Chilling Comparison of Vietnam and Iraq

I don't know about anyone else, but I am afraid. All this talk of cut'n run and we cannot pull out, Hubris! If this be (fair & balanced) fear for us all, so be it.

[x NYtimes]
The Lessons of a Quagmire
By MAX BOOT

This month's setbacks in Iraq — the downing of American helicopters, the suicide bombing of an Italian headquarters — have made President Bush's mantra of "progress" ring increasingly hollow. It's true that 80 percent of Iraq remains peaceful and stable, but we seem to be losing in the other 20 percent, mostly among Sunni Muslims who benefited from Saddam Hussein's rule. The escalating violence lends credence to critics who see parallels with Vietnam.

In truth, there is no comparison: In Vietnam, we faced more than 1 million enemy combatants backed to the hilt by North Vietnam and its superpower patrons, China and Russia. In Iraq we confront a few thousand Baathists and jihadis with, at most, limited support from Iran and Syria. But even if this isn't "another Vietnam," we can still learn important lessons from that earlier war about how to deal with the insurgency.

The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht. The military staged big-unit sweeps with fancy code names like Cedar Falls and Junction City, and dropped more bombs than during World War II. Neither had much effect on the enemy, who would hide in the jungles and then emerge to ambush American soldiers. Seeing that his strategy wasn't working, Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander, responded by asking for more and more troops, until we had 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And still it was not enough.

President Bush seems so intent on avoiding this mistake that the Defense Department has unveiled plans to cut the total number of troops in Iraq next year from 132,000 to 105,000. It is hard to see what, in the current dismal strategic picture, convinces the Pentagon that this makes sense. Such a slow-motion withdrawal will only embolden our enemies in Iraq and discourage our friends.

Senator John McCain has suggested that, far from reducing our forces, it's time to send another division. There are certainly tasks where we could use more troops, such as securing Iraq's porous borders and guarding arms depots that have become virtual Wal-Marts for terrorists. But as the experience of Vietnam suggests, more troops will not necessarily solve our central challenge: defeating guerrillas.

Sending more soldiers could even be counterproductive if it results in more civilian casualties, as it did in Vietnam, complicating our effort to win over the population. American forces in Iraq have tried hard to avoid "collateral damage," but they have nevertheless made some costly mistakes. A week ago, an army sentry shot dead the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City in Baghdad.

What proved most effective in Vietnam were not large conventional operations but targeted counterinsurgency programs. Four — known as CAP, Cords, Kit Carson Scouts and Phoenix — were particularly effective.

CAP stood for Combined Action Platoon. Under it, a Marine rifle squad would live and fight alongside a South Vietnamese militia platoon to secure a village from the Vietcong. The combination of the Marines' military skills and the militias' local knowledge proved highly effective. No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the Vietcong.

Cords, or Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was the civilian side of the counterinsurgency, run by two C.I.A. legends: Robert Komer and William Colby. It oversaw aid programs designed to win hearts and minds of South Vietnamese villagers, and its effectiveness lay in closely coordinating its efforts with the military.

The Kit Carson Scouts were former Communists who were enlisted to help United States forces. They primarily served as scouts and interpreters, but they also fought. Most proved fiercely loyal. They had to be: they knew that capture by their former Vietcong comrades meant death.

Phoenix was a joint C.I.A.-South Vietnam effort to identify and eradicate Vietcong cadres in villages. Critics later charged the program with carrying out assassinations, and even William Colby acknowledged there were "excesses." Nevertheless, far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000).

There is little doubt that if the United States had placed more emphasis on such programs, instead of the army's conventional strategy, it would have fared better in Vietnam. This is worth keeping in mind today as Sunni towns like Fallujah and Ramadi increasingly turn into an Arab version of Vietcong "villes." The Army is running some valuable counterinsurgency programs in Iraq, but too often it responds to major setbacks with big-unit sweeps (the ongoing one is called Iron Hammer). In a move reminiscent of some of the excesses of Vietnam, the military has taken to dropping 500-pound bombs and sending out M-1 tanks in a largely futile attempt to wipe out elusive foes.

To secure the Sunni Triangle, the army would do better to focus on classic counterinsurgency strategies. We need closer cooperation between Iraqi and coalition forces, as in CAP. We need better coordination between the military and L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, as in Cords. We need better intelligence to identify and neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in Phoenix. We might even want to recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their erstwhile comrades, as in the Kit Carson Scouts.

The common factor in all these initiatives is solid help from Iraqis. Only locals can pick out the good guys from the bad. Also — and this is a more delicate matter — Iraqis would be able to try some of the strong-arm tactics that our own scrupulously legalistic armed forces shy away from.

Excessive brutality can be counterproductive in fighting an insurgency (as the French discovered in Algeria), but there is also a danger of playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules against ruthless opponents. Our military — which is court-martialing an Army lieutenant colonel who fired his pistol into the air to scare an Iraqi suspect into divulging details of an imminent attack — may simply be too Boy Scoutish for the rougher side of a dirty war. Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny likely feel no such compunctions. More should be done to recruit relatives of those killed by the Baathists who would be eager to pursue a "blood feud" against Saddam Hussein's men.

While Mr. Bush's plans to accelerate the turnover of political authority to Iraqis and the deployment of Iraqi security forces make sense, for now the brunt of the military campaign will still have to be borne by Americans. If American forces fear to spend time on the streets of Fallujah and other Sunni towns, what hope is there for undertrained Iraqi security officers who will be branded collaborators by their own people?

Even if the American forces do everything right, there is no quick or easy end in sight. No halfway competent guerrilla force has ever been defeated as easily as the Iraqi army was in 1991 and 2003.

The Iraqi guerrillas, like the Vietcong, realize that a conventional military victory is beyond their grasp. Their only hope is to continue ratcheting up the cost of the conflict until the desire of the American public to continue the struggle is shattered. This worked in Vietnam. It might — sobering thought — work today. Is the American will to sustain casualties greater than our enemies' ability to inflict them? Upon that question will turn the future of Iraq.


Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company

What Happens When Your Mom Discovers Your Blog

This Blog is not public. No Google search will bring up its URL. I have enough trouble. If this be (fair & balanced) craveness, so be it!

[x The Onion]
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.


Above: Widmar, whose blog was recently discovered by his mother Lillian (inset).

"Apparently, Mom typed [Widmar's employer] Dean Healthcare into Google along with my name and, lo and behold, PlanetKevin popped up," Widmar said. "I'm so fucked."

In an e-mail sent to Widmar Monday, Lillian reported in large purple letters that she was "VERY EXCITED :)!!!" to find his "computer diary," but was perplexed that he hadn't mentioned it to her.

Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.

"I don't have one of those sites that's a big tell-all about one-night stands and wild parties," Widmar said. "I mostly write about the animation I like or little things that happen to me and my friends. But there are definitely things in there that I wouldn't, well, write home to Mom about."

Fortunately for Widmar, Lillian's comments about the site indicate that she has not delved deeply into its contents.

"Mom's main comment was that I look tired in the photos from my birthday party, so I'm guessing that she didn't get past the first page yet," Widmar said. "She will, though. She will."

Widmar said he expects his site to provide Lillian with ample cause for worry.

"Even on that benign front page, she found something to freak out about," Widmar said. "She read the entry for Monday, where I mentioned how much I hate my job, and e-mailed to say that she hoped I wasn't thinking of quitting in this economy."

"Mom had a fit when she found out that I put my television on my credit card," Widmar added. "If she reads about how I was with my friend Jayson when he got pulled over for drunk driving, I'll never hear the end of it."

"Oh God," Widmar said with a gasp. "Three days ago, I wrote something about buying pot!"

Widmar said that the idea of his mother immersing herself in the boring details of his life is just as frightening as the idea of her discovering his misconduct.

"Really, the blog is just a record of what I think about the world and how I spend my free time," Widmar said. "In other words, exactly the sort of information that no 30-year-old wants his mom to have access to."

Widmar said he imagines his inbox filling up with e-mails containing elaborate questions about an off-hand comment on Kill Bill—or, should he appear to have too much free time, requests for him to come and visit her.

"I know enough not to tell Mom that I'm seeing a girl until it's serious," Widmar said. "Now, she's going to know exactly who I hang out with, where I go, and what I spend my time doing on a daily basis. I am so in hell right now."

"God, my links alone contain unlimited fodder for Mom's neuroses," Widmar said. "She'll have access to not only my life, but the lives of all my friends who have web sites. She'll have the names of all the places in Minneapolis where we hang out, which she can—and will—look up. With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious."

"To think that I was happy that Mom was e-mailing instead of calling ever since [Widmar's sister] Karen got her online last year," he added. "I didn't see the danger."

According to Widmar, there's "no fucking chance" that Lillian will simply give the site a cursory look and never return.

"Mom loves hearing every boring detail of her kids' lives," he said. "She'd want to know what I'm eating for dinner every night, if she could. This blog is like porn for her."

"Come to think of it, why do I sometimes write about what I ate for dinner?" Widmar asked.

Seeing his blog through his mother's eyes, Widmar said he knows there's no way the site can remain unchanged.

"I know Mom will instantly become the site's most avid reader and most vocal fan," Widmar said. "As I write it, I'll think, 'How would Mom feel about this?' Even worse, I'm sure she'll give the address to all our relatives."

All of the tactics Widmar has considered to divert his mother seem unworkable.

"I could take it down for a few weeks, but I know she wouldn't just forget about it," Widmar said. "I could edit the site and send my other readers through a back door, to another blog just for them. But, I mean, that's just ridiculous."

If Widmar starts a blog at a new address, without his full name this time, he said he risks losing "close to 100" regular readers.

As of press time, Widmar had not decided whether to shut PlanetKevin down.

"The clock is ticking," Widmar said. "I've gotta act fast. At this very minute, she might be reading about the time I did Ecstasy last summer. If Mom finds that entry, I can pretty much count on our conversations for the next year being centered on the dangers of drug use."

© Copyright 2003, Onion, Inc., All rights reserved.
The Onion® is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

Whose Ox Is Being Gored?

Gore Vidal is an original. He took on William F. Buckley on live television during the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. He has written some brilliant historical fiction: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, and numerous others. Suffice it to say that he doesn't like W. Well, neither do I. If this be (fair & balanced) sycophancy, so be it.

[x LA Weekly]
Uncensored Gore
The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule.
by Marc Cooper

(Photo by Debra DiPaolo)

It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.

When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.

Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display — vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity — their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.

The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.

MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.

GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles — slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.

But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism — the only form of government suitable for such a people.

[Q] But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn’t he? He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

[A] Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn’t working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn’t care.

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.

[Q] Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America’s two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?

[A] Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

Bush’s friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn’t already. No one is punished for squandering the people’s money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It’s not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with — even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh — how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time — was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.

[Q] In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn’t. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

[A] Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.

So you’d find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can’t think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don’t think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.

[Q] But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman’s founding of the national-security state, to LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

[A] No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

[Q] So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

[A] No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

[Q] Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

[A] I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

[Q] Yet you saw in the ’60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don’t you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

[A] I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It’s often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I’m afraid that 90 percent of Americans don’t know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don’t care.

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there isn’t enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we ‰ are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago — which of course is ridiculous.

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.

[Q] Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

[A] No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don’t want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn’t their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?

So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can’t lose.

[Q] But Gore, aren’t you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

[A] Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Truman’s plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn’t have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

[Q] You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn’t there still a democratic underpinning?

[A] No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.

[Q] Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?

[A] Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

[Q] How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

[A] I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.

Copyright © 2003 LA Weekly

Garry Trudeau On Ann Coulter (Treason)

Garry Trudeau has skewered Ann Coulter (darling of Faux News) in this Sunday's Doonesbury that the Amarillo fishwrap doesn't provide. Liberalism=Treason? If this be (fair & balanced) polemicism, so be it!