Is this Viet Nam All over again?

“I am incensed. I just heard on the radio that some Marines were ambushed in Falloujah, so reinforcements were called in. As soon as they arrived, the insurgents fled into an "exclusionary zone". An "exclusionary zone" is a holy area that the Iraqis have negotiated with the US Armed forces not to enter.

This is akin to the enemy basing themselves in Cambodia and Laos, and the US agreeing not to attack certain areas in the Viet Nam war. Of course, the enemy just stockpiled weapons and troops there, and they are doing it here also.

If the Iraqis do not want us to attack certain areas, they can make darn well sure that we won't be attacked out of there, and verify it with and for us. Whatever happened to the long standing order for our forces to defend themselves when fired upon and to return fire with all means possible?

Whatever diplomat/General/Leader/whatever allowed this stipulation to be put in place ought to go patrol in the vicinity and experience, first hand, the danger he has placed or young men in, and the frustration that they must feel, knowing they are fully capable of "taking care of" that threat.

Personally, if I were in charge, I would have a meeting with my Iraqi counterpart that this stupid agreement was worked out with, and tell him directly, to take care of this threat, right now , or we would, in no uncertain terms, obliterate the area with one of those parachute bombs. We would give less than 24 hours notice for civilians to get out of there, and the enemy insurgents would feel the whole weight of the US armed forces coming down on them. Shucks, many of the civilians are intermingling and sheltering the insurgents by their lack of action. It's called aiding and abetting the enemy. I could care about them (but I won't), it's our boys dying over there.

If the Iraqis truly don't like us handling a threat like that, since they won't, then we ought to just get out of there. (I can't believe I just said that). But enough of our boys have died that we should not run a war like that. Did Viet Nam teach us anything???? Label the entire country a war zone, get rid of those stupid rules of engagement and go root em out and be done with it. Allow our men to return fire, where ever it is coming from, and enable them to accomplish the task we sent them over there to do!”

“If all of Vietnam had been a war zone China would surely have entered the war since the north of Vietnam borders on China.

I believe there are already areas of Iraq that U.S. forces stay out of because of this hit and run crap.”

“It’s not even close to being Vietnam. But there are some who do think so. Like Ted Kennedy and that terrorist Emum in Iraq.”

“We bombed the living #&%!$ out of Cambodia, BTW.”

“But not while Johnson and McNamara were calling the shots Tilt.”

“Big #&%!$ing deal.”

“Does that mean Republicans want to take credit for Pol Pot? LOL”

“I'll take credit for the Pol Pud!”

“The United States incursion into Cambodia was a flop, failing to achieve its original objective. They captured arms and documents, made a lot of noise, ran the VC out of their headquarters area, but failed to kill or capture the leadership. Within weeks of the end of the operation, they were right back in business in their same old digs.”

“This is all Clinton's fault, I think.”

“Link

August 04, 2004, 8:49 a.m.
The Real Iraq Story
Americans don’t often get the right picture out of Iraq.

By Karl Zinsmeister

How insightful is the Iraq reporting that you've been consuming? Take a little test.


If I tell you that scores of Iraqi detainees have been killed and maimed this year in Abu Ghraib prison, you may not be surprised. But you're probably guessing wrong about who hurt them. The moronic American guards who are now on trial for improperly humiliating some Iraqis caused no deaths or injuries: The many casualties in the prison were all inflicted by Iraq's guerilla terrorists.

During this spring's frenzy of reporting on the plight of detainees at Abu Ghraib, I was surprised that none of the stories mentioned what anyone who has spent time at the prison (as I have) knows is the central danger to the prisoners there. By far the gravest threats to the Iraqis in that facility are the mortars and rockets that guerillas regularly lob into the compound — knowing full well that the main victims of their indiscriminate assaults will be fellow Iraqis. One attack on April 21 of this year, for instance, killed 22 detainees and injured another 91.

The number-one priority for Arabs and Americans concerned about the rights of Iraqi detainees, therefore, ought to be eliminating the merciless assaults of the terrorist insurgents. The sexual indignities imposed by the prison's rogue guards would have to come second on any sensible list.

Shouldn't the reporting on Abu Ghraib have provided some context along those lines? Wouldn't a fuller media presentation of these facts on the ground in Iraq have given the public a better perspective on the various problems at the prison?

Or take another of the Iraq stories most loudly trumpeted in our media: the electricity shortages. You know Baghdad continues to suffer periodic blackouts — news reports remind us of that ad nauseum. Just one more example of U.S. ineffectiveness in this war: The generating system is broken and nothing gets fixed, right?

Wrong. Despite continuing efforts by guerillas to sabotage the grid, Iraq is now generating more electricity than existed in the country before the war. So why do we continue to hear about shortages? Two reasons:

First, Saddam shamelessly hogged the country's electricity in his capital, shunting 57 percent to Baghdad while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 percent of the total. Though that means occasional shortages in privileged neighborhoods unused to such things, Iraqis as a whole are better off.

Second, Iraq is in the midst of a consumer surge. The economy will grow an estimated 60 percent this year. Iraqis, who have flocked to cell phones and imported a million cars, are also snatching up washing machines, air conditioners, and electronic devices never before available to them. A third of the country now has satellite TV. Electricity demand is thus rising even faster than the steady increases in generation.

Certainly there are problems that stem from growing electricity demand and a new fairness in distribution. But they are "nice" problems, not simple indicators of failure. Now let me ask: Has any of this been adequately explained in the Iraq reporting you've seen?


THE REST OF THE STORY
Over the last year and a quarter, America's major media have given us millions of words about the Iraq struggle, most of them accurate. Yet they've often done a poor job of communicating the big, important truths about developments in that country. The very largest, most critical truth they've missed is that the Shiite middle has stuck with us through many travails.

This was demonstrated again when the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr went on the warpath during the spring. Scads of reporters and newsroom analysts declared a general uprising, the loss of majority Shiite support, the beginning of the end for the U.S. in Iraq. "United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising," announced the lead sentence of an April 7 New York Times story written from Washington. A Newsweek headline on April 10 screamed: "THE IRAQI INTIFADA: Suddenly the insurgency is much broader and much more dangerous than anyone had imagined it could become."

These reports were wrong. Ordinary Shiites and Shia leaders alike subsequently made it clear that the mad cleric does not speak for the majority of them. They quietly plotted amongst themselves and with the Coalition to neutralize Sadr. His uprising petered out.

As someone who has recently spent three months on combat patrols with Coalition soldiers, I'll be the first to acknowledge that the U.S. is facing a hard guerilla fight in Iraq. It is, however, not a mass revolt, or a broad popular insurgency.

If you're a regular NRO reader, that's not news to you. But for many Americans, that is news. They shouldn't feel bad. The fault lies with reflexively alarmist and often incomplete reporting. Over the last 16 months I've published two books about the Iraq war based on my own experiences as an embedded reporter. In both I found it necessary to include an entire chapter about problems in media coverage I observed.

Many factors have skewed our Iraq reporting. Deadline pressure, sensationalism, and sometimes just laziness create a negative bias. The easiest reporting from a war zone is simply to point a camera at something that's on fire. A hundred counterparts that aren't in flames are "not a story."

But getting the full picture in a guerilla war requires more than just showing up for the explosions; you need to study and then describe the deeper, glacial changes taking place in society, the public temperament, the tactics of the terrorists, etc. Alas, few reporters show the appetite, endurance, or creativity for this slower style of reporting.

This bias toward failure is fanned by what Michael Barone calls the "zero defect standard" of today's media. For months, armchair journalists without the slightest understanding of what real war is like have howled that this guerilla struggle hasn't been run according to a tidy "plan." Why did we "allow" the looting? How come nobody anticipated the IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) threat? Isn't it wrong for GIs to invade people's houses?

Policy nerds and media critics imply that the transformations being attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq should have been smoothly orchestrated like some kind of grand Super Bowl game. Of course even Super Bowls, we've learned, are subject to "wardrobe failures" and other breakdowns. But wars never proceed according to plan; they are always fought by the seat of one's pants, through constant improvisation.

On D-Day (one of the most carefully "planned" military events ever), 4,649 American soldiers were killed within just a few hours — many through what an accusatory mind could characterize as "screw-ups" (gliders and paratroopers landing in the wrong places, amphibious and landing craft unloading in water that was too deep, Air Force and Navy failures to suppress German fire on the beaches). At its recent 60th anniversary, the Normandy invasion was remembered for its high import and the majesty of its sacrifices. Yet by standards of war invoked by some contemporary media observers, those landings could be viewed as traumatic bungles.

British Labour-party leader Tony Blair recently complained that Western reporting on today's Iraq war had become "appallingly one-sided." He cited several examples of inexplicably negative and critical coverage of encouraging developments. Why, he asked, would reporters casually tar as "an American stooge" Raad Juhi, the bright, courageous, and principled Iraqi judge who signed the warrant to arrest Moqtada al Sadr for murdering a moderate fellow cleric, and who then arraigned Saddam Hussein?

Some of the antagonistic coverage is undoubtedly linked to ideological imbalances in today's press corps. A string of studies since the 1980s have shown that elite reporters vote for Democrats over Republicans, liberals over conservatives, by around ten to one. In a war that has taken on intense partisan connotations, the personal dispositions of reporters will inevitably affect the stories.

Today's war coverage is also often colored by the cultural gap that separates many reporters from soldiers. As Kate O'Beirne only half jokingly put it a couple of years ago, "You've got to remember, most journalists spent their high school years being stuffed into lockers by the kind of males who are running our military. Now they're determined to get even."

The individuals who make up our media elite didn't used to be so disconnected from military life. During World War II more than 700 Harvard men perished in combat. But in a typical class at many Ivy-level colleges today you can count on one hand the number of individuals who do military service. Most of the reporters who shape today's national news now come out of institutions where they have not a single friend or acquaintance or relative with military experience. This doesn't encourage sympathetic understanding of military work or military people.

The gulf between journalists and warriors doesn't always lead to hostility, but it regularly creates misunderstandings and ignorant claims. Editor and columnist Michael Kelly noted in a 1997 Washington Post column that "my generation of reporters" (the baby boomers) "is, in matters military...forever suffering a collective case of the vapors. At the least exposure to the most unremarkable facts of military life...we are forever shocked."


BIAS MATTERS
Does incomplete and unduly negative reporting matter in this war? It certainly matters to the public. The American people do not give our media high grades for their coverage of the Iraq war. Only 30 percent told the Pew Research Center they have a great deal of confidence "that the press is giving an accurate picture of how the war is going." Droves of viewers concerned they are being manipulated with negative imagery have migrated to alternative outlets (like Fox, the only news organization that has enjoyed clear net increases in audience and consumer trust over the last year and a half).

Many other Americans have simply tuned out or cancelled their subscriptions. In different polls, large majorities of the public now say that our news organizations are more inaccurate than accurate, and that reporters "get in the way of solving social problems" (Gallup and Princeton Survey Research). Fully 72 percent of Americans now say "the news media have too much power and influence in Washington" (Harris). As someone doing a lot of speaking on this subject, I can tell you that a substantial portion of the American public (and most of the soldiers serving in the war theaters) is dissatisfied with the last year's journalism from Iraq.

Unbalanced war reporting can have fatal effects. Any guerilla war is as much a struggle of truthful images as it is a military encounter. Unbalanced coverage can demoralize forces of good, and encourage the sowers of chaos.

Jim Marshall is a Vietnam combat veteran, a Congressman serving on the House Armed Services Committee, and a Democrat. After returning from a fact-finding trip to Iraq he had this to say: "I'm afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes [and] not balancing this bad news with the 'rest of the story,' the progress made daily. ... The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation, and emboldens our enemy."

Tony Blair went even further in April 2004. He warned that some journalists and opinion shapers would like to see President Bush and "the power of America" defeated in Iraq. "The truth is," Blair wrote in Britain's Observer, "faced with this struggle on which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back — if not half-hoping we fail — certainly replete with schadenfreude at the difficulty we find."”

“No, it means that the Geneva convention is rubbish.

The concept that war can have rules both sides will follow.

A product of medieval minds, that chivaly and courtesy will be observed at some level while peasants have their homes destroyed and are hacked to death by the thousand to capture some irrelevant hill.

Those that oppose the western culture know full well that they cannot defeat western military, so they target western political opinion.

Washington learned he could not defeat the British in the field, so he attacked on sacred holidays, he (gasp) targeted officers.

The modern equivalent is the suicide bomber in a supermarket.

We will leave Iraq because the terrorists are shaping public opinion, using you, and our free press to do so. We should have walked out the minute we captured or killed Saddam. Pretty bad for the Iraqis but no different than for the South Vietnamese.

As for the cries of the war fought for oil, if we were imperialistic we would confiscate the oil and it would now be super cheap, and the war would be running at a profit.
It is not, the US taxpayer is paying through the nose for the one-sided concept of 'honor' in war.

The promise of the 'Dems' the UN.
We are just paying (yep the US taxpayer pays most of the UN bills) another layer of administration to talk endlessly about what should be done.”

“Yeah, I guess the American guards were just a bunch of fun-loving American kids on Spring Break, as England's lawyer so eloquently implied.”

“What? You've never worn a pair of panties on your head just for fun? Be honest now! And who doesn't love a good 3rd world puppy pile? Really!”

“"We bombed the living #&%!$ out of Cambodia, BTW."
Tilt
09:11:52 AM

The U.S. military expected to find an "enemy headquarters" in Cambodia.

They spent a huge fortune in ordinance to kill a ralative handful of people and the headquarters was not much more than a bicycle with a radio strapped on.”

“relative”

“Didn't the Vietnamese military take out Pol Pot in the late '70s?”

“I can see that photo wasn't tampered with, ... no siree bob. That million air logo was just naturally a different shade from the background, sure, right!

Somebody's PhotoShop skills need sharpening!”

“The enemy were 'minute men' just as in 1776.

Civilians one minute, ready for combat one minute later.
same as guerillas everywhere.

Some with public support, some with the public too terrified to resist.”

“Anytime someone tries to pass off cheap propaganda like that, it doesn't do wonders for the creditbilty, ya know?


On topic, though there might be some things that seem the same, this is not Vietnam all over again, not yet at least. It's just too easy to jump into that line of thinking, not remebering what was happening back then.

We has a social revolution here in the states during that time, there is none now.

We had multiple Presidents trying to deal with 'Nam, we only have one here.

We had very powerful "states of government" supplying our enmeny, we haven't seen this.

We were living up to containment, we are there for revenge, oil and possible "geo-political" reasons (shout out to Mutt).

It's just too easy to call this another "Nam. It ain't so.......






No yet at least. The foundation is laid for in the future to become another situation like Vietnam, but we are far away from the conditions in the past, like substantual body counts, massive social up roar and the likes. Their are some very striking similarities to the beginings of "Nam today, but one would hope that this time around, we learned our lesson, which we all know is about as possible as me getting elected dog catcher in this upcoming election......!”

“The Iraq involvement could reach one similarity to the Vietnam conflict.

The soldiers may get to where they see no objective other than making it home in one piece.

That happened to the Russian army in Afganistan and substance abuse was a serious problem.
Some of them even traded weapons and ammunition for "intoxicants".”

“I think we should just go ahead and re-invade Vietnam. We've learned a lot of lessons since then. But I think we should soften up their resistance a bit by dropping millions of Hostess® Twinkies from high flying aircraft. Then the invasion would be a cake-walk.”

“Funny thing though - that Al Sadr uprising that your cut and paste says petered out seems to have had another eruption.”

“pedxing, I think your talk of petered eruptions would be more appropriate on the gay marriage thread. Thank you.”

“Not all the Vietnamese Communist forces were VC guerillas. There were regular North Vietnamese Army units operating all over South Vietnam from the mid-60s on.”

“Is there Viagra in Al Sadr?”

“I don't know about Viagra, but there may well be sodomy in Sadr.”

“Well then it's time to rain down some Fire & Brimstone on there sorry asses!







What the Hell is Brimstone anyway?”

“I fart brimstone. I'd like to know exactly what that stuff is too.”

“Brimstone was the old name for sulphur”

“Sulfur! That explains it!


Buck - stop eating any yellow crystals and stay away from campfires until you do.”

“Sulphur?


One more similarity... last week was the 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.”

“Did those North Vietnamese patrol boat carry weapons of mass destruction?”

“Pol Pot died just a few years ago... of natural causes, I believe.”

“That's the ticket!”

“Isn't it clear that we need to get out of Iraq as soon as possible?

We have zero positive influence in that country. There are only two questions to answer: 1) Can we retreat without massive American casualties? 2) Can we retreat without completely destroying the credibility of positive groups in Iraq?

I remember a few years ago in the Canadian elections. Brian Mulroney was a weakened leader of the Progressive Conservatives. He won an election in a squeaker. Almost immediately after the election, his polls went, essentially, to zero. The next three or four years were simply an exercise in party self-destruction.

So, do we vote for Kerry because it's the right thing to do, knowing that he'll have to withdraw? Or do we vote for Bush and let him stew in his own juices?”

“I just had one of those chicken enchilada stuffed burritos from Taco Hell...I'm literally dripping with brimstone as I speak.”

“TMI! Ban Nigal!”

“I fart in your general direction!”

“Get yourself an appropriate Turd Twister plug, Nigal.”

“If you vote for Bush there may be nothing left to salvage in 2008... at home or abroad.”

“Jeb in '08!”

“The analogy to France in Algeria may be better than US in Vietnam.”

“Did we find stockpiles of brimstone in Iraq yet?”

“I prefer to look at it as America in Iraq. Analogies rarely turn out to be true.”

“It is perfectly understandable that people in Iraq would want foreign troops out of the country.

I would, too.

The best thing that we can do, at this point, is to find a good, secular moderate and tell that moderate to demand that we leave. He can make a big show of it. We can act grudgingly about it. We'll wait just long enough for that person to become the leader of the forces opposing us. Then, we'll leave and hope for the best.

Oh, and we've got to let the Kurds have enough time to build enough roadblocks to protect themselves.

Partition, anyone?”