So to those who want to paint Iraq as a guaranteed defeat just as Vietnam was, spare me. You haven't a clue about what happened in Vietnam or what is happening in Iraq, so your comparison of two events about which you know nothing is less than useless.
Cue the clueless:
Perhaps it's a measure of just how badly things are going in Iraq that the strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success. But it's interesting that the Iraq team, like its predecessors in Vietnam 35 years ago, is getting serious about counterinsurgency doctrine after making costly initial mistakes.
So what is the amazing thing our military is doing in a war going badly that reminds Ignatius of Vietnam (other than the fact that upright bipeds are shooting at us)?
We are training Iraqis to fight so we can withdraw. You know, just like we worked to get the Vietnamese to take over the fighting nearly forty years ago.
The fact that this is pretty much what you need to do to help any foreign government fight an enemy does not occur to Ignatius. No, since it is what we did in Vietnam, it must mean Iraq is a quagmire. Since we trained Vietnamese and Hanoi conquered South Vietnam, this means the strategy will fail in Iraq. Never mind that Vietnam was won until Congress cut of our support to Saigon. But no, Ignatius discounts one author's contention that we lost Vietnam in Congress:
By Sorley's account, it was politics back in America that turned victory into defeat, by blocking U.S. support for the Saigon government after North Vietnamese troops invaded the South en masse in 1974 and '75. That seems to me a considerable stretch -- many other analysts argue that the South Vietnamese army was never strong enough to prevail against Hanoi. A Vietnamization that required continuous American life support wasn't much of a victory.
It is hardly a stretch to argue that the South Vietnamese lacked certain capabilities and so when we cut off those capabilities (like supplies and air power) the South Vietnamese could not stop the NVA. But according to Ignatius, needing American support means you can't win. And since we can't train the Iraqis to fight without our logistics, planning, and firepower support, Iraq too will fall when we turn over primary combat duties to the Iraqis, even after we train Iraqi units to fight.
By this reasoning, Korea was a failure because the South Korean military needed continuous American life support.
The Soviet war against Germany wasn't much of a victory for them because they needed continuous American support to supply them.
Heck, NATO wasn't really an alliance since a lot of the smaller NATO countries would have needed continuous American support after about 36 hours to sustain them in combat.
The British in the Falklands War needed US shipments of air-to-air missiles (if I remember my history), so sorry guys--didn't count. Call them the Malvinas Islands.
And the Israelis needed resupply from America in the October War--so the IDF is clearly inadequate.
To be bold (on the Marine Corps birthday), since the United States Marines needed a good-sized contingent of United States Army support units to support them in an unprecedented drive inland in 2003, the Marines didn't have much of a victory either.
And to really show how ridiculous this standard is, we have to cancel North Vietnam's victory in 1975 on a technicality since the Soviets poured supplies into Hanoi to propel them south to capture Saigon. An invasion that required continuous Soviet support wasn't much of an invasion, apparently.
Further, who says the support of South Vietnam had to be continuous and never-ending? South Korea surely does not need American help now should North Korea attack them. NATO certainly doesn't need us to repel invaders. Why does the fact that South Vietnam needed help in 1974-75 mean that Saigon would have always required the same amount of support?
This Vietnam comparison talk is silly. The reason we are doing some things the same in Vietnam and Iraq is that it is what anybody would need to fight insurgents anywhere. Crawl, walk, run is a standard progression. And the very idea that an ally that needs help isn't actually fighting is purely absurd.
So, um, yeah. Thanks for the advice, Mr. Ignatius. At least Ignatius doesn't just clutch is skull and scream "Halliburton!!!"
Owens describes far better the progress of the war since we recaptured Fallujah last year:
When the Marines took Fallujah at the end of last year, they began the strategically important process of interdicting the "ratlines," the insurgents' infiltration routes from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq. One ratline follows the Euphrates River corridor — running from Syria to Husayba on the Syrian border and then through Qaim, Rawa, Haditha, Asad, Hit, and Fallujah to Baghdad. The other follows the course of the Tigris — from the north through Mosul-Tel Afar to Tikrit and on to Baghdad.
Operations followed throughout the spring and summer of 2005. While the earlier operations succeeded in keeping the pressure on the insurgents in Al Anbar province they could not prevent the insurgents from abandoning one town and moving to another not threatened by allied forces.
That has begun to change lately and one of the reasons is very good news indeed: Coalition forces are able to apply simultaneous force against the insurgent strongholds and, more important, to stay in the area because many Iraqi units are now able conduct combat operations with minimal U.S. support. In a Pentagon press briefing on Sept. 30, Gen. George Casey, the U.S. ground-forces commander in Iraq, pointed out that the number of U.S.-Iraqi or independent Iraqi operations of company-size or greater had increased from about 160 in May to over 1,300 in September, and that US-Iraqi or independent Iraqi operations now constituted some 80 percent of all military operations in Iraq.
The increasing number of capable Iraqi units means that the Iraqi government can begin to extend the writ of the Iraqi government to Al Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni Triangle. For instance, the recently completed Operation River Gate has established a substantial Iraqi government presence in Haditha, Haqlaniyah, and Barwana, three former insurgent strongholds along the Euphrates River.
It may seem counterintuitive, but from a strategic standpoint, it is possible to argue that the spike in U.S. casualties actually reflects military success, not failure. Of course we mourn the loss of all service members fighting in this war. But the recent up-tick in casualties indicates not so much that the enemy is becoming more aggressive, but that we are. Casualties always increase when one side goes on the offensive. That we are applying force simultaneously means that the enemy has no place to run and must stand and fight. As in Fallujah, this means more Coalition casualties, but it also means that the insurgents are being killed and captured away from Baghdad. This buys more time for the Iraqis.
We're buying time for the Iraqis to assume more and more responsibilities and these are significant even as we retain a role well into the future.
We're winning out there. Don't be so jumpy. Only by mindlessly chanting Vietnam can we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory--just like in Vietnam.
