Failed American policies rise from the grave in Iraq war (SF Chron)

[struggle4progress]

Judith Coburn
Sunday, August 13, 2006

Through a scrim of red, dry-season dust, the sign appeared like an apparition hanging low over the no-man's land of the South Vietnamese-Lao border: "Warning! No US Personnel Beyond This Point." Its big, white expanse was already festooned with grunt graffiti, both American and Vietnamese. It was February 1971, the afternoon before the invasion of Laos, and the sign but the latest bizarre development in the Pentagon's campaign to "Vietnamize" the war in Vietnam. The journalists who had hoofed it all the way to the border found the sign so grimly funny that we lined up for a group photo in front of it.

President Richard Nixon announced the first withdrawal of American soldiers from South Vietnam in late 1969 and their replacement by South Vietnamese troops. The new policy was dubbed Vietnamization by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and hailed as the beginning of the end of America's war in that land. But the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi wasn't fooled for a minute. The communists believed Vietnamization was intended only to de-Americanize the war, not to end it.

Hanoi was right, more right than anybody at the time could have imagined. In the five-plus years of war after Nixon's first inauguration in January 1969, more than 20,000 American soldiers would die; Nixon would actually widen the war by invading both Cambodia and Laos; and brutal American bombing campaigns would kill more than a million more Indochinese. In fact, more Indochinese and Americans would be killed or wounded during the Vietnamization years than in the war before 1970.

Comparisons to Vietnam and terms from that era like "quagmire," "hearts and minds" and "body counts" swamped the media the moment the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, but Vietnamization didn't make it into the mix until November. Then, the White House, which initially shied off anything linked to Vietnam, started a media campaign to roll out what it was calling "Iraqification," perhaps as an answer to critics who doubted the "mission" had actually been "accomplished" and feared there was no "light at the end of the (Iraqi) tunnel." But the term was quickly dropped. Perhaps it resurrected too many Baby Boomer memories of Vietnamese clinging to the skids of choppers fleeing the fruits of Vietnamization ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/13/INGKFKDJH81.DTL

[hobbit709]

1. History repeats

and repeats ad nauseam since we never seem to learn the lessons.