"Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President ...

... Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."

I just ran across this article written a year ago by Max Cleland.  As the election focus on BushCo's Iraq disaster hopefully intensifies, I think it's important to hammer on the lessons of history.

The president of the United States decides to go to war against a nation led by a brutal dictator supported by one-party rule. That dictator has made war on his neighbors. The president decides this is a threat to the United States.

In his campaign for president he gives no indication of wanting to go to war. In fact, he decries the overextension of American military might and says other nations must do more. However, unbeknownst to the American public, the president's own Pentagon advisers have already cooked up a plan to go to war. All they are looking for is an excuse.

Sound familiar?  Read on -->
 

Based on faulty intelligence, cherry-picked information is fed to Congress and the American people. The president goes on national television to make the case for war, using as part of the rationale an incident that never happened. Congress buys the bait -- hook, line and sinker -- and passes a resolution giving the president the authority to use "all necessary means" to prosecute the war.

The war is started with an air and ground attack. Initially there is optimism. The president says we are winning. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense says we are winning. As a matter of fact, the secretary of defense promises the troops will be home soon.

However, the truth on the ground that the soldiers face in the war is different than the political policy that sent them there. They face increased opposition from a determined enemy. They are surprised by terrorist attacks, village assassinations, increasing casualties and growing anti-American sentiment. They find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla land war, unable to move forward and unable to disengage because there are no allies to turn the war over to.

There is no plan B. There is no exit strategy. Military morale declines. The president's popularity sinks and the American people are increasingly frustrated by the cost of blood and treasure poured into a never-ending war.

Hmmm... Sounds like a quagmire. Could it be ...?

The president was Lyndon Johnson. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense was Robert McNamara. The congressional resolution was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The war was the war that I, U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John McCain and 3 1/2 million other Americans of our generation were caught up in. It was the scene of America's longest war. It was also the locale of the most frustrating outcome of any war this nation has ever fought.

Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. They could have learned some lessons.

Perhaps, assuming they had been capable of taking off their ideological blinders long enough to learn anything.  Had they done so, Cleland points to some valuable lessons they might have learned, including:

• If the enemy adopts a "hit-and-run" strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman once said about Vietnam) you can't win the war.

• If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you make it the 51st state.

• If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you.

• If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.

BushCo, however, in an act of monumental hubris, decided to defy history rather than learn from it. The result, as Cleland puts it, is our current "Disaster in the Desert."

Cleland is by no means alone in drawing the parellels between Vietnam and Iraq. Stewart Nusbaumer, founder of Veterans Against Iraq War has provided a similar view of how the Chickenhawks blindly led us into another quagmire:

Iraq is a terrible rerun from a horrible earlier war, Vietnam. If those who arrogantly demanded we rush into Iraq with guns ablazing had been in Vietnam, their bravado would have been tempered, they would have approached the war with caution, with a realization that U.S. military power has limits, with knowledge that Americans die on the battlefield just like Asians and Arabs -- horribly. But George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz (in the infamous words of Dick Cheney) "had other things to do." Vietnam was not a classroom for these men.

Countless others with first-hand perspectives have made the Iraq/ Vietnam comparison;

- Robert McNamara:

What, then, does he think about Iraq? Until now, the former secretary of defense has avoided comment on the actions of that job's current occupant, Donald Rumsfeld. The two are often compared to each other in their autocratic leadership styles and in their technocratic, numbers-driven approaches to war. And their wars, of course, are often likened. But Robert McNamara has insisted in staying out of the fray.

He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being ignored. He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself.

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

-  Republican Senator John McCain:

Until now. In a NEWSWEEK interview, McCain for the first time compared the situation in Iraq to Vietnam, where he survived six years of wartime imprisonment, and began openly distancing himself from Bush's war strategy. McCain, aides say, was rankled by what he saw as a useless, Panglossian classified briefing, especially after reading Donald Rumsfeld's now infamous internal memo. In it, the secretary of Defense said that Iraq would be a "long slog," and admitted the government had no "metric" for knowing if it was making net progress in ridding the world of terrorists.

"This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam," McCain declared, "in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground. I'm not saying the situation in Iraq now is as bad as Vietnam. But we have a problem in the Sunni Triangle and we should face up to it and tell the American people about it." Also reminiscent of Vietnam, McCain said, was the administration's reluctance to deploy forces with the urgency required for the quickest victory. "I think we can be OK, but time is not on our side... If we don't succeed more rapidly, the challenges grow greater."

- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel:

Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam veteran, sees "some parallel tracks," including the difficulty of "getting out," and the lack of international support for U.S. policy.

Hagel's quote comes from a November, 2003 article in Salon, which provides additional insight into how "some of the sharpest thinkers of the Vietnam generation see stark parallels with the war in Iraq.."

Perhaps the most important way in which the Iraq war mirrors Vietnam is one focused on by Richard Cohen earlier this year:

We don't know what the hell we're doing.

And, according to Cohen, the most important lesson:

The lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right.

Kerry is now correctly hitting on BushCo's Iraq mistakes, and properly describing the quagmire we are in. That description has a long, an d unfortunately oft ignored, history. Fill in the blanks in this indictment of an ongoing war, delivered by a much-revered American during the last month of a Presidential election:

You ask me about what is called imperialism. Well, I have formed views about that question. I am at the disadvantage of not knowing whether our people are for or against spreading themselves over the face of the globe. I should be sorry if they are, for I don't think that it is wise or a necessary development. There is the case of _. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it -- perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the __ -- but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the __. I thought we should act as their protector -- not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from __'s tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the __, a government according to ___ ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

The year?  1900
The war?  The U.S. "liberation" of the Philippines.
The speaker? Mark Twain

When will we ever learn?

Perhaps never, but we can, at the least, take action to repudiate and remove leaders who have arrogantly refused to learn.

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