Yesterday on the Sunday talk show circuit leading Democrats disputed reports due today from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. With a New York Times/CBS News poll finding only a modest increase in the number of Americans who are aware that the surge has dramatically improved the situation in Iraq, leading Democrats have put all of their chips on a political strategy that seeks to fill the void with their own version of events in Iraq.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Leading Democrats today pre-emptively assailed the expected findings on Iraq due this week from Gen. David H. Petraeus as “dead, flat wrong” and said President Bush’s likely call for continued patience in the war would simply extend an “unconscionable” and “completely unacceptable” policy.
It's either a strange confidence or utter desperation, but the parade of Democrats accused the top military commander in Iraq of being unaware of what's going on within his command or of an intention to willfully deceive congress. And all before his reports are delivered. Republicans fired back.
Republicans laid down their own markers. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on “Fox News Sunday” that the troop increase was “undeniably working” and that “the only way we’re going to lose this war is to have politicians in Washington undercut the surge.”
Invoking the specter of Vietnam on NBC's Meet the Press Joe Biden predicted helicopters would be evacuating Americans from the Green Zone in Baghdad within two years. The comparison to Vietnam is oddly appropriate. Chapter 2 of the U.S Army & Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual uses the Vietnam War as an example of effective counterinsurgency operations.
Keen attention was given to the ultimate objective of serving the needs of the local populace. Success in meeting the basic needs of the populace led, in turn, to improved intelligence that facilitated an assault on the Viet Cong political infrastructure. By early 1970, statistics indicated that 93 percent of South Vietnamese lived in "relatively secure" villages, an increase of almost 20 percent from the middle of 1968. By 1972, pacification has largely uprooted the insurgency from among the South Vietnamese population and forced the communists to rely more heavily on infiltrating conventional forces from North Vietnam and employing them in irregular and conventional operations.
In 1972, South Vietnamese forces operating with significant support from U.S. air-power defeated large-scale North Vietnamese conventional attacks. Unfortunately a North Vietnamese conventional assault succeeded in 1975, after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, ending of U.S. air support, and curtailment of funding to South Vietnam. [p 74-75]
In the Petraeus view, as described in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the counterinsurgency in Vietnam was a military success. The North Vietnamese were only able to defeat South Vietnam after congress withdrew support for a country that had been an American ally by voting to cut off financial aid. Senator Biden's predictions of a helicopter evacuation from the Green Zone will only happen if the Senator is successful in forcing a "curtailment of funding" for the war in Iraq. He's trying.
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Posted by: David M | September 10, 2007 at 12:54 PM