The Vietnam "experience" and strategy
Matt Bai in his long treatise on McCain and how Vietnam shaped him interviews the Senat "band of brothers" who hunger for defeat in Iraq. Perhaps the most pathetic of the lot is Max Cleland.
I am not denigrating their service so much as putting it into perspective. Some of my perspective comes from my own brief tour in Vietnam as a communications officer in the Third Marine division communication Center in Dong Ha and as XO of a rifle company on the DMZ. In both of those positions I know for a fact that I saw no war crimes committed. Working in the communication center, I got to see every message for the division during a 12 hour period seven days a week. If there was a hint of a war crime it would have been communicated through there and none were.
Most of my perspective comes from reading about the war after I got back. My intense interest was based on how you win every battle and still don't win the war. Judging by what Cleland and his buddies are saying, they learned little from their experience and even less after they got back. McCain on the other hand went to the Navy War College when he returned instead of anti war demonstrations. Cleland's attempt to say that McCain's experience as a POW kept him from experiencing the reality of the war is not only disgusting, it is irrelevant.
Cleland's "point" seems to be the thesis of the long article. It fails, because his premise is flawed. Many who studied the war after it was over with, have come up with an effective counterinsurgency strategy that is working. The know much more about the subject than Cleland's gang. You can start with Cleland's false premise that counterinsurgencies are not winnable.
In fact, insurgents lose 90 percent of the time. It is just not factually arguable that counterinsurgencies are unwinnable. It does take longer to win them. On average it takes about 11 years to defeat insurgents, because they avoid combat most of the time. The FARC insurgency in Colombia has been underway for 40 years and the insurgents are only now begin to fade away. Since we adopted our current counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, we have made remarkable progress, despite the willful blindness of people like Cleland, Kerry, Hagel and Obama.
McCain's insight was to recognize that the small footprint strategy of Gen. Abizaid was not working. He pushed for more troops and supported President Bush when he decided to surge troops into Iraq and change strategy. I think that makes him much more right about the war than his Senate colleagues who seem to favor losing. It is too bad Bai couldn't find someone who recognizes these facts.
...Cleland is a guy who became a hero and a cripple when he fumbled a live grenade in a non combat situation. He may be a great guy, but his experience in the war does not make him a strategic are tactical genius. John Kerry's vast three or four months experience in Vietnam must have wounded his mind more than the "combat" injuries he got since he came back and accused all of us combat veterans of war crimes. If that was his perspective on the war, he is not someone to go to for strategy either. The soda straw through which Chuck Hagel saw the war was working as an enlisted man on a tank, which while worthwhile and worthy work is not a place to get perspective on counterinsurgencies.
“McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!
...
I am not denigrating their service so much as putting it into perspective. Some of my perspective comes from my own brief tour in Vietnam as a communications officer in the Third Marine division communication Center in Dong Ha and as XO of a rifle company on the DMZ. In both of those positions I know for a fact that I saw no war crimes committed. Working in the communication center, I got to see every message for the division during a 12 hour period seven days a week. If there was a hint of a war crime it would have been communicated through there and none were.
Most of my perspective comes from reading about the war after I got back. My intense interest was based on how you win every battle and still don't win the war. Judging by what Cleland and his buddies are saying, they learned little from their experience and even less after they got back. McCain on the other hand went to the Navy War College when he returned instead of anti war demonstrations. Cleland's attempt to say that McCain's experience as a POW kept him from experiencing the reality of the war is not only disgusting, it is irrelevant.
Cleland's "point" seems to be the thesis of the long article. It fails, because his premise is flawed. Many who studied the war after it was over with, have come up with an effective counterinsurgency strategy that is working. The know much more about the subject than Cleland's gang. You can start with Cleland's false premise that counterinsurgencies are not winnable.
In fact, insurgents lose 90 percent of the time. It is just not factually arguable that counterinsurgencies are unwinnable. It does take longer to win them. On average it takes about 11 years to defeat insurgents, because they avoid combat most of the time. The FARC insurgency in Colombia has been underway for 40 years and the insurgents are only now begin to fade away. Since we adopted our current counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, we have made remarkable progress, despite the willful blindness of people like Cleland, Kerry, Hagel and Obama.
McCain's insight was to recognize that the small footprint strategy of Gen. Abizaid was not working. He pushed for more troops and supported President Bush when he decided to surge troops into Iraq and change strategy. I think that makes him much more right about the war than his Senate colleagues who seem to favor losing. It is too bad Bai couldn't find someone who recognizes these facts.
Comments
Post a Comment