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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ Tony Swindell recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks" have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an "insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000 to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque. As neocons and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines simple path to peace. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!
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Today's Stories April 20, 2006 Justin E.H. Smith April 19, 2006 P. Sainath Norman
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Reed Alexander
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April 15 / 16, 2006 Jeffrey
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Hoffmeister Kevin Prosen
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| April 20, 2006 The Real Problem Wasn't the Execution of the War, But the Enterprise ItselfSweeping UpBy WILLIAM S. LIND As recognition of the defeat in Iraq spreads, so also does the process of sweeping up the debris. Both civilian observers and a few voices inside the military have begun the “lessons learned” business, trying to figure out what led to our defeat so that we do not repeat the same mistakes. That is the homage we owe to this war’s dead and wounded. To the degree we do learn important lessons, they will not have suffered in vain, even though we lost the war. Most of the analyses to date are of the “if only” variety. “If only” we had not sent the Iraqi army home, or overdone “de-Baathification,” or installed an American satrap, or, or, or, we would have won. The best study I have thus far seen does not agree. “Revisions in Need of Revising: What Went Wrong in the Iraq War,” by David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, puts it plainly:
It is of interest, and a hopeful sign, that this blunt assessment was published by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. One target the study hits squarely is the American assumption, still regnant in the Pentagon, that superior technology guarantees our Second Generation forces victory over technologically primitive Fourth Generation enemies. Hendrickson and Tucker write,
Recognition that war is not dominated by technology but by human factors is an important counter to what will inevitably be claims by the U.S. military that it performed brilliantly; it was the politicians who lost the war (the Vietnam War claim repeated). As the authors note, this reflects an overly narrow definition of war: Other
lessons are that the military services must digest again that “war
is an instrument of policy.” The profound neglect given to
re-establishing order in the military’s prewar planning and
the facile assumption that operations critical to the overall success
of the campaign were “somebody else’s business”
reflect a shallow view of warfare. Military planners should consider
the evidence that occupation duties were carried out in a fashion
– with the imperatives of “force protection” overriding
concern for Iraqi civilian casualties – that risked sacrificing
the broader strategic mission of U.S. forces. The most important point in this excellent study is precisely the one that Washington will be most reluctant to learn: “Rather that ‘do it better next time,’ a better lesson is ‘don’t do it at all.’” What we require is a “national security strategy (I would say grand strategy) in which there is no imperative to fight the kind of war that the United States has fought in Iraq.” For
most of America’s history, we followed that kind of grand
strategy, namely a defensive grand strategy. If the fallout from
the defeat in Iraq includes our return to a defensive grand strategy,
then we will indeed be able to say that we have learned this war’s
most important lesson.
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