Vietnam/Iraq

Yesterday, the WaPo carried a series of three essays on the parallels between the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq, in which the authors all also tried to draw out some policy conclusions for today.
Robert Kaiser is a longtime WaPo foreign-affairs journo. His piece was titled Trapped by Hubris, Again.
He wrote,

    For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18 months covering the Vietnam War for The Washington Post, it is a source of amazement to realize that my country has done this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn’t understand, whose expectations for life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans.
    Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders [!], who did not see their country’s fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted [!]. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.
    How did this happen again? After all, we’re Americans — practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we’d like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, religious, political and historical realities far different from our own. These failings — more than any tactical or strategic errors — help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq.

I note, first of all, the apparently unconscious– or anyway, unremarked– hubris with which Kaiser writes there about the local politicians “not following US orders” and “not producing the outcome Washington wanted.”
Does the guy have any sense of self-awareness or of irony?
Also, regarding his question, “How did this happen again?” I’d love for Bob Kaiser to go back and reflect much more transparently on some of the journalistic decisions that he himself and his colleagues were making, regarding Iraq, back in 2002/2003. In a well-researched 2004 article in the New York Review of Books titled “Now they tell us” Michael Massing dissected some of the decisions the editors at the WaPo, the NYT, and other major US print media had made in the run-up to the war that had the effect of suppressing and/or hiding the widespread doubts there were even inside large and relevant sections of the US government back then, regarding the veracity of the case the Bushites were making against Iraq.
Massing wrote, in particular, about how two pieces very critical of the Bush case that veteran WaPo intel-affairs writer Walter Pincus wrote in mid-March 2003 were first resisted by his editors– including, I assume, Kaiser– and then, once they were published, were buried deep inside the paper rather than being spotlighted on page 1. Massing added,

    The placement of these stories was no accident, Pincus says. “The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think,” he told me. “They’re like writing a memo to the White House.” But the Post’s editors, he said, “went through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference.”

When senior journos at the WaPo and the NYT hurried to rebut Massing’s accusations, the NYT’s rebuttals came from Judith Miller (!) and from a senior NYT editor. The WaPo’s came from Kaiser, who signed off his letter as “Associate Editor and Senior Correspondent.” He huffed, “does Massing really mean to imply that editors who will run a story on A10 somehow lack courage if they won’t put it on A1? That suggestion seems silly.” No it doesn’t at all. Kaiser also said nothing about Pincus’s claim that one of his key doubt-Bush stories was at first resisted completely by the WaPo editors, and was published only after Bob Woodward– of all people– intervened.
… In light of which, Kaiser’s present rhetorical question of “How did this happen again?”, i.e., the 2003 launching of an an ill-considered war, seems disingenuous, at best.
The “lessons” Kaiser draws from the present state of affairs is also extremely half-hearted:

    Before initiating a war of choice — and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify — define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success.

But how about this lesson, from Helena Cobban, instead:

    Forget about ‘wars of choice’. Forget about trying to sustain– and also ‘justify’– US military dominance over the whole of the rest of the world. Instead of that, let’s find ways to work constructively with other governments to find nonviolent ways to resolve our differences and concerns, and strengthen the international institutions that will help us do that.

Noooo. I guess Bob Kaiser is not quite ready enough to let go of his own “ethnocentrism” or his “certainty of his own country’s superiority” to be able to do that.
… And moving right along, the second essay was a piece of “realist” analysis from Les Gelb and Dick Betts, under the (eminently realistic) title We’re fighting not to lose.
Gelb and Betts long ago co-authored a book about Vietnam. Titled “The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked,” it argued that although U.S. policy in that war was disastrous, the policymaking process performed just as it was designed to. (H’mmm, bad system maybe?)
Now, looking at the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, they write:

    In both cases, despite talk of “victory,” the overriding imperative became simply to avoid defeat.
    How did these tragedies begin? Although hindsight makes many forget, the Vietnam War was backed by a consensus of almost all foreign-policy experts and a majority of U.S. voters. Until late in the game, opponents were on the political fringe. The consensus rested on the domino theory — if South Vietnam fell to communism, other governments would topple. Most believed that communism was on the march and a worldwide Soviet-Chinese threat on the upswing.
    The consensus on Iraq was shallower and shorter-lived. Bush may have been bent on regime change in Baghdad from the start, but in any case a consensus emerged among his advisers that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of securing nuclear weapons capability — and that deterrence and containment would not suffice. That judgment came to be shared by most of the national security community. Congress also saluted early on. The vote to endorse the war was less impressive than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which passed almost unanimously, but many Democrats signed on to topple Hussein for fear of looking weak.
    As soon as the war soured, the consensus crumbled. Without the vulnerability of middle-class youth to conscription, and with the political left in a state of collapse since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the antiwar movement on Iraq did not produce sustained mass protests as Vietnam did by the late 1960s. But the sentiment shows up just as clearly in the polls.

Later on, it seems as though both these guys– neither of whom is in any way a specialist on Iraqi or broader Middle Eastern affairs– look as though they’ve “bought”, hook, line, and sinker the mainstream US narrative about the nature of the situation in Iraq:

    Vietnam was both a nationalist war against outside powers — first the French, then the Americans — and a civil war. In Iraq, the lines of conflict are messier. The main contest is the sectarian battle between Arab Shiites and Arab Sunnis.

Note: no mention of Iraqis having any “nationalist” motivation to fight against outside powers there, at all.
But also, note this:

    In both countries, U.S. forces worked hard at training national armies. This job was probably done better in Vietnam, and the United States certainly provided South Vietnamese troops with relatively better equipment than they have given Iraqis so far. South Vietnamese forces were more reliable, more effective and far more numerous than current Iraqi forces are. [But still, the US didn’t win… Any lessons there? ~HC]
    In both cases, however, the governments we were trying to help proved inadequate. Unlike their opponents, neither Saigon nor Baghdad gained the legitimacy to inspire their troops. At bottom, this was always the fundamental problem in both wars. Americans hoped that time would help, but leaders such as South Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu and Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki were never up to the job.

So these two guys– one of whom is the politically very well-connected Gelb– have already completely written off Maliki. Interesting.
Then, here is their best-possible scenario:

    With some luck, Washington may yet escape Baghdad more cleanly than it did in the swarms of helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975.

The erosion of confidence in the possibility of a US “victory” in Iraq has evidently now gnawed deep into the country’s policy-making elite itself. Interesting.
… And then, finally, there was Robert K. Brigham, a professor of international relations who last August published a book titled Is Iraq another Vietnam?
His piece in the WaPo yesterday was titled The time to negotiate is now.
He wrote:

    Despite President Bush’s call for more troops in Iraq, each day seems to bring closer an endgame there that could echo the one of three decades earlier, with U.S. helicopters landing “inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof,” as Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) recently put it.
    That image would seem to bring the United States full circle, retreating from another ill-conceived war and nursing an “Iraq syndrome” much like the Vietnam syndrome that limited U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward.
    But there’s a difference: Today’s policymakers have the benefit of the Vietnam experience. It’s not too late to draw on its lessons to ensure a better outcome in Iraq. It’s still possible to snatch victory from defeat — if the Bush administration understands that there is no hope of a narrowly defined military victory in Iraq, and that the best it can wish for is a negotiated settlement that will bring greater stability and security to the region…
    As it did in Vietnam, the time has come for the United States to announce a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. No meaningful settlement can take place while Washington is escalating the war. A schedule for phased troop withdrawal would signal to regional players that Washington is interested in a political settlement to the conflict. It would also allow Washington to pressure the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take responsibility for rebuilding Iraq’s civil society instead of enabling a civil war. Finally, as difficult as negotiations might be, it is time to think of the Iraq war in regional terms. Because of the sectarian violence threatening to rip the country apart, it will be impossible to settle the civil war without thinking of Baghdad’s more powerful neighbors, including Syria and Iran.
    Granted, the idea of regional negotiations poses significant problems. It could give states such as Syria and Iran more influence over Shiites and events inside Iraq than they deserve. It assumes that the Sunni states can control or isolate the more radical elements of the insurgency. It suggests that most players in the region want to limit the conflict to Iraq. And it relies on a dramatic change in the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel. Washington is unlikely to abandon its long-standing support of Israel — nor should it — but in a balance-of-power peace settlement, Israel will need to enter into negotiations with some of its regional enemies. Nonetheless, it seems that diplomacy is the best hope for the future.
    If it needs political cover to engage in regional negotiations, the Bush team could simply refer to the Iraq Study Group report.

Oh yes, so it could… If only the Prez were not still so deeply in thrall to all his unresolved psychological father issues.
Brigham goes on to note many parallels between the ISG report and a secret study CIA Director Richard Helms conducted in 1967 into the possible consequences of a US withdrawal from Vietnam. He writes,

    The resulting secret report [in 1967] concluded that the United States could leave without suffering a significant loss in security, global prestige or power. And yet it was six more years before Washington acted on the Helms report.
    Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long this time.

I have two reactions to that. Firstly, I am convinced at this point that it will not take anything like another six years before the US withdraws from Iraq. History is unfolding at a steroid-fueled speed these days, thanks in great part to the expansion and democratization of access to near-real-time information and analysis.
Secondly, I don’t believe that the US has any options left, regarding the manner of its withdrawal from Iraq, that will leave its “global prestige” anywhere near as high as it was back in 2002, before that disastrous decision to invade Iraq was taken.
Every day since that ill-fated day in March 2003 when the invasion started, US “prestige” in the world– and all the concomitant political/strategic power that flows from that– has been undergoing a sharp erosion. The only way the US can stanch that continuing bleeding of national power is to find a way to undertake a total and orderly troop withdrawal from Iraq; and the sooner that is done, the less the total erosion in US “power” will be.
That is a perfectly “realist” piece of analysis from me. Beyond that, I would say the interests of the US citizenry as such will be most effectively and sustainably met over the longer term if we work to transform our country’s relationship with the rest of the world from one of hegemonism to one based on the equality of all human persons and on a strong commitment to reciprocity in all international agreements, the pursuit of nonviolent means of resolving differences among nations, and the building of accountable and effective international institutions.
And the sooner the better. No more Vietnams. No more Iraqs. No more hegemonism. Please!

21 thoughts on “Vietnam/Iraq”

  1. Helena forgot the most obvious parallel: the Left fraudulently claimed to oppose both wars on humanitarian grounds, but was actually seeking to give aid and comfort to anti-American butchers.

  3. Helena,
    “… find a way to undertake a total and orderly troop withdrawal from Iraq; and the sooner that is done, the less the total erosion in US “power” will be. That is a perfectly “realist” piece of analysis from me.”
    I beg to differ Helena. When, since WWII, has the US foreign policy apparatus shown the Zen kind of introspective wisdom that you advocate? They have always either attacked, or retreated in defeat (Saigon, Beirut, Mogadishu, …). I would say your “realist piece” is anything but. Sounds quite idealist to me.
    And then you go on to say “we work to transform our country’s relationship with the rest of the world from one of hegemonism to one based on the equality of all human persons and on a strong commitment to reciprocity in all international agreements, the pursuit of nonviolent means of resolving differences among nations, and the building of accountable and effective international institutions.”
    Now if that is not idealist, I don’t know what is. The many records of behind the scenes negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and the San Francisco conference of April 1945, all show the clear machinations by the US and the UK to create a system based on anything other than the equality of nations, and reciprocity in international relations.
    As painful as it may be, I think at some point we have to come to terms with what we are and what we stand for.

  4. I would say the interests of the US citizenry
    I don’t know who and how we can stope this.
    Bush and his Aid Cheney today said ” Congress Can’t Stop Troop Boost in Iraq, Bush Says“
    So who is in US have the power to stop them then?

  6. Crow, let’s hear your answer to Kassandra’s question, please?
    Additionally, please show us any iota of evidence you have that people on the left were, as you accuse, “actively seeking” to provide such aid and comfort.

  7. The problem, it seems to me, is that Americans think wars are like football games. Much the same way Romans thought about the games at the Coliseum. Has there ever been a case of war fever turned aside? Is war fever similar to raw sexual exitement among the young – an urge so insistent it must be satisfied regardless of consequences? Sure, Helena knew the war would be a fraud & never wavered in that belief, but that did not stop the mass hysteria that, to me, comes to resemble that of the Super Bowl. Which is due any minute now.

  8. The best example of the left’s behavior is this board, where they develop anti-American affinity to anything anti-American.
    Would any of the usual characters here have any symphathy to the mullas of Iran if they weren’t on the anti-American side? Now they even colapsed on Salah for posting anti Iranian opinions.
    Left=progressive; Iran=religious tyranny, no press freedom, civil liberty abuses, women opression, arms merchants, oil magnates, fnatical, international terrorists.
    What else is there in common between the Big Chavez, you little Chavezes of this board, and Iran? Will any of you have the cojones to go live in Iran instead of our great US of A?

  10. Regarding the troll’s “aid and comfort” canard:
    In February of 1972, I came back from my eighteen months of “Vietnamizing” the South Vietnamese military; got out of the Navy; and returned to my old college to continue my long-interrupted education. Amost immediately, I ran into a sizeable contingent of South Vietnamese foreign-exchange students whose “wartime” presence on an American college campus Governor Ronald Reagan found not in the least objectionable. I never once heard him threaten to kick them out of school — as he had me six years previously — for not wanting to “fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here,” as the old slogan went. Eventually, of course, they just settled “here” (meaning America) as our equivalent Iraqi aid-recipients today would do also, except that they find Europe a more civilzed environment in which to hang out while avoidng the unpleasantness currently consuming their fellow-Iraqis (not to mention those hardly-rich American soldiers) in Iraq.
    At any rate, this collection of Vietnamese “draft dodgers” (the Southeast Asian equivalent of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush) held “culture night” assemblies on campus where they would sing “patriotic” songs with charming lyrics like “Chet Nguoi My” (kill the Americans) in honor of their “compatriots” in the NLF busy trying to get the American military out of their country at the time. All this, of course, while the American Left (including Vietnam Veterans Against the War) worked hard to get our military out of Southeast Asia so that neither poor Americans nor poor Vietnamese would have to stupidly continue killing each other so that the pampered parents of wealthy America and South Vietnam (soon to become a needless redundancy) could keep their own precious progeny as far away from any patriotic unpleasantness as possible.
    America finds itself “doing it again” in Iraq precisely because America never gave its own “Left” (which in time became a majority of the American population) the credit and honor it deserves — and deserves today — for opposing needless conflict if for no other reason than that expounded by H. G. Wells: namely, that “The man who first raises his fist is the one who has run out of ideas.” Sheriff Dick Cheney, Deputy Dubya Bush, and their entire coterie of rabid reactionary cretins in America couldn’t raise their fists fast enough — which explains why they never had a single idea worth contemplating, let alone fighting and dying for. I say, then, that America’s anti-war “Left” has done us all proud again and hopefully always will do so, given that the perpetually raised fist of crypto-fascist Warfare Welfare and Makework Militarism in America (i.e., the Republican and Democratic Parties) practically guarantees that the formerly great republic seldom has a new or creative idea worth serious consideration.
    I mean, “put a man on the Moon by 2020”? We already did that in 1969, and it only took nine years starting from scratch in 1961. Really, America has run out of ideas and the kind of people who can turn them into reality. Lunatic Leviathan America today, as thirty-five years ago, now pretty much represents a global menace — a perpetually raised fist without a sentient, let alone humane, thought to guide it. Too bad for the formerly great republic. It could have meant so much more but chose not to.

  11. Whew, “Doris”, I am so glad to learn that– by your clear implication– in the good old US of A there are no “civil liberty abuses, women opression, arms merchants, oil magnates”, etc, etc.
    That’s a relief.
    (Probably you’ll need my ‘irony alert’ here.)
    Btw, this isn’t a “board”… That’s such an early-1990s thing. This is a “blog”.

  12. Helena, you are avoiding my point, and I’ll spell it again cause you seem slow today. If it weren’t for the US the left would have no common cause with Iran at all. And the US of A ain’t that bad if people from everywhere keepin flocking here, including your sorry self. The USA is by the moslems own admission the freest place for the practice of Islam.
    There is no substantial difference between a blog and a board other than protocols and formats used to post and view the content. Was that another distraction to avoid the question?

  14. Helena,
    I just caught in surprise by thing
    “Khalilzad’s first glimpse of the United States came as a teenager, when he visited this country in a student exchange program run by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker charitable organization, Gouttierre recalled. Khalilzad went home with a passion for American culture, including basketball.
    How then this man went from Quaker to so close to necon’s

  15. Dear Doris, leave the jejune sneering over on the rightwing ‘boards’. The US has had ‘common cause’ with Iran for many years, and for many of the same reasons we have had ‘common cause’ with Iraq. As for ‘moslems’ declaring the US is the ‘freest’ place to practice moslemitude or whatever you’re calling it, perhaps you do actually know some ‘moslems’ who say such things and could provide citations for your claim. And no, Deepak Chopra isn’t a ‘moslem’, although I think his religion is a ‘tude.
    And Doris, if you aren’t an American Indian, your sorry self is just another grifter, like the rest of us, suckin’ off the Big White Teat.

  16. “We are simply trying to communicate to the region that we are going to be there for a long time.” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates
    Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more.”
    — President George W. Bush
    February 26, 2003
    What a liers

  17. Helena, thought I would give you a few answers:
    “Does the guy have any sense of self-awareness or of irony?” NO
    Also, regarding his question, “How did this happen again?” SAME WAY IT HAPPENED 10,000 BEFORE THROUGH OUT HUMAN HISTORY
    and this:
    “the antiwar movement on Iraq did not produce sustained mass protests as Vietnam did by the late 1960s” This time around, it did produce the largest ever pre-war demonstration saying “don’t do this!” Since Bush so clearly ignored the 10 million Americans who showed up for those demonstrations, I think people felt it was a waste of time and gave up and went about their lives.
    “Nonetheless, it seems that diplomacy is the best hope for the future.”
    It is the only hope for the future.
    “the Left fraudulently claimed to oppose both wars on humanitarian grounds, but was actually seeking to give aid and comfort to anti-American butchers.”
    -crow
    Others have asked how did the left ‘give aid and comfort’ – but I would like to know exactly how Vietnam and Iraq were “ANTI-AMERICAN BUTCHERS” prior to the US military showing up and bombing and shooting people. I would like examples of those counties governments or recognized legitimate groups of people from those countries who killed at least 1,000 Americans PRIOR to any military action against them. Rogue elements of society, like say Timothy MacVeigh types, do not count.
    and also – would it be okay in your eyes to throw all that “humanitarian grounds” overboard and just oppose wars because it wastes a lot of money and does not produce results that are beneficial to us in this modern age? (I really that in prior ages it did: genocide against the Native Peoples did allow white Europeans an opportunity to grab land and acquire wealth. But I don’t see that being true today, mainly because we can not get away with genocide without the world noticing.)
    and finally this:
    “If it weren’t for the US the left would have no common cause with Iran at all. And the US of A ain’t that bad if people from everywhere keepin flocking here, including your sorry self. The USA is by the moslems own admission the freest place for the practice of Islam.”
    well, I didn’t flock here, I was born here. But how does being left (and against war, I suppose) mean that I have common cause with Iran? To me, Iran is just another country on this planet that has not attacked anyone for decades. They have elections, and they allow people to leave. I don’t like the fact that they are developing nuclear power plants, but I cannot see where that is different from other countries developing such a toxic source of energy. As for the potential that they may develop nuclear bombs, it seems to me the only sane way to stop nuclear bombs is by world-wide treaties and enforcement. Unfortunately, the US is the biggest player in that game and they have no interest in stopping nuclear bomb production. And in light of that fact, we can get nowhere until the USA changes.
    I just don’t get these circular arguments about Iran, Iraq, and other countries that say we have to go and make war on them because “they aren’t like us” (meaning they don’t have the same government as we do) when the stated reason for the wars are the fears that they are doing what the US government has been doing for decades – making WMDs. And, of course, once countries do make those WMDs, then going and attacking them is a lot less likely.
    As for the “freedom” supposedly found here in the USA – yeah, I’m free to go where I want, can say what I want on blogs and bumperstickers, and I am free to walk into all legislative offices and say what I want (except the White House) – and I can buy whatever I can afford except recreational drugs (which I don’t want anyway). Now, I am not free from fear, because this is not a very safe country, with lots of violent people running around, but really, I have only be assaulted once in my 50+ years, so I’m not overly afraid.
    – but the biggest impact on my personal sense of freedom is the fact that my government can steal my money right out of my paycheck and then use most of it to rain down horror, pain, fear, panic, disfigurement, death, disease, trauma,and all manner of evil on people who never hurt me and probably could not hurt me if they tried. On top of that, my government is stealing my money to ruin the earth.
    And my choices are to let them steal the money to do evil things with it, fight them and end up giving them even more money to do evil things with, or be very, very poor – or move to another country. I often think that if I were a truly moral person, I would choose one of the last two. I am probably just fooling myself when I think that by staying here and working inside the system that I am doing more good than by leaving.

  19. “Under Saddam it was impossible for any foreign company to get such a deal. This is enslavement of our country by those who say they came to liberate us. Do they think we will allow them to extract our oil and sell it on such terms? This is theft of a nation under siege, exploiting our weakness at the point of a gun. They are kicking us while we are down. I opposed Saddam, that’s why I live exiled in France all these years. But now I am not sure. Maybe Saddam was better.”
    An emotional Iraqi exile I happened to sit next to told me in a café in Paris recently.
    I asked him if he had gone back. He told me he had for one year “but I decided it was all a big lie. You cannot work within the system unless you accept the occupation first and that’s too much for me to accept”.http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10097051.html

  20. LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war–a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.
    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

    LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year–or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.
    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

    LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.

    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

    LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged “a much more massive effort to improve the life of man” in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.

    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

    LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war–a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.
    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time…In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy – by advancing liberty across a troubled region.

    LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: A time of testing–yes. And a time of transition. The transition is sometimes slow; sometimes unpopular; almost always very painful; and often quite dangerous. But we have lived with danger for a long time before, and we shall live with it for a long time yet to come. We know that “man is born unto trouble.” We also know that this Nation was not forged and did not survive and grow and prosper without a great deal of sacrifice from a great many men.

    GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship…A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them – and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.

    http://www.inblogs.net/abutamam/

  21. “Iran is just another country on this planet that has not attacked anyone for decades..
    Make that centuries and you’d have it about right. The modern nation state of Iran does not have a history of attacking other countries.

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