September 8, 2004 - On March 13th 2002, a year and a week before he launched the Second Iraqi War the President of the United States said that he had learned the lessons of Vietnam. “[T]he politics ought to stay out of fighting a war. There was too much politics during the Vietnam War", he said. On September 7th 2004, just two weeks short of eighteen months after the President launched the “decapitation attack”, the one thousandth American was killed in Iraq. The Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff marked the occasion with a press briefing. They conceded that Sunni insurgents control Ramadi, Fallujah, Baquba and Samarra. They also conceded that there was to be no military attempt to reduce insurgent control of those areas of the Sunni triangle or to end the Mehdi Army’s uprising in Sadr City and the Shi`ite south until after the November elections. The delay, they said, was to give time to train and equip the Iraqi Army so that local troops could carry the burden of defeating the insurgents and to permit the Allawi government to negotiate a peaceful solution to the pacification of Iraq. Domestic politics and the political cost of mounting American casualties have nothing to do with it, they said.

Whether the President and his advisors misunderestimated the difficulty of the task of reducing Iraq when they started the war is beside the point. They got us into it. They did not underestimate the easy conventional campaign that started the war. That part went according to plan and resulted in only 138 American deaths. It was the aftermath of that easy conventional victory that they missed. The policy that President Bush has adopted to deal with the aftermath is familiar. It was tried before. While denying the obvious parallels to the ten year war in Vietnam the Bush Administration is intent upon following the same Nixonian policies that failed in Vietnam. Having started the Second Iraqi War President Bush and his Administration simply haven’t the stomach to finish the job.

The Pentagon political rhetoric has a familiar ring to it. They speak of pacifying Iraq as they spoke of pacifying Vietnam. They speak of turning the war over to the Iraqis as they spoke of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. They speak of training and equipping the Iraqi Defense Force as they once spoke of training and equipping the ARVN. Meanwhile the war of ambush kills more and more Americans and their Iraqi allies just as it did while Nixon trained Vietnamese and Kissinger negotiated in Paris. They seem to forget that the Vietnamese War ended when the last Marine climbed into the last chopper on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon.

In April US Marines fought the three week battle of Fallujah only to see Bremer’s negotiators snatch victory away. In August US Marines fought the three week battle of Najaf only to see Allawi’s negotiators snatch victory away. In the month of August the frequency of attacks aimed at US forces doubled and that rate is being maintained in the first week of September. Americans are being killed and wounded daily in the Shi`ite south; the central Sunni Triangle; and the Kurdish north of Iraq and that steady drip of American blood will continue unless the President finds the political courage to pay the cost and commit sufficient manpower to finish the job now or until we have a new President willing to fight this war instead of reprising Vietnam.

On February 20th 1969 three young Lieutenants Junior Grade taught one of the forgotten lessons of Vietnam when they developed a new tactical doctrine for dealing with an ambush. On the command, “Turn Ninety” they charged. They took the battle to the enemy and did not stop until the enemy was ambushed and routed. If they were disillusioned by the conditions they saw around them; if they were distressed by the corrupt puppet governments that American lives were propping up; it did not show that day. They understood that winning their part of the war meant accepting risks and taking the fight to the enemy. That is the lesson that George W. Bush never got.