11-Step Program for Iraq Failure
In his press conference on April 13, President Bush argued that comparing the quagmire in Iraq with Vietnam would only be a disservice to our troops.
However, if one reviews the list of mistakes that former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara claims we made in prosecuting the war in Vietnam, it is clear that Bush, his advisors and the American people can learn a great deal about how we got ourselves into the current situation in Iraq and how we can get out of it.
In his book "Retrospect," McNamara argues that he and his colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations made 11 mistakes in their handling of Vietnam.
The first, and presumably the most egregious, was to exaggerate the dangers our adversaries posed to us, something the Bush administration did in Iraq by exaggerating intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its ties to Al Qaeda.
Bush's comments about how we are fighting the enemy in Baghdad so we will not have to fight it in Boston (or Brooklyn) are eerily reminiscent of President Johnson's comments about how we were fighting communists in Saigon so we would not have to fight them in San Francisco.
McNamara's next four mistakes concern our misjudgments about the political forces, nationalism and the history and culture of Vietnam as well as our ability to shape every nation in our own image.
It is now clear that our lack of knowledge about Iraq, coupled with the belief that America could shape Iraq in its own image, led the Bush administration to assume that we would be greeted as liberators, and that the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds would agree to set up a federal republic modeled after our own.
Another three of McNamara's criteria focus on the use of military power. He warns that high-technology military equipment is insufficient to win the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
He also says Congress and the American people should be drawn into a full, frank debate on the pros and cons of large-scale military involvement, and that military action should be carried out only in conjunction with the real support of the international community.
Casting these lessons aside, the Bush administration failed to heed the advice of military professionals that our overwhelming conventional military power would not be enough to translate a military victory into a stable peace without the deployment of a large number of ground troops for a long time.
