Lesson from Vietnam: It's time to cut our losses

[unhappycamper]

Lesson from Vietnam: It's time to cut our losses
By H.D.S. Greenway | August 28, 2007


IT ILL BEHOOVES an administration led by two who assiduously avoided the Vietnam War -- Vice President Dick Cheney famously said he had other priorities than fighting for his country -- to lecture the nation now on the lessons of its consequences. President Bush said last week that those who succumbed to calls to end the war would be responsible for the same tragedies that the end of Indochina wars unleashed.

"Will today's generation of Americans resist the allure of retreat?" he asked? Or will we bug out and leave Iraq to Khmer Rouge-like horrors?

For those of us who spent some years in Indochina, living through that drawn-out catastrophe, there are indeed parallels with today. The president's rousing claim that "a free Iraq" is within our reach is the same drivel as was the "light at the end of the tunnel" to a previous generation.

Robert McNamara, the Donald Rumsfeld of the Vietnam War, admitted, even tearfully, years afterward that we had little business sending soldiers to die in a country where we knew so little about its culture or history. Of course there were knowledgeable people who tried to tell McNamara, but, like Rumsfeld, he had his own illusions of American military capability, and didn't want to hear anything that ran counter to his preconceived conceptions.

There are parallels in the arrogance and hubris of those whom David Halberstam called the "best and the brightest," the men President Johnson inherited from John Kennedy -- smart to a fault and, like Paul Wolfowitz and his soulmates, totally wrong.

There are parallels in the corrupt and ineffectual leaders that America tried to prop up in Saigon, then, and in Baghdad today. In the end they were always handicapped by being seen as lackeys to a foreign power.


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[Callalily]

1. Unfortunately, our

current administration is incapable of learning from past mistakes.