We're doing it again! Politics versus Military Strategy.

[wjh2657]

Before anybody goes off the deep end and burns me as a traitor, let me set the scene. I am a retired Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant (30 years USMC) and I put 6 years in country. I am currently a Colonel (real not Honorary) in the Tennessee State Guard and spend a lot of my time supporting and helping TN National Guard families. So don't tell me I need to leave the country!

I have bitch with this country ( Government) and the current problems in the middle east. We did not learn from the Viet Nam debacle!

The sad truth is, we won the military war in Viet Nam. After TET 68 ( I was there), the Viet Cong wre defunct and the PAVN were on their knees and out of reinforcements. General Giap even said this right on American TV!

We lost the War politically, in Viet Nam, not at home. We finally realized that all we could do was conquer Viet Nam, not reunite it or stabilize it. The corrupt idiots that we put in power in Saigon were unpopular, the wrong religion, and unable to work with the North Vietnamese. The people of Viet Nam, in the meantime, just wanted to get their country back together. The folks in the south all had kin in the North and some of their sons were even in the PAVN army! They wanted the round eyes out and the country in one piece. If it took a communist power (even one that was going to mistreat them) to do it, so be it!

Yes I had South Vietnamese acquaintences that didn't want that. But what they really wanted was to leave Viet Nam and go to the States. The rice farmers (the real Vietnamese) just wanted it to be one country, free of foreign devils, and to be left alone to put in their next rice crop.

We had hurt too many people and lost most of our credibility to be able to reach any kind of agreement for them. We should have started that in 65-66 ( when instead we started to most of the fighting by ourselves).


We've done it again in Iraq and Afghanistan. The troops are doing a great job of fighting, but there has been no concerted effort on the part of the State Department and AID to reach out and touch the hearts of the people. I am not even sure , as christians, that we can. All the hatred, distrust and zenophobia is still there, growing and festering. Again, the average Yusef (Joe in Arabic) wants his country free of Christian Infidels, the electricity turned back on, the hospitals working with a medicine supply, and for people in Washington and in Baghdad to leave him alone so he can raise his family and run his business. This is true even if he does run a chance his neighbor is going to blow it all up because they go to different mosques!

At best, we can only be an occupying force, with all the resistance that entails. We need to be more aware of the cultural differences and how they cloud the military efforts. The idea that we are going to turn them all into good little Republicans/Democrats who are going to do everything in a nice christian way is going to lead to only more lamentations and gnashing of teeth of more mothers and widows (with many of those mothers and widows being in the U.S.) If the problem can be solved it will have to solved within the context of the Islamic Babylonian culture of Iraq, not by good old American know-how!

Just like in Viet Nam, we made terrible mistakes in the first year of the war and it remains to be seen if all the best efforts by some the most sincere and dedicated military leaders we have ever had can actually do anything to reverse those errors. I just don't believe that the State Department is even in the picture anymore, or if they ever were!


Just my 2 cents worth.

[Pistolenschutze]

First off, wjh, let me welcome you to TFF. Glad to have you with us.

I don't think you will find many around here ready to burn you in effigy, at least not on this issue. Many of us here on TFF--and the vast majority of those who post on this particular forum--are military veterans, and no small number of us are Vietnam vets. As you might expect, most who inhabit TFF tend toward the conservative, pro-military side of the political equation as well, given that TFF is a firearms oriented place to begin with. That doesn't mean we are unable to see the forest for the trees.

You draw a parallel between Vietnam and the current Iraq conflict that has not gone unnoticed or uncommented upon here in the past. I, for one, have done so on several occasions, and my thoughts have generally paralleled your own. While I sincerely hope that we can--somehow--accomplish the goals we have set for ourselves in Iraq, I too have serious doubts about the long-term outcome from a political perspective. Within a purely militarily context we can--indeed, I believe we are--winning, just as we did in Vietnam. But as you point out, that is only part of the battle. Winning the "hearts and minds" (how I hate that phrase!) part of the conflict may not be truly possible, not if we insist on trying to create a relatively unified society there that mirrors our own. In Iraq, I believe we are making the highly questionable assumption, just as we did in Vietnam, that the cultural forces which so greatly influence the actions of the Iraqi people are identical to our own. They are not. We are, in essence, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, at least that is what I fear.

There is no tradition of democracy and individual freedom in Iraq, any more than there was in Vietnam so long ago. Human cultural patterns tend to be self-perpetuating and any significant change in them does not occur over short periods of time, but rather over decades, if it occurs at all. The best we can hope for in Iraq, I believe, is some sort of stability to be achieved that will not be terribly inimical to our own interests in the region, for interests we do indeed have. The ultimate answer may well be a breakup of Iraq into separate entities--Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni--with the U.S. using the threat of its military strength to keep outsiders (primarily Iran and Syria) from unduly influencing events. The current government, the one we are supporting, is a sham at best and in invitation to disaster at worst. As I see it, let the military do the job it is trained to do without political interference, then let the chips fall were they may based on the cultural mores operative in Iraq. True political change, not the kind imposed from outside, can only come from the Iraqi people themselves.

[berto64]

Welcome WJH,
I agree with Pistol Shooter that you are Preaching to the choir on this topic.
I'm a 3 tour vet of Vietnam myself (US Army) and I saw this coming from the beginning.

[Pistolenschutze]

Originally Posted by berto64

I'm a 3 tour vet of Vietnam myself (US Army) and I saw this coming from the beginning.

Yup, I saw it coming too, Berto, though I originally had high hopes that we had actually learned something from ten years of war in Vietnam. I served only one tour "in country" 1969-70, but it didn't take me long, even as a grunt, to figure out that war was totally FUBAR, not because the military couldn't win it, but because the politicians were running it. The same thing is happening in Iraq I fear.

[berto64]

Rumsfield=McNamarra{Ignorance}

[JD]

Welcome to the VMBB wjh!

The VMBB is it's own site that has incorporated with TFF.

Interesting thread, to say the least.

JD