The Only Way To End The War In Iraq Is To Escalate It

[Jcrowley]

Bush can't kick habit of military might
Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
 
HERE WE GO again: A new secretary of defense and yet another call for ending the war in Iraq by escalating it. What are they smoking in the Bush White House?

Even as government statistics now show marijuana is America's No. 1 cash crop, it is important to remember that militarism is the most dangerous drug threatening our sanity. Yet even formerly sober folks -- first Colin Powell and now new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- get a contact high from cozying up to the walking hallucinogen that is our president.

Succumbing to the Bush fantasy that freedom is fertilized by firepower, a vision that has mucked up Iraq beyond recognition, Gates told CBS that "as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for generations to come."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/12/20/EDGOULJ69J1.DTL

[leftofthedial]

1. I think we need to send 500,000 more troops

to Iraq.

FIrst, we empty the Ivy League colleges of all legacy students. Then we send every elected repuke and any family member of military age. Then we start working on the media and then the fundie churches.

[Jcrowley]

2. I nominate you

as policy planner for this invasion. You's gots a clear idear of what's necessary.

:toast:

[leftofthedial]

4. they can't come home until the entire world is peaceful

sadly, we won't be able to provide body armor or armored humvees

and there won't be any care (or jobs) for those who come home

oh well

[Old and In the Way]

5. That would be a terriffic piece of legislation for the Democrats to bring

to the floor. We can call it the "Put your life where your mouth is" bill. Draft every neo-con and wingnut who thinks this war on the ME is so damn important. Watch the opposition to peace melt before our very eyes.

[whistle]

3. That is what Richard Nixon did with Vietnam when he took office

....in January 1969. His secret plan to end the war was to expand the war and also to use nuclear bombs against North Vietnam:

<snip>
Nixon White House Considered Nuclear Options Against North Vietnam, Declassified Documents Reveal
Nuclear Weapons, the Vietnam War, and the "Nuclear Taboo"*

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195
Edited by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball

Posted - July 31, 2006
Washington, DC - July 31, 2006 - During the past year, indications that the Bush White House was seriously considering a "nuclear option" against Iranian nuclear sites understandably alarmed many in the press and public as well as the U.S. high command. Some treated such alleged planning as saber-rattling bluff, while others saw it as an example of a related madman strategy. These scenarios are not without historical precedent. From time to time during the Cold War and after, American officials tried to find ways of making nuclear weapons usable, not only for deterrence against Soviet attack but as "tactical" weapons in local conflicts or as a key element in a coercive strategy of threat-making by means of "atomic diplomacy."
<...>
The "concept of operations" was "markedly different from previous air and naval operations" against North Vietnam. Nixon, Kissinger, and their planners believed that President Johnson's prior bombing campaigns in the North had been "spasmodic" ones against limited targets associated with the war in South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam). The Duck Hook operations, by contrast, would direct a sequence of "intense" air and naval attacks of "short duration" against the DRV to achieve a "lasting military and economic effect" and "generate strong psychological impact on Hanoi's leadership." Aerial mining would serve to "quarantine" North Vietnamese ports, while aerial bombing would strike strategic targets heretofore off-limits. Among these was "the levee system in the Red River Delta." The report raised the nuclear issue in an attachment entitled "Important Questions" (see document 2I), which includes this question: "Should we be prepared to use nuclear weapons?"

The references to nuclear weapons in these documents are not substantive enough to settle the issue of whether Nixon or Kissinger specifically requested operations plans involving the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, but they do reveal that in the first year of the Nixon administration some of Kissinger's top advisers believed that the matter of nuclear weapons use should be raised with military planners. This in turn suggests that Lake, Morris, and other September Group members understood that Nixon and Kissinger believed that nuclear weapons were potentially efficacious in the circumstances of late 1969, and that, therefore, their possible use should be given serious consideration in military contingency planning for Duck Hook.

Despite verbal threats directed against Hanoi and NSC planning for Duck Hook, Nixon pulled the plug on the prospective operation sometime between October 2 and October 6. His reasons were many. Secretary of Defense Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers opposed military escalation. Nixon began to doubt whether he could maintain public support for the three- to six-month period that Duck Hook might require. Another concern was that the three major antiwar demonstrations previously scheduled for October 15 and November 13-15--dates coincidentally bracketing the launch of Duck Hook--might additionally erode public confidence in his leadership, expand into larger demonstrations, and blunt the psychological impact of the operation upon Hanoi. In any event, Nixon had recently come to the conclusion that the North Vietnamese had been unmoved in the face of the military threats he had directed against them since July. The other side of this coin was that reduced enemy-initiated fighting in South Vietnam seemed to indicate that Vietnamization might be making progress--a good omen, if true, for it offered Nixon an alternative to Duck Hook. Furthermore, linkage diplomacy had thus far failed to leverage Soviet cooperation vis-à-vis North Vietnam, which had implications for Duck Hook's prospects for success.

After having cancelled Duck Hook, Nixon believed "it was important that the Communists not mistake as weakness the lack of dramatic action on my part in carrying out the ultimatum." In a bizarre move designed to compensate for the aborted Duck Hook operation, he set in motion the "Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test," an elaborate and secret global military exercise carried out between October 13 and 30, 1969, that was tantamount to a nuclear alert. The origins of the idea for the alert may lie in an implicitly nuclear-related question posed in the "Important Questions" attachment to the October 2 report to Nixon on Duck Hook (see document 2I): "What military actions should we undertake concurrently, e.g., should we alert our strategic and/or the various theater forces?"

One of the largest secret military operations in American history, the exercise included a stand-down of training flights to raise operational readiness, Strategic Air Command ground alerts and "maintenance readiness" procedures, heightened readiness postures for overseas air units, stepped-up naval activity, increased surveillance of Soviet ships en route to North Vietnam, and a nuclear-armed B-52 "show-of-force" over Alaska. The purpose of the alert was to "jar" the Soviets and North Vietnamese into making negotiating concessions-perhaps by indicating to them that it was the preparatory phase of Duck Hook and/or a readiness operation in anticipation of Soviet reaction to massive U.S. bombing. The nuclear alert failed to intimidate either the North Vietnamese or the Soviets before the November 1 deadline, but it did have an unintended consequence: it caused the Chinese to go on alert-either in reaction to the U.S. alert or to steps the Soviets might have taken in response to the U.S. alert. (Note 6)

The nuclear option was still on President Nixon's mind in 1972, when he agonized about how to respond to the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive. On April 25, while discussing "Linebacker," the forthcoming U.S. aerial counterattack against the DRV, Nixon told Kissinger about his interest in using "a nuclear bomb" as an alternative to bombing North Vietnam's dike system, which was also a step he strongly favored. A nuclear attack against another target, he assumed, would cause fewer civilian casualties yet make a powerful "psychological" impact on Hanoi and the Soviets. But Kissinger and other advisers and planners had reservations, and in the face of these misgivings, which he may have privately shared, Nixon backed off from the use of nuclear weapons and settled on "merely" the implied threat of their possible use.
<MORE>

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB195/index.htm