A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq

[RadiDem]

--snip--

Iraq and Vietnam , he said, are both products of failed civilian and military leadership. Presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush began with flawed aims and assumptions, and in both cases they produced military strategies that were doomed to fail.

"If the strategy is wrong and the policy is wrong, you can't blame the people implementing it. They are trying to implement a political strategy that won't work. It's very difficult to turn the train around," said Warner, who at 81 heads a defense consulting firm in McLean, Va . "I have to believe that military leaders in positions of trust and confidence may have made stupid decisions (in the course of fighting an insurgency), but never with malice aforethought towards the country that spawned them and certainly not with intent to destroy the lives of those soldiers who believed in them, trusted their decisions and carried out their orders to their deaths."

The flawed assumptions of Vietnam and Iraq are nearly mirror images of one another.

In Vietnam , Kennedy and other policymakers believed in the "domino theory": If South Vietnam fell, other U.S. allies in the region— Thailand , Malaysia , Singapore , the Philippines , Indonesia — also would fall to the communists.

In Iraq , Bush and the neoconservative policymakers in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office had a democracy theory: Implanting democracy in Iraq would be easy, and from there it would spread to Syria , Egypt , Saudi Arabia and beyond. The fact that the most democratic nation in the region, by most standards, is Iran and that Islamists dominate some of the region's most popular political parties, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon , seems not to have made much of an impression.

--snip--

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20070806/wl_mcclatchy/20070806bcusiraqgeneral_attn_national_oped_editors_ytop;_ylt=Aj5KDGA_Hr1AkuQxSVShFf6s0NUE

[sandnsea]

1. 1954, Eisenhower Articulates The Domino Theory

Another failed Republican policy that they somehow manage to shove off on Democrats.

http://www.historytools.org/sources/domino.html