[color="DarkGreen"]Lesson of Iraq began in Vietnam

By JOHN GRAHAM

I was a civilian adviser/trainer in Vietnam, arriving just as U.S. troops were going home. I wasn't there to fight, but I hadn't been in country a week when I learned that the word "non-combatant" didn't mean much where I was posted, 50 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone that divided South Vietnam from North. I got the message when a sniper's bullet whistled past my ear on the main highway 20 miles south of Hué.

Snipers or not, in 1971 it was the U.S. government's policy not to issue weapons to civilian advisers in Vietnam, even to those of us in distant and dangerous outposts. The reason was not principle but PR -- and here begin the lessons for Iraq.

Sometime in 1969, the White House, faced with unrelenting facts on the ground and under siege from the public, had quietly made the decision that the U.S. couldn't win its war in Vietnam.

President Nixon and Henry Kissinger didn't put it that way, of course. The U.S. was a superpower, and it was inconceivable it could lose a war to a third-rate nation whose soldiers lived on rice and hid in holes in the ground. So the White House conceived an elaborate strategy that would mask the fact of a U.S. defeat.

The U.S. would slowly withdraw its combat troops over a period of several years, while the mission of those who remained would change from fighting the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to training the South Vietnamese. At the same time, we would give the South Vietnamese a series of performance ultimatums that, if unmet, would trigger a total withdrawal and let us blame the South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow. This strategy was called "Vietnamization." Implementing it cost at least 10,000 additional U.S. and countless more Vietnamese lives, plus billions of dollars.

It was a rigged game from the start. All but the wildest zealots in Washington, D.C., knew the South Vietnamese would not and could not meet our ultimatums, including the creation of a national state that enjoyed popular allegiance strong and broad enough to control the political and cultural rivalries that had ripped the country's fabric for a thousand years.

To make this deceitful drama work, however, the pullout had to be gradual. The plan (Vietnamization) had to be easily explained to the American people. And the U.S. training force left behind had to be large enough and exposed enough to provide visual signs of our commitment on the 6 o'clock news. Pictures of unarmed U.S. advisers like me shaking hands with happy peasants would support the lie that Vietnamization was succeeding.

Now the Iraq Study Group suggests the same strategy for Iraq. The group wants to shift the mission of U.S. forces there from fighting a war to training Iraqi troops and police. The report calls for the U.S. to lay down a series of performance conditions for the Iraqis, including that the Iraqis end their civil war and create a viable national state.

Deteriorating conditions on the ground soon will force President Bush to accept this shift in mission strategy. It is Vietnamization in all but name. Its purpose is not to win an unwinnable war, but to provide political cover for a retreat and to lay the grounds for blaming the loss on the Iraqis. Based on what I saw in Vietnam, here's what I think will happen next:

The increased training will make no difference. What the Iraqi military and police need is not just technical skill but unit cohesion and loyalty to a viable central government. Neither can be taught or provided by outside trainers.

At home, political pressure to get out of Iraq completely will increase rapidly as the violence gets worse. The military force left behind to protect the U.S. trainers will be drawn down to -- or below -- a bare minimum, further increasing the dangers for the Americans who remain.

Our ultimatums and conditions won't be met. As the situation gets worse, whatever remains of a central government in Baghdad will be even less able to make the compromises and form the coalitions necessary to control centuries of factional and tribal hatreds. The civil war will spiral out of control, giving us the justification we need to get out, blaming the Iraqis for the mess we've left behind. Then we will face the regional and global ramifications of a vicious civil war whose only winners will be Iran and al-Qaida.

U.S. leaders may decide, as they did 37 years ago, that we must again create a sham strategy to mask defeat and that the PR benefits of that strategy are worth the cost in lives and money. If they do, however, they should not lie to us that such an option has any military chance whatsoever of success.
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John Graham, Whidbey Island, is president of the Giraffe Heroes Project.