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Sometime in September, the report card on how things are going with the anti al-Qaeda war in Iraq will be due from General David Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker and submitted to congress and the American people.
It should astonish no one that regardless of the assessment, each side of the political aisle will see it differently.
And no matter the extent of the report’s good, bad and ugly, we will continue to have a major sustained presence in Iraq even if there is a political party change at the big desk at the White House in about a year and a half. The tipoff to that was evident several months ago as news came that the U.S. had started to build new military command facilities in Iraq.
The report offhandedly mentioned that “several swimming pools” were part of the new construction. Installing swimming pools is hand in hand with expectations of a long time commitment by our military. Pentagon-trained shiny stars and bars on overseas assignments anywhere are due the amenities that come with their officer status, and swimming pools, particularly in the Iraqi broiler, are part of it. The swimming pool bunch includes generals, and generals generally command major-sized units, like divisions and armies.
You can take this to the bank--we won’t be getting out of Iraq anytime soon--once they began digging swimming pools.
Congress months ago gave the okay for 20,000 additional troops--a “surge”--for the Iraq war. At the time my response was a near yawn and “so what”--a strategy comparable to throwing more and more money at a problem.
But Petraeus convinced one Iraq tribal faction that it would be in their best interests to join U.S. forces in the fight against al-Qaeda, then put those extra boots on the ground in a different way. He had them put their noses to the ground, too, in a manner of speaking.
After a series of much-maligned generals heading up our war effort in Iraq--Tommy Frank chief among them--Petraeus apparently is the first to peruse military history books when it comes to defeating an insurgency.
The guidance came from the war in South Vietnam, which some have viewed with linkage to Iraq, in terms of our military frustrations and inability to secure a quick and decisive victory.
Along with Petraeus, we need to go back 40 years and late 1967 when President Lyndon Johnson correctly saw that the American people’s support for the War in Vietnam was rapidly shrinking. He summoned home the American commander in South Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, who toured the country making a series of speeches. Their common theme was “there is light at the end of the tunnel” when it came to turning back the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their guerilla fighter force in the south dubbed the Viet Cong (VC).
Westmoreland was an artillery general and his war strategy from the get-go had been to draw the enemy into battle, then destroy it with the awesome artillery and other fire support the U.S. had at hand. It came to be known as a “war of attrition”--killing many more of the bad guys than they killed of us, driving them into surrender. It was a failed plan because shortly into the war, the NVA and VC recognized they would be sitting ducks and went largely to hit-and-run warfare, but Westmoreland stuck with his plan until he was replaced in June, 1968.
In late January of that year during South Vietnam’s Tet holiday (when everyone celebrates their birthday and equivalents to our Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4, etc.) the VC simultaneously launched surprise attacks on 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns. For awhile, they even occupied the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
Their hopes were that the South Vietnamese people would rise up and join them and overthrow the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, which was mired in corruption and inefffectiveness, a charge also lodged against Iraq’s leadership now.
The VC miscalculated and generated no backing from the people. And once U.S. and South Vietnamese units caught their breath from the initial blows, the Viet Cong were obliterated by the thousands to where they no longer were a significant fighting factor in the war until its conclusion in 1975.
It was after that stunning blow to the Viet Cong that the North Vietnamese, in archives made public only in recent times, determined that they should sue for peace. Yes, they had had their fill and wanted to get out of the war that history books and scholars until now have underscored as “the only one the U.S. ever lost.”
It’s worth mentioning again, because the opposite has been thrust into the American psyche for four decades--we had whipped them, and they were ready to start hoisting the white flag.
But one voice emerged within those North Vietnamese chambers and suggested that they wait and gauge the reactions of the American public. It was outrage, anti-war protests were everywhere, after Westmoreland’s earlier remarks of being nearer to winning. The chorus demanding that we withdraw from South Vietnam was deafening and fell onto the ears of our congress, which responded by eventually cutting off funding for the war. That left the South Vietnamese with U.S. helicopters--but no replacement parts to keep them flying; that left them with our M-16 rifles--but insufficient ammunition. And after our military pullout in 1973, the North Vietnamese overran the South in 1975 which set the stage for a bloodbath that killed countless millions of civilians there and in adjoining Laos and Cambodia.
In mid-year after Tet, General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland and he instigated a counter insurgency plan--eliminating the enemy’s “nose” which Gen. Petraeus is using in Iraq.
Abrams reasoned that a major component of soldiers fighting outside their country was their hidden caches of food, ammunition, medical supplies and weapons. Since the NVA, VC and South Vietnamese all looked the same (as al-Qaeda looks like any Iraqi) they count on these hidden supply stations in a guerrilla-type action. And if those caches were destroyed, one by one, province by province, the VC and NVA would be seriously impacted to the negative. Once VC and NVA presence in an area was eradicated, the South Vietnamese locals would feel safe from the terrors of the insurgency, Abrams believed.
The citizenry no longer would be afraid of providing intelligence, shoring up the U.S. war effort and leading to capture of enemy leaders. By the Spring of 1970, Abrams, one of his deputy commanders and a driver could take an excursion by jeep through most of the South Vietnamese countryside without fear of ambush, land mines or sniper fire. The war was in hand...again, we had won with Abrams’ “nose” strategy.
Petraeus is incorporating this “nose” tactic in Iraq. Several news sources have reported that the number of caches being eliminated is way, way up. They also say we have control of Anbar Province, which, by the way, constitutes one third of the entire Iraqi land mass.
Further indications of the “nose” came in recent weeks when we captured the leader of the al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. That doesn’t happen without quality information from a populace no longer intimidated by the potential consequences when they turn in an enemy combatant.
Americans typically have been impatient with the wars we have fought; even the rah, rah of World War II dissipated as it wore on.
Will Petraeus’ “nose” game plan continue to work? More importantly, will he be allowed to continue with it?
It just might be up to the American people, again, if they are willing to keep their noses...to the Iraqi war grindstone.
by GARY BOOKS
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