Lessons lost on America - Creating a New Guernica

[RickSp]

From an article by Peter Dunn. Dunn's grandfather fought in the disasterous English invasion and occupation of what is now Iraq in 1917.

Many of us who had spent considerable time in Vietnam soon saw the pattern of the war to come. While the differences are obvious - desert versus mountain, urban versus jungle - the principles were similar. The recent assault on Fallujah is instructive. If the generals are to be believed, it is worrying because it indicates they have no clear understanding about guerrilla warfare. After a few days during which elements of two heavily armed U.S. divisions, backed by armor, artillery, helicopters and fighters, blasted their way into the city and were said to have killed more than 1,000 "insurgents," a top Marine general said they had "broken the back" of the insurgency. One hopes he really knew better, because it is basic guerrilla doctrine never to stand and fight regular troops. The backbone and the brains actually escaped, leaving a determined rearguard to exact a price from the attackers, who by destroying so much of the city might well have created another Guernica, a town in northern Spain where the massacre of civilians during the Spanish Civil War caused outraged reaction. In Fallujah, innocent Iraqi males rounded up and later released to find their homes razed simply swelled the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. Barring relief to civilians in the city by the Red Crescent increased the hatred of Americans around the world. The United States seems to have learned nothing from the Vietnam disaster, in which the North Vietnamese gained all their political and military objectives and the United States was defeated in all of its goals. ....... One unforeseen - by Washington, at least - result of the war on Iraq is the exposure of the relative weakness of America’s ground forces. Specialists in this field have long known this. Many strategic thinkers have noted that since Vietnam, care had been taken to limit American wars to small states such as Panama, Grenada and the like. But relatively small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched and exhausted U.S. ground forces and caused heavy reliance on the reserve troops, most of whom were ill prepared for war. Thus, Iran could say it did not worry much about being invaded by the United States because few American troops were left for the job. The United States does not even want to consider a fight with the tough million-man North Korean army. Any serious fight with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia or other large country would be problematic because U.S. conventional forces are not strong enough to prevail.

Lessons lost on America

[SVMc]

I think it is safe to say that every student of military history was seriously disillusioned by the US invasion and continued occupation of Iraq....

[Ken Carman]

I think Vietnam has become the USA's masochistic "wailing wall." We have gone back to Iraq, in part, to beat our head bloody against that wall. George One actually did the sensible thing, if you agreed with how we got into that one. He got in, got out because that's what we had agreed upon with a true coalition. This was probably the most ethical thing he did (disregarding the promises to the Kurds) and for it he was crucified.

We will never win Vietnam. The only way we can really win such a war is to turn our country 1984 and "destroy the village to save it." Even then, what we have lost will be far worse than what we have won: the very freedoms we are supposedly fighting for.