2centsworth.info

There are a lot of differences between Iraq and Vietnam but it’s probably worth looking back on Vietnam as we consider what course to take in Iraq.

Should we “cut and run” or should we keep sending soldiers and marines over there to secure “peace with honor.”

When our political and military leadership have no clear plan or objective, does it make any sense, and is it morally defensible, to keep on wasting the lives of our rank and file military.

The Bush administration says that if we simply withdraw that it will be disastrous; that Iraq will be a haven for terrorists. Yet I don’t think anyone outside of the White House believes that sending another 20,000 troops to Baghdad for a couple of months is going magically stabilize Iraq. If we’d followed General Shinseki’s advice in 2003 and sent in 300,000 troops and had a less corrupt and incompetent reconstruction effort things might have turned out better. But we didn’t and it’s three years later and it’s really too late now.

Let’s get the troops out before any more are wasted. It’s worth remembering that we lost in Vietnam… The bad guys ended up in control of both North and South Vietnam. And what harm has come of it? It’s thirty years down the road from the fall of South Vietnam and we are now trading partners with Vietnam.

There is no doubt that the Middle East is very different from South East Asia and the mindset and cultural and religious issues are enormously different. It is ironic, about 2 million Vietnamese and over 50,000 Americans died during the war there and yet an American traveler today is probably safer in Hanoi today than he would be anywhere else in the world. That isn’t going to be true in the Middle East; not now, not in thirty years, and probably not ever. Muslim fundamentalism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are not going to away and we will have to figure out political and military responses to them all.

But the invasion of Iraq was ill-conceived from the beginning and hopelessly bungled in its execution. It’s time to get our guys out of there and leave the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to sort it out among themselves. We won’t be able to just walk away and forget about it… But we need to back off and find another approach, wait two years until GW and his gang of fools are gone and have a more intelligent and less corrupt President try to sort this out.

Update 31JAN09: Well, we now have a more intelligent, less corrupt President. And a combination of the troop surge and the new policy of reaching out to the Sunni militants has resulted in a much more stable Iraq. Both thanks to General Petraeus and getting rid of Rumsfeld. Now we can, one hopes, get out of Iraq and attend to our unfinished business in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I got this from page A13 of today’s New York Times (January 12, 2007).

In February 2003, prior to the US invasion of Iraq, General Shinseki (the then US Army Chief of Staff) said the following in testimony before Congress:

“Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required to stabilize Iraq after an invasion.

We are talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems…

And so it takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with a situation like this.”

After these remarks before Congress, the Bush administration led by Donald Rumsfeld first vilified and then marginalized General Shinseki who then faded away into retirement.

Three years and three thousand combat deaths later, General Abizaid, the departing commander of US forces in the Middle East told Congress:

“General Shinseki was right that a greater international force contribution, U.S. force contribution and Iraqi force contribution should have been immediately available after major combat operations.”

General Shinseki has not made any public statements since retirement and certainly isn’t telling anyone “I told you so…” He doesn’t need to.

Years later, with Iraq’s infrastructure still in a shambles, and outright civil war going on between Shia and Sunni, the Bush administration wants to send another 20,000 troops and commit additional $ billions to Iraq reconstruction… Way Too little, way too late.

Our dear leader, George W. Bush, is out there calling up the glorious memories of World War II and urging us to “stay the course” in Iraq (which he continues to associate with 9/11 and the war on terrorism; go figure).

I would suggest that reminding us of World War II was a bit risky. It’s been 5 years since 9/11. My recollection is that 5 years after Pearl Harbor we had clearly won the war.

Five years after 9/11 I doubt that anyone other than Dick Cheney thinks we are even close to winning in Iraq or the war on terrorism. If we’d had GW running things in 1942, we’d all be speaking German or Japanese at this point.

I doubt that even the most rabid Republican thinks that the history books will ever put GW in the same league as Roosevelt. Or if they do it will be because of his “New Deal” program of tax cuts benefiting the obscenely rich. [And while we are on the subject of WW II, I don't recall anyone suggesting that Truman was a war profiteer.]

When it comes to GW and “stay the course”, an analogy that is more appropriate would be the Titanic.

In January 2005, a Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine hit an undersea mountain south of Guam. One sailor was killed; others were injured; and it is expected that repairing the submarine will cost around $100 million.

The submarine commander’s career for all intents and purposes ended at the same instant as the collision. It did not matter that he wasn’t on watch at the time of the collision. It did not matter that the course which led to the collision was plotted by his subordinates. It did not matter that the undersea mountain was not shown on the official Navy charts his officers used to plot the course. And it did not matter that he had dedicated his life to defending his country and had provided decades of courageous and blameless service.

In the US Navy, the commander of a ship is responsible for its safe navigation. If the vessel under your command is involved in a collision you can kiss your career goodbye. No excuses are accepted and all naval officers understand this.

Now contrast this with the culture among our political leadership. The terrorist attacks that occured on September 11th 2001 are the worst intelligence failure the US has suffered in 50 years. Thousands of people were killed and the economic costs mounted into the billions of dollars. Yet the officials who you would think were responsible for preventing this… The head of the CIA, the head of the FBI, and the National Security Advisor… Did not lose their jobs. We got to hear them provide hours worth of excuses during their Congressional testimony and then they either continued in their jobs (FBI)… Got promoted (National Security Advisor to Secretary of State)… Or received the nation’s highest civilian medal (CIA). Talk about double standards.

And now we have hurricane Katrina and its tragic and humiliating aftermath. We find that the head of the FEMA is a lawyer with no experience at disaster management (his previous gig was managing the judging committee for the Arabian Horse Association). Both he and Chertoff (head of homeland security) seem to have spent more time on talkshows than they did doing anything to help the folks in New Orleans and Mississippi. Given the response of this administration to the 9/11 debacle, one wonders what lofty posts these two will get promoted to.

When will the voters recognize that regardless of your political persuasion, the competence, integrity, and experience of our leadership matters. We elected a president that even his supporters admitted was not the sharpest tool in the drawer. We were assured that he was being provided with experienced minders… men with gravitas… Like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

But what did Dick and Don ever actually do? They joined the Reagan Whitehouse as well-connected (went to the right schools, joined the right clubs) young men. Then they bounced from Republican adminstration to well-compensated positions in the military industrial complex and then back to Republican administration jobs. They both made their fortunes at taxpayer expense. The only problems they ever solved were ones that could be solved using their connections or by the lavish expenditure of taxpayer dollars. These guys would have fit right in in the old Soviet Union. Stalwart party members working their way up the ranks using their connections and personal loyalties.

I don’t care whether you like or dislike their politics… When is the US public going to recognize that these guys GW, Dick, Don, Condoleeza, and all the rest are incompetent?

• A small bunch of religious nuts totally blindsided us in 9/11 and Condoleeza and Tenet give us a bunch of whining excuses as to why they couldn’t have been expected to prevent it.
• The administration decides to invade Iraq before 9/11 and gives us one “the dog ate my homework” excuse after another why this was necessary… First it was WMD’s… After 9/11 it was that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots… Heck Donald Rumsfeld has stronger connections to Saddam than Osama does! And now, of course, it turns out we invaded Iraq to turn the Middle East into a garden of democracy.
• OK, so we had to invade Iraq… General Shinseki tells Congress that we will need nearly 300,000 troops to properly secure Iraq… So Donald (military genius that he is!) fires Shinseki and allocates half the number of troops needed and two years later we have Dick (another military genius) telling us the insurgency is in its last throws. I haven’t heard anybody actually serving in Iraq say that the insurgency is breathing its last. I imagine sitting on this side of the Atlantic surrounded by body guards gives you a different perspective.

The only thing that went according to plan is that Dick Cheney and Halliburton have made a lot of money war profiteering.

And, by the way, Bin Laden is still out there laughing at us.

To return to my original thesis… If these politicians and appointees were held to the same standards as our Naval officers, they’d all be disgraced and out of work. The consequences to the US public of their manifest failures is immense both in dollars and human lives and yet the consequences to them are insignificant. In fact, they are (or are likely to) profit from the whole sad mess.

News Flash: The president has sent Dick Cheney to the Gulf in a desperate attempt to see if he and Halliburton can extract additional profit from another administration disaster.

{Update: The previous “news flash” was just a sarcastic comment on my part. To my astonishment yesterday’s Wall Street Journal said that Halliburton is in line to get piece of the Gulf reconstruction action.}

Outside of the techie world, remarkably few people know the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web… Or even understand the distinction between them. I am certainly not an authority on either but I have “grown up” with both.

Back in the 70’s, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) saw the potential value of networking computers together. They funded the development of a network architecture by a mixture of private companies (e.g. Bolt, Beranek, & Neuman) and various academic institutions. My understanding is that they specifically asked for an architecture that would resist the loss of various nodes due to battle damage. The result was a network (called ARPANET) that tied together computers at federally-funded academic institutions, military facilities, and government research labs. The networking protocol that was used is called TCP/IP. Ironically, no ARPANET or Internet node has every been destroyed in battle but the battle-resistant architecture has proven to be reasonably well suited to dealing with the loss of nodes due to routine equipment failure. [Hmm, maybe the resistance to battle damage requirement is a myth... According to the Resource Center for Internet History, ARPA developed the Internet for purely scientific purposes with no intent for military use.]

For the first couple of decades, ARPANET (later the Internet) was known to, and used by, a few thousand academic and military types. The primary use was for email and file transfers.

In the late 80’s, the government decided to open up the Internet for public and commercial use. It is largely forgotten now but this was quite controversial. The priviledged elite who had used the Internet up to that point objected to masses of unwashed newbies getting access to the network.

Of course the real revolution was not the opening up of the Internet for public use. After all, the average person saw little use for email or electronic file transfers. The real revolution was the development of the World Wide Web by an obscure Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee. He was working for CERN which is a multi-national physics laboratory sponsored by the European Union (roughly corresponding to one of the US Governments national laboratories like Lawrence Livermore or Argonne).

His intent was simply to provide a means for sharing documents (physics papers, primarily) among the staff of CERN which numbered in the thousands and which was located at a number of different sites around Europe. All these sites were networked using the TCP/IP Internet and he built a computer architecture that layered on top of TCP/IP and allowed people to publish information on a server on one part of the Internet that could be viewed by someone else using a client browser at a remote location.

Berners-Lee apparently had no plans to “change the world” but he was a very competent programmer and designed an architecture that was scalable, robust, and very flexible. The same architecture he designed to serve the needs of a few thousand people in Western Europe in the late 1980’s is still being used… But now it is being used by millions of people across the planet. We now use it buy products, make travel arrangements, check the weather, read the news, publish our opinions, settle bets, and a million other day-to-day tasks.

In my opinion, no single individual can have had as great an impact on technology, business, and politics in as short a time as Tim Berners-Lee but hardly anyone knows his name.