“It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it could not be done.” So spoke General Jacques Leclerc, the French World War II hero sent to Vietnam in 1946 to estimate how many troops would be required to take back that country. Leclerc’s estimate would still be valid two decades later when over 500,000 US troops were in Vietnam, as Barbara Tuchman notes in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.
Fast forward to General Eric Shinseki’s testimony to Congress on February 25, 2003 just three weeks before the invasion of Iraq. When asked how many troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq, Shinseki said “several hundred thousand.” Three days later Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki’s estimate as “far off the mark,” but it is now clear that they had no idea what the occupation of Iraq would require.
The Meaning of Fallujah “There are no insurgents in Fallujah,” says Mohammed Latif, once a senior intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s regime and now commander of the Iraqi brigade controlling the city. Washington has been blaming the conflict in Fallujah partly on “insurgents.” Resistance to the occupation is a far more accurate description, and there is plenty of that in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq.
Words make a big difference. In Vietnam we labeled the Vietnamese Communists “terrorists” and “insurgents.” This obscured for far too long the reality that they comprised a deeply nationalist movement determined to resist any and all invaders—however powerful. In this kind of war kill ratios have little meaning. Killed: 58,000 US troops; 2 to 3 million Vietnamese.
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This article describes how to declare victory and get the hell out of Iraq.http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0510-08.htm
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