Calling For Backup
Ray McGovern chaired National Intelligence Estimates during his 27-year career and had high respect for the expertise and dedication of INR analysts. Ray is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes alumni from CIA, INR, and other intelligence agencies. He is now co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, DC.
"It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it could not be done." So spoke General Jacques Leclerc, the French war hero sent to Vietnam in 1946 to estimate how many troops would be required to take back that country. Leclerc's estimate would still be valid two decades later when more than 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam, as Barbara Tuchman notes in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.
Fast forward to General Eric Shinseki's testimony to Congress on Feb. 25, 2003"just three weeks before the invasion of Iraq. When asked how many troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq, Shinseki said "several hundred thousand." Three days later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, dismissed Shinseki's estimate as "far off the mark." But it is now clear that they had no idea what the occupation of Iraq would require.
The Meaning of Fallujah
"There are no insurgents in Fallujah," says Mohammed Latif, once a senior intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's regime and now commander of the Iraqi brigade controlling the city. Washington has been blaming the conflict in Fallujah partly on "insurgents." Resistance to the occupation is a far more accurate description, and there is plenty of that in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq.
Words make a big difference. In Vietnam we labeled the Vietnamese Communists "terrorists" and "insurgents." This obscured for far too long the reality that they comprised a deeply nationalist movement determined to resist any and all invaders"however powerful. In this kind of war, kill ratios have little meaning. Killed: 58,000 US troops; 2 to 3 million Vietnamese.
The current focus on the abuse of Iraqi detainees"while entirely appropriate"distracts attention from the key decision confronting the administration and Congress. Should we send still more troops to Iraq? Thus far, very few of our leaders have been willing to pause long enough to weigh this critical step against US objectives"stated and unstated.
On May 6, for example, Congressman John Murtha,D-Pa."a strong supporter of the military"said, "We cannot prevail in this war with the policy that is going today. We either have to mobilize or we have to get out."
Prevail? This must be measured against our objectives. First the stated objectives: - Eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. (There were none, but 60 percent of the American people still believe there were, so the administration can declare this objective achieved.)
- Prevent Saddam Hussein from providing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. (The intelligence community did not consider it likely that he would, but there was always the possibility.) Achieved.
- Remove a brutal dictator who most Americans still believe had a hand in the attacks of 9/11"a notion fostered with consummate skill by the administration. (President Bush has admitted that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, but this has received very little play in the U.S. press.) Achieved.
- Introduce democracy to Iraq and other countries of the Middle East. This cannot be done by invading and occupying Iraq. Not achieved; not achievable, according to most experts.
Three out of four"not bad. One option for the administration would be to capitalize once again on the prevailing ignorance of our citizenry and to tell Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite TV channel, FOX News, to declare a 75 percent victory and say that we have already "prevailed."
This would enable the Bush administration to do the sensible thing: make it clear that it will surrender real power to the United Nations, and gradually withdraw our troops with the expectation that peacekeeping troops from other countries would then fill in behind.
Unstated Objectives
A face-saving solution of this kind, however, would be impossible to achieve absent willingness on the part of the president's current advisers to abandon the real aims of the war. Those aims have little to do with weapons of mass destruction or ties between Iraq and terrorists. They have everything to do with the neoconservative vision to exert dominant influence in strategic, oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel's security. On the latter point, several months before the war, Philip Zelikow"a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board between 2001 and 2003"pointed explicitly to the threat against Israel as "the unstated threat"a threat that dare not speak its name. . . because it is not a popular sell."
Yes, Unwinnable
Even with 500,000 troops. But who will tell the president? Not the sycophants around him who parrot what he and Cheney want to hear. It is time for the president to widen his circle of advisers to include experienced specialists inoculated against charges of lack of patriotism for questioning the wisdom of this war. President Lyndon Johnson did precisely that immediately after the countrywide Tet offensive in early 1968 in Vietnam. Johnson's panel of "wise men" came up with solid recommendations in three weeks during March 1968, prompting him to turn toward negotiations and refuse to run for another term.
My colleagues and I are appalled at how few lessons have been assimilated from the experience of Vietnam. Most of us had a front-row seat in that misguided war and had hoped it would be the last such "march of folly" in our lifetimes.
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Published: May 07 2004
