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Listening to President Bush's speech before the Naval Academy, I could not help but think about previous Presidents who made similar speeches and similar excuses about the need for America to continue fighting another war in another far off land forty years ago.
That war was Vietnam.
The first speech of which I was reminded was Lyndon Baines Johnson's.
On the 28th of July, 1965 in his "We Will Stand in Vietnam" speech, Lyndon Baines Johnson, more eloquently, more humbly, and more sincerely than George W. Bush exhorted the country to stay the course by claiming "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men into battle."
This summer, in a previous speech about the war, George W. Bush echoed Johnson's earlier sentiment with his claim that "Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real."
Neither man willingly chose to give their speeches.
Rather, both were forced to give these speeches to shore up plummeting support for their interventions in far off lands after casualties mounted and it became apparent to the American people that these wars were going to be long protracted affairs with no clear guarantees of success.
Both claimed the stakes were high and both invoked versions of the "domino" theory.
Johnson claimed that if we pulled out of Southeast Asia the other non-communist nations there would fall to communist aggression.
Bush claimed that if we pull out of Iraq, the Middle East would fall under the control of terrorists.
Both claimed to be reluctantly fighting to defend freedom. Of the two men, Johnson was more eloquent with his claim that "we did not choose to be the guardians at the gate."
Both claimed to offer the American people clear cut plans to achieve success, with Johnson announcing troop escalations from 75,000 to 125,000 troops, and a doubling of the draft call, while Bush stated that we would stand firm and that we would continue to train the Iraqi Defense Force (much like the ARVN in Vietnam) to take over our role there so that we could someday eventually leave Iraq.
Before the Vietnam War was over, the number of U.S. troops there would rise from the 75,000 Johnson mentioned to peak at well over a half a million men and still there was no American victory to be found in Vietnam.
At the time of Johnson's speech, approximately 400 American servicemen had already died in Vietnam. As Bush spoke the first time this summer, there were already around 1,740 American dead or more than four times as many as when Johnson gave his "We Will Stand in Vietnam" speech.
With over 2100 American dead, with 160,000 troops in Iraq at Christmas time, with the war still dragging on interminably in Iraq towards a fourth year, and his poll numbers in free fall, Bush yesterday decided it was time to offer us a second speech from the Vietnam War - this time from Richard Nixon.
Bush's speech yesterday before the Naval academy cadets bore a striking resemblance to Nixon's so-called "Vietnamization" speech given on 3rd of November, 1969.
With his back against the wall, President Bush finally came forth with this much over-hyped and overdue "plan" for Iraq which is little more than a public relations driven re-packaging the same old rhetoric we've already heard with no new real substance.
He has misleadingly and very patronizingly labeled it a "plan" for "victory" when in fact it is neither a plan nor will it lead to victory.
It was literally given against a hastily constructed and obviously P.R. driven backdrop literally designed to fill the TV screens of those people in the viewing audience with the phrase "Plan for Victory" as though the pure repetition of this hollow phrase would somehow make it so.
In spite of the P.R. gimmickry, the public was not fooled - it was just like when he went around the country trying to sell us "privatized" Social Security.
No one was buying Bush yesterday either.
It is obvious to this observer that victory - much like the "weapons of mass destruction" which Mr. Bush used to justify the war in the first place - is nowhere to be found in Iraq.
We have twice been told about Iraqi elections and now we are told that another election is forthcoming. These elections in and of themselves are not real progress and signify nothing.
Thus far the Iraqis have not even been allowed to know for whom they were voting.
How close to democracy could Iraq truly be based on elections between anonymous candidates who can't show their faces or give their names; between candidates who would need armed U.S. military patrols just to "knock" on voter doors and "canvass" the neighborhoods if they were foolish enough to try; between candidates who don't give stump speeches, don't debate each other, don't run 30 second TV ads, and who don't even kiss babies or shake hands at the rope line?
This candidate anonymity was apparently necessary for their own protection. Nonetheless, numerous candidates and transitional government officials have been repeatedly assassinated by Iraqi gunmen and Iraqi bombing attacks both before and after these "elections." There is no sign that anything will change with the upcoming "election."
Indeed, the upcoming election itself has a historical parallel in Vietnam - for there was a national presidential election in South Vietnam on the 3rd of September, 1967, only about 5 months before our marines were besieged at Khe Sanh (21 Jan '68) and not quite 2 weeks beyond that (30 Jan '68) before all of South Vietnam exploded into violence during the Tet Offensive.
The Bush notion that the Iraqis are willing and able to "defend" their country from the Bush labeled "terrorists" and that they just need a little more time to be trained so that we can leave Iraq is in fact far more preposterous than the Nixonian notion that the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) were willing and able to defend their country against the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies and that we could eventually exit Vietnam by "Vietnamizing" the Vietnam War.
This President and his spin-masters continue to follow the Vietnam war model of withholding important material facts and even blatantly lying to the public about the ability of the Iraqi Defense Forces (IDF) to stand on their own two feet, the conduct of the war, and finally about the cohesiveness of the Iraqi nation itself.
We are told by the President and his talking heads on TV that there are hundreds of IDF brigades that are capable of "taking the lead" when this is in fact a meaningless phrase that tells us nothing about the ability or willingness of the Iraqis to fight for themselves.
The truth is that the Defense Department's own objective report to Congress indicated that only ONE brigade of 750 men that was capable of independent action. By comparison, the ARVN was a much larger, better equipped, and better trained fighting force than the IDF.
Capability of independent action by the IDF is the real prerequisite milestone if "Vietnamization" is going to be a real exit plan for Iraq. For all practical purposes, however, the IDF is several years away from "independent action".
We are also not told that contrary to administration spin that the war is not going well and that the rate of attacks is escalating and the insurgents are growing more sophisticated every day.
Finally, we are also not told that Iraq is really composed of three distinct nations, Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd that were artificially thrown together at the end of World War I by the British Empire and that their hatred for each other is only superceded at this point by their common hatred for the Americans who occupy their countries. Polls conducted in Iraq now show that over 80% of Iraqis want us to leave and even that 45% of Iraqis think it is acceptable to attack American servicemen.
Iraq is disintegrating into a civil war that we started but which we are powerless to stop.
In the final analysis, it all comes down to the numbers.
Iraq has more than twice the population of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and several times the land area of South Vietnam.
We could not control South Vietnam in spite of having nearly five times the number of troops we have in Iraq, keeping two aircraft carriers permanently on station of the coast, using free fire zones where anything that moves could be legally shot at according to the approved rules of engagement and employing widespread use of napalm, massive B52 aerial bombardments and artillery fire missions - none of which would be politically acceptable today to even the most hawkish of hawks.
There is today, approximately 1 American soldier on the ground in Iraq today for every 160 Iraqis and 1 American soldier for every square mile of Iraq.
Even fictional Vietnam War hero Forrest Gump could do the math.
There is no victory to be found unless, as retired United States Marine, and Bronze Star recipient, Colonel Murtha said two weeks ago, we are willing to abandon the volunteer army, forcibly draft young people into the military and deploy a massively larger force to Iraq.
Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, before the war predicted it would take at least 250,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq for at least 5 years to pacify the insurgents.
He was fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to stick to the preposterously optimistic Bush administration line that only 60,000 troops were required and that occupation would be easy.
In hindsight, General Shinseki was also significantly underestimating the manpower that would be required.
It seems clear that if we could not control South Vietnam with 585,000 U.S. troops and several hundred thousand more South Vietnamese ARVN, South Korean and Australian troops that any interpolation from that conflict to Iraq based on relative sizes and populations of the two countries would lead to the reasonable conclusion that literally several million troops would be required to effectively pacify Iraq.
The arrogance of powerful men from that past war like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger has been continued today in Iraq by the arrogance of men like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld who don't understand the vast difference between obliterating a country by aerial bombardment and occupying it.
We can certainly blow any nation off the face of the earth in a matter of hours with impunity. That never translates, however, to occupying that country and forcing the inhabitants to do what we say at the point of a gun which always requires huge numbers of soldiers for long periods of time and a public willing to accept large losses in that occupation.
It is important to remember that less than three years after Johnson's speech, there would be over 11,000 dead American servicemen, our marines would be under siege at Khe Sahn, our soldiers would be fighting off the Tet Offensive even inside our own embassy in Saigon and Johnson himself would be announcing that he would neither seek nor accept another term as our President.
By the end of the war on the 30th of April of 1975, there would be approximately 58,226 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines killed or missing in action in Vietnam.
Must we wait for that many deaths before we put a stop to the misadventures of this new Texas President in Iraq?
On the 23rd of April 1971, a young lieutenant in the United States Navy, another decorated war hero who had earned the Silver Star named John Kerry, poignantly asked the United States Senate and the American people about that tragic war in Vietnam the important question -
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
We need to ask ourselves that same question today and every day from now on about the war in Iraq -
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for George Bush's mistake?"
Douglas J. De Clue
Orlando, Florida
ddeclue2@earthlink.net
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