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Iraq
Repeat after me
How can such drastic miscalculations be made just a generation after the catastrophe of Vietnam?
by Kevin Potvin
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By Kevin Potvin
As early as summer 1967, the upper-echelon of generals in the Pentagon, and the leading figures in the White House administration that they advised, knew for certain that nothing resembling a victory could ever be won in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers, stolen in 1970 from the file cabinets of private think tank The Rand Corporation by then-Rand employee Daniel Ellesberg, and published by The New York Times that year, were compiled after a long-running detailed study of the conflict from the point of view of the organization conducting it, and were never meant for public consumption.
The study, which looked at military briefings made to key officials over more than a decade, memos between military brass and commanders in the field, and analyses of specific situations encountered in the war by specialists at military colleges, concluded that the US could indefinitely hold its bases in Vietnam, and so would never “lose” the war, but would never gain for itself or for its South Vietnamese allies any secure hold over territory. The US military machine knew that it would never remove the enemy from the scene, and so would never “win” the war.
And yet the war went on with even greater ferocity for another six years, spreading to two neutral neighbours and shattering the lives of up to two million more families through death and dismemberment, including many tens of thousands of American soldiers. All of what happened from 1967 through to the American withdrawal in 1973 had to do not with securing victory, but with how to save face while retreating in defeat. Even those who then, and still today, support the aims of that war and thought that it was necessary for the US to prosecute it and to try to win it, must admit, with the leading generals and policy makers of 1967, that everything that happened between 1967 and 1973 should have been avoided and could have been avoided. The fact that it was not should be universally regarded as a severe and costly failure of American leadership.
And now we have another such monumental failure of leadership today, with the Pentagon again engaged in a war it cannot win, even if it can stave off losing outright indefinitely by hunkering down on bases in Iraq, while one hundred US soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis are killed every month.
How can it happen that a superpower of this strength and influence can become embroiled in two disastrous and unwinnable wars in the space of just 30 years? Could it be that the shock of loss in Vietnam and the directly linked tale of Richard Nixon and his crimes was so overwhelming to that perpetually innocent nation that they forgot they lost in Vietnam and forgot they twice elected a criminal for a President? Or do they just not care?
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