Vietnam experience creates differing views on Iraq for Hagel, McCain (NYT)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1216&u_sid=2350222

Published Monday | March 19, 2007
Vietnam experience creates differing views on Iraq for Hagel, McCain
THE NEW YORK TIMES


Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a grunt in the Mekong Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of war from the bottom up - men sheared in half by explosives, half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had been used.

John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet above Hanoi on a bombing run one month into his tour. He spent 51/2 years as a prisoner of war; he was held in solitary confinement, tortured, beaten until he could not stand. An admiral's son and a Navy pilot, he came to believe, like many pilots, that the war could have been won if only it had been fought right.

Memories of Vietnam haunt the public debate on the war in Iraq. They also lurk in the private thoughts of a generation in Congress - men like Sens. Hagel and McCain, who lived through the earlier war, vote on the current one and, despite their shared past, now disagree profoundly on what the United States should do next.

McCain, an Arizona Republican who is running for president, is a vocal supporter of the plan President Bush announced in January to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. It represents, he says, the best hope for success, "our last shot." Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who has accused the administration of "arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam," opposes the troop increase and is pressing for a phased withdrawal.

With more than half of Americans saying the war was a mistake, McCain's support for continuing it has become one of the biggest challenges his candidacy faces; and Hagel's status as the war's most outspoken Republican critic in Congress has become a powerful argument in favor of his running, although he shied away from entering the campaign last week.

What role does the Vietnam experience of the two senators, longtime allies and friends, play in their divergent thinking about Iraq? McCain says his years as a pilot and a prisoner of war play no part - although one aide said the year he spent studying the war at the National War College probably did.

Hagel, however, says his Vietnam experiences unquestionably inform his thinking. "Surely it has affected how I have seen this war and why I have spoken out as I have," Hagel said last week. "I was part of, I think, the forgotten group of people in all wars - that is, the person at the bottom who is expected to fight and die and has very little to say in policy, even tactics."

FULL article at link.

[leftchick]

1. McCain apparently left part of his brain in Hanoi

That or his soul. :puke: