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Saving Face

Texan

Well-known member
Saving face: a cautionary tale
By JUSTIN LOGAN
Special to the Star-Telegram


The Bush administration has shifted from forcefully defending the war in Iraq to emphasizing the suspected downsides of withdrawing.

Ever since his State of the Union address, the president has focused on two negative consequences: a loss of U.S. credibility, and the prospect that withdrawal would precipitate a sort of reverse domino effect, propping up the authoritarian governments that Bush's Iraq policy was intended to undermine.

These claims bear a strong resemblance to the arguments of Lyndon Johnson, who argued against cutting our losses in Vietnam.

The issue of credibility was so central to America's Vietnam policy that tens of thousands of Americans died in the pursuit not of victory, but of saving face.

But the wiser voices inside the Johnson administration were arguing as early as the mid-1960s that the costs of defeat were manageable.

On Sept. 11, 1967, the intelligence community issued a secret memo titled "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam." The authors considered the many dire predictions if the United States were to withdraw from Vietnam. The memo concluded that the perils would be "probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated."

When the memo was written, fewer than 20,000 Americans had died in Vietnam.

The Bush administration argues U.S. allies would broadly question America's commitments, concluding that when the going gets tough, America bails out.

This argument is partially true, as it was in Vietnam.

Al Qaeda will indeed attempt to link our withdrawal to a larger narrative that includes President Reagan's retreat from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and our departure from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident. But unless our national leadership allowed our failure in Iraq to call into question other commitments, this damage certainly could be mitigated.

Any administration extricating U.S. troops from Iraq would have to send the message that the U.S. military would refocus its full attention on al Qaeda. As for other commitments, why would we allow anyone to conclude that our failure in Iraq had any bearing on them?

In withdrawing, the United States should answer questions of credibility loudly and clearly.

The other protest from war supporters is that withdrawal would sound a death knell for the prospect of liberal democratic reform in the Middle East -- a reversed version of the domino theory. But that objection implies that liberal democracy could sweep across the Islamic world if U.S. forces are kept in Iraq.

In every location in which elections have been held in the Muslim world since the Iraq war something close to the worst possible result has emerged.

Elections predating significant social change have done little to advance either America's interests or the cause of liberalism itself. Similarly, the naïve assertion peddled by neoconservatives that liberal democratic change was a workable solution to America's terrorism problem has been a blight on U.S. grand strategy. Reform in the Islamic world cannot be precipitated -- or even hastened in a meaningful way -- by pressure from America.

All this said, withdrawing from Iraq will indeed represent a U.S. defeat.

It should be taken as a cautionary tale about the perils of nation building and the inadvisability of foreign-policy adventurism in general.

But in the end, we face the same question as we did in Vietnam: Can the United States end the war and emerge with its fundamental global position unchanged?

The 1967 memo offered the almost heretical view that "it seems unlikely that in the end an unfavorable outcome in Vietnam would greatly alter the present pattern of [power] relationships."

We should at least consider whether the same is true of Iraq.


Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.


http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/16739362.htm
 

Steve

Well-known member
we were attacked on Sept 11 because Osama saw us as weak...

Osama based this knowledge on our actions in Nam, Lebanon,..and Somalia,...would he not find US still weak and attempt to attack US again.....or feel that our failure was enough and go home to live on his war stories?

We are in fact in Iraq now because of Vietnam...Saddam felt he could play the US and negotiate our failure...he based this flawed belief on the history of our actions in Nam,...Lebanon and Somalia...

so the pullout in Nam,...the pull out of Lebanon, and Somalia, not only cost US the lives that were lost in the battles, but every loss since then in New York,...Pennsylvania,...Washington DC,...Afghanistan,...and Iraq combined. not to mention the loss of credibility in the Iran hostage situation, and every small terrorist attack since the betrayal in December 1974, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974...
 

Steve

Well-known member
Osama bin Laden in the Manhattan Delta
Editorial
October 2001

by: Andrew E. Busch


In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, analysts were divided about its meaning. For some, including President Bush, it represented "the first war of the 21st Century." For others, including George Will, it was a continuation of the last war of the last century, an extension by other means of the Persian Gulf War against Iraq. What recent anti-war demonstrations have shown, however, is that our current crisis can be also be viewed as the last battle of the Vietnam War.

Those demonstrations, and much intellectual commentary surrounding them, show a familiar scene: the usual suspects wielding the usual slogans and using idealistic (not to mention historically ignorant) youth as their fodder. However, over the past thirty-five years, their argument has been gradually stripped to its essence, until now little remains but its hard core, the twin towers of anti-Americanism and pure naiveté.

It is hard to believe today, but the original composite anti-Vietnam war argument was relatively complex and respectable. It went something like this: we do not support our country because it is fighting a war far away for unclear purposes on behalf of a corrupt, repressive regime against a popular insurgency. If America were fighting for freedom, against clear international aggression, or to defend our own homes, of course we would support it.

The argument was terribly flawed; as it turns out, in Vietnam we were fighting for freedom (remember the "boat people" and the killing fields of Cambodia?) and against external aggression (there is no doubt that the war was driven by North Vietnamese regional imperialism). Subsequent events have dismantled it piece by piece.

When the United States sent troops to Grenada in 1983, they liberated the island from a bloody dictatorship and were welcomed with open arms by most Grenadians. America was clearly on the side of freedom. Yet the slogans and the protests continued, as if Grenada were Vietnam.

When the United States sent troops to free Kuwait in 1991, America was not fighting an insurgency but an Iraqi army sent across an international border to conquer and pillage another country. America was clearly fighting as a response to an act of naked aggression. Yet the slogans and the protests continued, as if Kuwait were Vietnam.

When the United States was attacked on the morning of September 11, 2001, without warning and without provocation, the target was our own people on our own soil. America, not some other land far away, was the victim. Yet, even before we responded—as the remains of Americans were even yet being dug out of the rubble—the slogans and the protests continued, as if the World Trade Center was Vietnam. Osama bin Laden has joined the Viet Cong in the Manhattan Delta, and our protestors are unfazed. For them, nothing has changed. No one can take seriously any longer the anti-war argument of 1968.

Anti-war forces are consequently forced to fall back on a battery of secondary propositions held together by little more than their common ludicrousness. Would a military response by the United States unleash a "cycle of violence?" For fifteen years, there has been no "cycle of violence," only a linear progression of violence as our enemies attacked us repeatedly with little or no effective response. It is true enough that retaliation will be followed by more terror. What the anti-war forces cannot admit is that failure to retaliate will also be followed by more terror. The only question is whether the United States will defend itself.

Is this really a "criminal" matter to be handled exclusively by the World Court or U.S. judicial authorities? We have already tried that approach and it failed miserably. After the first bombing of the World Trade Center, we convicted and imprisoned a small handful of bit players who were involved. They were simply replaced, and the mission was resumed. September 11 was not grand theft auto on a large scale.

Did U.S. policy incite the terrorists to this mayhem? , which U.S. policy would that be? The U.S. policy that saved the Muslim Somalians from starvation; the policy that helped rescue the Muslim Afghans, Kuwaitis, Bosnians, and Kosovars from brutal occupation by hostile armies; or the policy that pressured Israel into the land-for-peace deal with Yassir Arafat? There is no U.S. policy in the Middle East short of throwing Israel overboard and completely abandoning the region to the forces of militant Islamism that would satisfy Osama bin Laden’s demands.

Are we turning "a tragedy into a war," as the protestors like to say? A tragedy is when a two-year-old drowns in a swimming pool or a tornado overturns a trailer park. September 11 was not a "tragedy." It was a deliberate, calculated act of war by an organized force whose leader openly declared war on America three years ago and whose Islamo-fascist ideology is committed to bringing America to its knees. Would the protestors think the U.S. military response was acceptable as long as we call it a tragedy?

No, the anti-war movement long ago turned its talents from tragedy to farce. All of the conditions it established for its support of American self-defense thirty-five years ago have been met, and yet it opposes American self-defense. In the end, the perpetual protesters are one part unconquerable naiveté, one part knee-jerk insistence on blaming America and embracing its enemies no matter how foul, and one hundred percent nostalgic narcissism. Now that the illusions are gone, they have nothing left but "Give Peace a Chance" and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win." Maybe that is all they ever really had.
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/busch/01/osama.html
 
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