Sunday, October 23, 2005
[1983 - Islamic terrorists bomb US Marine barracks at Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241]
"Vietnamization" of Iraq
Early on in this President's ill-fated Iraq adventure there were many fanciful comparisons to the Vietnam experience by the pundits and Poohbahs, and much talk of quagmire. Like a lot of us who served and lived through the Vietnam debacle, William was unimpressed by these strained efforts to find parallels. Mr. Bush seems determined to make believers of us though.
When it became clear to all in the early '70s that gross mismanagement of the Vietnam conflict had placed this Nation and our military forces in the midst of an un-winnable war, in a desperate attempt to save face the reigning leader of that era announced a new strategy called "Vietnamization." The idea was a simple one:
1. Create another in the succession of puppet regimes in the Republic of Vietnam.The Iraq exit strategy now espoused by the President, who after 2.5 years of misleading us and bleating "trust me" and "stay the course" finally seems to have found one, bears a striking resemblance to the cover story for the US withdrawal from Vietnam. One cringes to imagine the possibility of a reprise of the ignominious scenes of US helos airlifting the last survivors from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) while hundreds of Vietnamese civilians milled at the embassy gates or scaled the walls in terror, anticipating the fate that would soon befall them once they had been labeled as US collaborators by the victorious North Vietnamese. One wonders what form the chaos will take this time around as we struggle to extricate our armed forces from another foreign country that we had no business sending our youth into to be maimed (15,000) and slaughtered (2,000).
2. Give them some training and military equipment.
3. Turn over the mess to them.
4. Beat a hasty retreat.
William's Whimsical Words:
Why can't we learn from our mistakes?
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