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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: `Iraqization' Idea Has Familiar Ring December 14, 2006 Haven't we been here before? Bogged down in a war that has come to seem impossible to win, unable to control the use of neighboring countries as sanctuaries by enemy forces, public support for the whole enterprise gone, and then a new plan. The last time, the plan was Vietnamization, the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of building the capacity of South Vietnamese forces while withdrawing U.S. troops. This time it is what? Iraqization? To put it starkly, the proposals put forward by the bipartisan commission led by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton call on the U.S military to train Iraqi security forces to do what American troops haven't been able to do: secure the territory and people so that healthy institutions of self-government can begin to develop. Let me hasten to say that I have no better idea. The chaos following the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces would be intolerably dangerous to the whole explosive region. Flooding the war zone with vastly more U.S. combat troops would be practically difficult--given how thin the U.S. military is already stretched--and politically impossible. Staggering along from car bomb to mass grave with no concept of an endgame is unthinkable. And so the United States is left with little choice but to ask its soldiers to do something they aren't equipped to accomplish: to take a frightened, unmotivated bunch of reluctant warriors riven by the very sectarian dynamics that are tearing the country apart and turn them into a highly disciplined, committed, effective peacekeeping force. Like Vietnamization, the proposed new strategy is a circumlocution for retreat. The trouble with retreats--think of Napoleon from Russia--is that they can turn into bloodlettings for the withdrawing forces. President Bush may find it tempting to launch an offensive to prevent this--just as President Richard Nixon did by invading Cambodia. This, of course, turned into the Khmer Rouge nightmare, though U.S. casualties did decline significantly afterward. In the Mideast, a similar offensive to cover retreat would be as dangerous to the region as precipitate withdrawal. Who knows what nightmares would follow? I arrived in Vietnam as a private first class just as the Vietnamization process was taking hold. At the Pacific Stars and Stripes, where I landed a job as a correspondent, my first front-page story told of the decision to bring home the Army's illustrious 1st Infantry Division, "The Big Red One." When I went out to the field with one of the best and most experienced combat commanders I ever met, then serving as an adviser to an elite Vietnamese unit in the Mekong Delta, he confided in me that he could not imagine things ending other than with a North Vietnamese flag flying over the presidential palace in Saigon, as it does today. Later, a public information officer from the U.S. command urged me to send a reporter to visit a Vietnamese unit that had just taken over from a withdrawing infantry unit. It was a real success story, he said. Our reporter discovered that the Vietnamese unit had developed the worst desertion rate in the military and had looted the base camp that had been turned over to it of almost everything of value, right down to the water pipes. If Iraqization becomes policy, expect to hear more such success stories coming out of the Pentagon and the White House. Meantime, civilians and soldiers will continue to die. And the American troops on the ground will know that they are engaged in a long, bloody face-saving operation. During Vietnamization, the troops joked darkly about what sad sack would be the last U.S. soldier killed in the war. "Will the last man out of Vietnam please turn out the lights," they said. The period of Vietnamization deeply demoralized the troops. Drug use increased. As did racial conflict and incidents in which soldiers attempted to kill their leaders, known at the time as "fragging." The men (for they were virtually all men at the time) knew they could not accomplish what they were told to do and were not accomplishing it, despite the official success stories. It was not their fault. They did do what they were equipped to do--win battles. They rarely failed at that, just as U.S. troops in Iraq neatly defeated Saddam Hussein. But in Vietnam and Iraq, the policymakers let the soldiers down. In Iraq they did not put in enough troops from the very start. They did not put in heavy infantry to the north to prevent defeated Iraqi soldiers from disappearing into the civilian population, keeping their armaments and fierce opposition to the U.S. plan of liberation. They did not recognize that security after the battle would be a bigger challenge than initial victory. And so the soldiers suffered. Just as they will now suffer as they are told to execute impossible new orders. Let us just hope that at least the U.S. does not turn on them if an unpleasant flag ends up flying in Baghdad. ---------- Jack Fuller is a former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
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