Top Ten Mistakes the Bush Administration Is Repeating from Vietnam

[AGENDA21]

Because the Bush administration, almost from the start, has eschewed any comparison of Iraq with Vietnam, officials apparently never read the history of the nation’s heretofore worst war and have made the same 10 major mistakes:

1. Underestimating the enemy. As in Vietnam, the superpower’s potent military has been astounded by the tenacity and competence of a nationalist rebellion attempting to throw a foreign occupier from its soil. For example, the U.S. military, a hierarchical organization, views the Sunni insurgency as disorganized and without a central command structure. Yet the insurgents are using this decentralized structure very effectively and are not threatened by any U.S. decapitation strike to severely wound the rebellion by killing its leaders.

2. Deceiving the American public about how badly the war is going. President Bush continues to talk of victory, and his chief military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, argued that the United States was making “very, very good progress” just two days before the more credible U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that a civil war was possible in Iraq. President Lyndon Johnson painted an excessively rosy picture of U.S. involvement in Vietnam until the massive communist Tet offensive against the south in 1968 created a “credibility gap” in the public mind. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries successfully beat back the offensive, but the war was lost politically because the U.S. government lost the confidence of its own citizens. The Bush administration has fallen into the same trap by trying to “spin” away bad news from Iraq. Polls ominously indicate that Bush’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the American public has plummeted more than 20 points since September of 2003 to 40 percent.

3. The Bush administration, like the Johnson and Nixon administrations, blames the media’s negative coverage for plunging popular support of the war. Yet the nature of the press is that it would rather cover extraordinary negative events, such as fires and plane crashes, than more mundane positive developments. Vietnam demonstrated that normal media coverage of mistakes in war could undermine the war effort. The Bush administration should have expected such predictable media coverage.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1694

[Warpy]

1. The biggest mistake was invading under false pretexts

The second biggest (and the true lesson of Vietnam) was in underestimating the will of a people to keep what is theirs.

The third biggest was in not starting a WPA like program immediately and getting the Iraqis back to work. There is nothing like a steady paycheck to give somebody hope for the future and nothing like a JOB to take up the time that might be devoted to making IEDs and planning murder.

The fourth biggest is the hubris of Vietnam, that more troops, bombing raids, bullets, and mayhem will subdue the country permanently.

Then we can start on this guy's top ten.

[mike_c]

2. k&r-- excellent article....

Another snippet:

Most important of all, starting a war with another country for concocted reasons, which did not hold up under scrutiny. Lyndon Johnson used a questionable alleged attack by Vietnamese patrol boats on a U.S. destroyer to escalate U.S. involvement in a backwater country that was hardly strategic to the United States. Bush exaggerated the dangers from Iraqi weapons programs and implied an invented link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. In a republic, the lack of a compelling rationale for sending men to die in a distant war can be corrosive for the morale of the troops and public support back home.

Ya think?

[savemefromdumbya]

3. Inability to recognize a quagmire

the fool bit off more than he could chew with Iraq. Just shows how niaive they all are about war? Chickenhaks!

[Ready4Change]

4. Only 10? n/t

[spindrifter]

5. Actually, I think

there was more of an effort to know about the cultural issues important to the Vietnamese people than there ever was in the Iraq debacle. But why would BushCo let anything get in the way of its goal of having a war to prop up the Chimp.