon to just under $3 billion. By 2001, the Bureau's budget stood at $3.4 billion. Freeh himself bragged about these increases as he left office. Those substantial increases point to a problem in management. A December 2002 audit by the Justice Department's Inspector General complained of the bureau's “inability to effectively complete IT projects within budget and schedule,” which had “reduced the FBI's credibility in the eyes of Congress.”
Just how bad did it get? Many of the FBI's computer systems not even have the technology to incorporate a mouse. “To store a single document on the Automated Case Support system required twelve separate computer commands,” Kessler writes. “On these green screened machines, the FBI could search for the word ‘flight' or the word ‘schools' – retrieving millions of documents each time – but not for ‘flight schools.' The CIA, in contrast, had been able to perform searches for ‘flight schools' on its computers since 1958.”
Having a former agent as Director was turning out to not be the plus it once was suggested to be, either. The distaste for supervisors he nursed as an agent came bubbling back to the surface. In The Bureau , Kessler quotes Freeh telling his assistant directors that he wanted them to “talk straight” with him. “If I'm full of sh-t, I want you to tell me,” he said, according to Kessler. Staff quickly learned that Freeh was not sincere about his desire for such dissent. Those who told him what he wanted to hear moved up the FBI ladder quickly, those who did not were ignored, shunned, and given “icy glares.” He would tell people their questions were “stupid,” rather than answering them. “Freeh killed the messenger,” one agent told Kessler. “After a while there were no more messengers.” Freeh's distaste for managers led him to decrease the number of agents assigned to headquarters by 37 percent. On the surface, the idea of putting more agents on the streets is attractive, but in practice it led to disarray at headquarters, which made everyone's job more difficult.
On Tuesday, Freeh told the 9/11 Commission he believed “that al-Qaeda declared war on the United States in 1996.” (And admittedly, he took a great deal of interest in the investigation into the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia the same year.) However, Freeh's congressional testimony in 1999 gives the lie to that. It appears his view of terrorsm took the PC posture of the Clinton administration. In that testimony two years before September 11 – and three years after he believed Osama bin Laden had “declared war” – Freeh said that the United States had “little credible intelligence at this time indicating that international or domestic terrorists are planning to attack United States interests domestically.” Instead, he insisted Americans were more threatened by “extremist splinter elements of right-wing groups.”
Among these domestic terrorists, Freeh included “militias,” “white-separatist groups,” “anti-government groups” (like Rush Limbaugh listeners), the “anti-abortion” (the overwhelmingly church-going, pro-life) movement, and “tax protestors.” That is, Freeh and Clinton were wary of being attacked by the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Despite the handicaps imposed by flawed leadership, the FBI's hardworking agents prevented 40 major terrorist attacks during the 1990s, saving thousands of lives. But even now, Freeh doesn't accept that the FBI had a blind spot on September 11. To this day, he maintains that he ran the agency well despite the allegedly tight-fisted ways of Congress. After years of ignoring the ever-depreciating technology in the FBI, citizen Freeh now insists before Congress that the Bureau's encryption software must be brought up to date. Why was this item not on his agenda during his eight years as Director?
The first George Bush once said he thought the Gulf War would cure America of the Vietnam syndrome. He was wrong. There is no cure for the Vietnam syndrome. It will only go away when the baby-boom generation does, dying off like the Israelites in the desert, allowing a new generation, cleansed of the memories and the guilt, to look at the world clearly once again.
It was inevitable that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. Indeed, the current comparisons are hardly new. During our astonishingly fast dash to Baghdad, taking the capital within 21 days, the chorus of naysayers was already calling Iraq a quagmire on Day 8! It was not Vietnam then. It is not Vietnam now....
Iraq is Vietnam not on the ground, but in our heads. The troubles of the last few weeks were immediately interpreted as a national uprising, Iraq's Tet Offensive, and created a momentary panic. The panic overlooked two facts: First, Tet was infinitely larger and deadlier in effect and in scale. And second, Tet was a devastating military defeat for the Viet Cong. They never recovered. Unfortunately, neither did we, psychologically. Walter Cronkite, speaking for the establishment, declared the war lost. Once said, it was.
The other major difference between Vietnam and Iraq is the social terrain. In Vietnam, we confronted a decades-old, centralized nationalist (communist) movement. In Iraq, no such thing exists. Iraq is highly factionalized along lines of ethnicity and religion.
Until now, we have treated this as a problem. Our goal has been to build a united, pluralistic, democratic Iraq in which the factions negotiate their differences the way we do in the West.
It is a noble goal. It would be a great achievement for the Middle East. But it may be a bridge too far. That may happen in the future, when Iraq has had time to develop the habits of democracy and rebuild civil society, razed to the ground by Saddam. ...