Thread for Opponents of Iraq War: "Why"?

[old dogg]

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Failure wasn't an option in Vietnam either ... until we failed ... and then realized that whole "failure not an option" routine was pure b.s. Too bad you didn't learn anything by all that and more kids have to die because of it.

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Well I'll have you know we didn't fail in the field in Nam,we were beat by those at home who underminded our-the soilders-efforts...The anti-war activists!

[Kaj]

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Failure wasn't an option in Vietnam either ... until we failed ... and then realized that whole "failure not an option" routine was pure b.s. Too bad you didn't learn anything by all that and more kids have to die because of it.

[ QUOTE ]
Well I'll have you know we didn't fail in the field in Nam,we were beat by those at home who underminded our-the soilders-efforts...The anti-war activists!

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You're a fool.

Incidentally, men like Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and David Hackworth would disagree.



From an Army War College paper (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/P...ter/record.htm):

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<font color="blue"> Those who believe the war was winnable contend that the US defeat in Vietnam was self-inflicted, blaming civilian perfidy, professional military errors, or some combination of both. The most extreme opinion absolves the armed forces of any significant responsibility: the military was simply stabbed in the back by a hostile press, a treasonous antiwar movement, and above all, a meddlesome and feckless White House and Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD--i.e., McNamara and his "whiz kids," whom the military had come to detest long before US ground combat forces entered Vietnam). Military affairs correspondent Hanson Baldwin lamented that "the blame for the lost war rests, not upon the men in uniform, but upon the civilian policy makers in Washington and those who evolved and developed the policies of gradualism, flexible response, off-again-on-again bombing, negotiated victory, and, ultimately, one-arm-behind-the-back restraint, and scuttle-and-run."[28] Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, who headed the US Pacific Command during the critical years of the war, has claimed that the US military "was not permitted to fight this war to win" by a civilian leadership petrified by "the possibility of Communist Chinese and Soviet intervention," and that the US national will was destroyed by "a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media's bombardment of sensationalism, rumors, and half-truths" about the war.[29]

Yet condemnation of the media is a dog that won't hunt. While the media's professional performance in covering the war left much to be desired, the fact remains that until the Tet Offensive, which prompted a dramatic lowering of de facto US war aims, from seeking a military victory to searching for an "honorable" way out of Vietnam, both the print and broadcast media by and large supported the war, in many cases buying the official and congenitally optimistic line on the war's course. Moreover, the early skepticism over official prognoses by such bright and ambitious young journalists as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnette, and David Halberstam was justifiably fueled by the yawning gap between, on the one hand, what they saw in the field with their own eyes--and were told by such US Army advisors as the legendary John Paul Vann--and, on the other, the appreciations to which they were treated by such career optimists as Ambassador Fritz Nolting and Westmoreland's predecessor, Paul Harkins (who, among other things, called ARVN's calamitous performance in the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac "a victory."[30])

The press justifiably was suspicious of an official reporting system whose integrity was constantly threatened by a near-manic preoccupation with quantification and pleasing superiors. Westmoreland himself concedes that in "those early days the newsmen were sometimes closer to the truth than were American officials, for there can be no question but that Paul Harkins was overly optimistic."[31]

With respect to the organized antiwar movement, which is not to be confused with the broader and far more influential phenomenon of antiwar sentiment, there is still no persuasive evidence that it had a significant effect on the formulation and implementation of US war policy. On the contrary, to the extent that the antiwar movement became a vehicle for the emerging counterculture of the 1960s, it probably turned off many more Americans than it turned on.[32] Most Americans simply did not wish to be associated with unwashed hippies, and certainly not with political radicals shrieking condemnation of American society and mores. The most effective antiwar initiatives came not in the form of street demonstrations, but rather post-Johnson Administration congressional amendments that progressively limited the President's military freedom of action in Indochina.[33]

If the press and the antiwar movement offer poor targets for those seeking to discover the roots of US defeat in Vietnam, the same cannot be said of the White House and the OSD. Civilian authority did indeed impose significant, and in some cases tactically absurd, restrictions on the use of force in Indochina; for the United States the conflict was, after all, a war fought with limited means for limited ends. What remains disputable is whether those restrictions thwarted a decisive military victory. And on this matter it is essential to reiterate that pursuit of military victory was abandoned in the wake of the Tet Offensive. The issue of the war's winnability thus boils down to whether the United States could have obtained such a victory before or during the Tet Offensive and its aftermath. Postwar discussion of prospects for a military victory rightly focuses on the pre-Tet years precisely because pursuit of such a victory was dropped after Tet. And to fashion a winning strategy the United States had a full three years--a longer period of time than that which separated the US Army's first contact with German forces in North Africa in November 1942 and Germany's surrender in May 1945.

Was defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by Johnson's refusal to mobilize the reserves; to permit US ground forces to invade Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam; and to authorize the bombing of all targets in North Vietnam that the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to bomb and when they wanted to bomb them? Would a full reserve mobilization really have made a decisive difference? Could the Ho Chi Minh Trail really have been effectively interdicted by an occupation of southern Laos and by trans-DMZ forays into North Vietnam's panhandle? Could North Vietnam's determination and ability to fight really have been destroyed from the air?

We will never know the answers to these questions, though logic suggests that a less restrained US use of force in Indochina would have made life considerably more difficult, but not necessarily impossible, for the communist side. We do know what did not work: commitment of over 500,000 US troops; release of over 8,000,000 tons of bombs on suspected enemy targets; and a strategy of punishing North Vietnam from the air while attempting to grind down enemy strength in the South via seeking out and destroying his big units in the Central Highlands and around the DMZ.

In South Vietnam, where the US military operated without significant civilian-imposed restraints, Westmoreland opted for a strategy of attrition. Though others within the military and beyond questioned the wisdom of the strategy,[34] Westmoreland has claimed that attrition was dictated by manpower constraints and by White House prohibition of US ground operations outside South Vietnam.[35] He has also dismissed the alternative of a population protection--or enclave--strategy as a defensive one that would have ceded the initiative to the enemy.[36] Westmoreland thus chose to kill communist regulars rather than protect friendlies, no doubt in part because he mistakenly assumed that by doing the former he was accomplishing the latter.

We now know that the combination of bombardment in the North and attrition in the South failed, and we know why it failed: gross underestimation of North Vietnam's tenacity, overestimation of its vulnerability to strategic bombing, and an inability to kill enemy troops in the field at a rate exceeding the communist side's capacity to replace them (the notorious "cross-over point"). Contrary to Westmoreland's conviction that search-and-destroy would deprive the communists of the initiative, the enemy for most of the war managed to control his own casualties by determining the initiation of as much as 88 percent of all tactical engagements.[37] Until the Tet Offensive, the communist side sought population control, not territorial acquisition, and therefore routinely refused combat except in the most favorable circumstances.

Which brings us to a more reflective body of opinion on the war's winnability. Such military observers as Harry Summers, Jr., Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., David Hackworth, Dave Richard Palmer, Douglas Kinnard, and Bruce Palmer, Jr., are critical of the professional military's performance in Vietnam as well as that of civilian authority. Readers will discover among their writings[38] often brutal condemnations of professional hubris, the attrition strategy, excessive use of firepower, reliance on lavish base camps, self-defeating personnel rotation policies, command disunity and micromanagement, and an officer corps corrupted by careerism--none of which can be laid at the doorsteps of McNamara's whiz kids, David Halberstam, or Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. These and other critics have properly concluded that no debacle as epic as America's in Vietnam can be ascribed solely to either military or civilian authority. Neither acquitted itself well, though ultimate responsibility for what happened to the United States in Vietnam rests with the White House. Harry Summers has observed that much of the criticism of political interference in military operations "is off the mark. Our problem was not so much political interference as it was a lack of a coherent military strategy--a lack for which our military leaders share a large burden of responsibility."[39] </font>

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[old dogg]

No Sir....YOU ARE THE FOOL.

Come out of your little protected college world and see what the real world is really like.

[Moseley]

[ QUOTE ]


[/ QUOTE ]

Failure wasn't an option in Vietnam either ... until we failed ... and then realized that whole "failure not an option" routine was pure b.s. Too bad you didn't learn anything by all that and more kids have to die because of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well I'll have you know we didn't fail in the field in Nam,we were beat by those at home who underminded our-the soilders-efforts...The anti-war activists!

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Bull!! McNamara had us bombing the same sites, over and over again, long after it looked like the moon.

Pilots coming back from missions with bombs on their wings, when they saw secondary targets after the mission, but were not given permission to attack.

Please. Hippie/Peace Power did not affect the troops attempts to win as much as the Nixon Administration.

[Kaj]

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No Sir....YOU ARE THE FOOL.

Come out of your little protected college world and see what the real world is really like.

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You mean like the Army War College world?

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<font color="blue">Those who believe the war was winnable contend that the US defeat in Vietnam was self-inflicted, blaming civilian perfidy, professional military errors, or some combination of both. The most extreme opinion absolves the armed forces of any significant responsibility: the military was simply stabbed in the back by a hostile press, a treasonous antiwar movement, and above all, a meddlesome and feckless White House and Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD--i.e., McNamara and his "whiz kids," whom the military had come to detest long before US ground combat forces entered Vietnam). Military affairs correspondent Hanson Baldwin lamented that "the blame for the lost war rests, not upon the men in uniform, but upon the civilian policy makers in Washington and those who evolved and developed the policies of gradualism, flexible response, off-again-on-again bombing, negotiated victory, and, ultimately, one-arm-behind-the-back restraint, and scuttle-and-run."[28] Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, who headed the US Pacific Command during the critical years of the war, has claimed that the US military "was not permitted to fight this war to win" by a civilian leadership petrified by "the possibility of Communist Chinese and Soviet intervention," and that the US national will was destroyed by "a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media's bombardment of sensationalism, rumors, and half-truths" about the war.[29]

Yet condemnation of the media is a dog that won't hunt. While the media's professional performance in covering the war left much to be desired, the fact remains that until the Tet Offensive, which prompted a dramatic lowering of de facto US war aims, from seeking a military victory to searching for an "honorable" way out of Vietnam, both the print and broadcast media by and large supported the war, in many cases buying the official and congenitally optimistic line on the war's course. Moreover, the early skepticism over official prognoses by such bright and ambitious young journalists as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnette, and David Halberstam was justifiably fueled by the yawning gap between, on the one hand, what they saw in the field with their own eyes--and were told by such US Army advisors as the legendary John Paul Vann--and, on the other, the appreciations to which they were treated by such career optimists as Ambassador Fritz Nolting and Westmoreland's predecessor, Paul Harkins (who, among other things, called ARVN's calamitous performance in the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac "a victory."[30])

The press justifiably was suspicious of an official reporting system whose integrity was constantly threatened by a near-manic preoccupation with quantification and pleasing superiors. Westmoreland himself concedes that in "those early days the newsmen were sometimes closer to the truth than were American officials, for there can be no question but that Paul Harkins was overly optimistic."[31]

With respect to the organized antiwar movement, which is not to be confused with the broader and far more influential phenomenon of antiwar sentiment, there is still no persuasive evidence that it had a significant effect on the formulation and implementation of US war policy. On the contrary, to the extent that the antiwar movement became a vehicle for the emerging counterculture of the 1960s, it probably turned off many more Americans than it turned on.[32] Most Americans simply did not wish to be associated with unwashed hippies, and certainly not with political radicals shrieking condemnation of American society and mores. The most effective antiwar initiatives came not in the form of street demonstrations, but rather post-Johnson Administration congressional amendments that progressively limited the President's military freedom of action in Indochina.[33]

If the press and the antiwar movement offer poor targets for those seeking to discover the roots of US defeat in Vietnam, the same cannot be said of the White House and the OSD. Civilian authority did indeed impose significant, and in some cases tactically absurd, restrictions on the use of force in Indochina; for the United States the conflict was, after all, a war fought with limited means for limited ends. What remains disputable is whether those restrictions thwarted a decisive military victory. And on this matter it is essential to reiterate that pursuit of military victory was abandoned in the wake of the Tet Offensive. The issue of the war's winnability thus boils down to whether the United States could have obtained such a victory before or during the Tet Offensive and its aftermath. Postwar discussion of prospects for a military victory rightly focuses on the pre-Tet years precisely because pursuit of such a victory was dropped after Tet. And to fashion a winning strategy the United States had a full three years--a longer period of time than that which separated the US Army's first contact with German forces in North Africa in November 1942 and Germany's surrender in May 1945.

Was defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by Johnson's refusal to mobilize the reserves; to permit US ground forces to invade Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam; and to authorize the bombing of all targets in North Vietnam that the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to bomb and when they wanted to bomb them? Would a full reserve mobilization really have made a decisive difference? Could the Ho Chi Minh Trail really have been effectively interdicted by an occupation of southern Laos and by trans-DMZ forays into North Vietnam's panhandle? Could North Vietnam's determination and ability to fight really have been destroyed from the air?

We will never know the answers to these questions, though logic suggests that a less restrained US use of force in Indochina would have made life considerably more difficult, but not necessarily impossible, for the communist side. We do know what did not work: commitment of over 500,000 US troops; release of over 8,000,000 tons of bombs on suspected enemy targets; and a strategy of punishing North Vietnam from the air while attempting to grind down enemy strength in the South via seeking out and destroying his big units in the Central Highlands and around the DMZ.

In South Vietnam, where the US military operated without significant civilian-imposed restraints, Westmoreland opted for a strategy of attrition. Though others within the military and beyond questioned the wisdom of the strategy,[34] Westmoreland has claimed that attrition was dictated by manpower constraints and by White House prohibition of US ground operations outside South Vietnam.[35] He has also dismissed the alternative of a population protection--or enclave--strategy as a defensive one that would have ceded the initiative to the enemy.[36] Westmoreland thus chose to kill communist regulars rather than protect friendlies, no doubt in part because he mistakenly assumed that by doing the former he was accomplishing the latter.

We now know that the combination of bombardment in the North and attrition in the South failed, and we know why it failed: gross underestimation of North Vietnam's tenacity, overestimation of its vulnerability to strategic bombing, and an inability to kill enemy troops in the field at a rate exceeding the communist side's capacity to replace them (the notorious "cross-over point"). Contrary to Westmoreland's conviction that search-and-destroy would deprive the communists of the initiative, the enemy for most of the war managed to control his own casualties by determining the initiation of as much as 88 percent of all tactical engagements.[37] Until the Tet Offensive, the communist side sought population control, not territorial acquisition, and therefore routinely refused combat except in the most favorable circumstances.

Which brings us to a more reflective body of opinion on the war's winnability. Such military observers as Harry Summers, Jr., Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., David Hackworth, Dave Richard Palmer, Douglas Kinnard, and Bruce Palmer, Jr., are critical of the professional military's performance in Vietnam as well as that of civilian authority. Readers will discover among their writings[38] often brutal condemnations of professional hubris, the attrition strategy, excessive use of firepower, reliance on lavish base camps, self-defeating personnel rotation policies, command disunity and micromanagement, and an officer corps corrupted by careerism--none of which can be laid at the doorsteps of McNamara's whiz kids, David Halberstam, or Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. These and other critics have properly concluded that no debacle as epic as America's in Vietnam can be ascribed solely to either military or civilian authority. Neither acquitted itself well, though ultimate responsibility for what happened to the United States in Vietnam rests with the White House. Harry Summers has observed that much of the criticism of political interference in military operations "is off the mark. Our problem was not so much political interference as it was a lack of a coherent military strategy--a lack for which our military leaders share a large burden of responsibility."[39] </font>

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/P...ter/record.htm

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[AJackson]

I opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning for a number of reasons.



-I feared that Iraq would steal our focus from Afganistan (an action I supported).

-While I like the idea of disposing of brutal dictators I questioned why Iraq would be at the top of the list, there are much worst regimes out there.

-I couldn't understand how you could ever have a democracy when you are dealing with groups like we have in Iraq; one minority group use to be in charge and the third group is a solid majority that will vote as their religious leaders tell them to vote.

-I questioned if it is even possible to 'install' a democracy. I think, in order for democracy to work the people have to be the force behind a move to a democratic system. Basically, they have to want it badly enough to fight for it.

-I feared that we would have something similar to what the Russians experienced in Afghanistan and we'd be fighting an on going urban war.

-Lastly, I feared that the American people wouldn't be able to handle a long term conflict and we'd end up leaving the job half done and the people worst off than they were before.

As bad as thought it could be, it has turned out so much worse. The bad intelligence, the lack of post invasion planning, the ignoring of all voices who disagreed. . .How much more could we have [censored] this up?

[Kaj]

[ QUOTE ]
I opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning for a number of reasons.



-I feared that Iraq would steal our focus from Afganistan (an action I supported).

-While I like the idea of disposing of brutal dictators I questioned why Iraq would be at the top of the list, there are much worst regimes out there.

-I couldn't understand how you could ever have a democracy when you are dealing with groups like we have in Iraq; one minority group use to be in charge and the third group is a solid majority that will vote as their religious leaders tell them to vote.

-I questioned if it is even possible to 'install' a democracy. I think, in order for democracy to work the people have to be the force behind a move to a democratic system. Basically, they have to want it badly enough to fight for it.

-I feared that we would have something similar to what the Russians experienced in Afghanistan and we'd be fighting an on going urban war.

-Lastly, I feared that the American people wouldn't be able to handle a long term conflict and we'd end up leaving the job half done and the people worst off than they were before.

As bad as thought it could be, it has turned out so much worse. The bad intelligence, the lack of post invasion planning, the ignoring of all voices who disagreed. . .How much more could we have [censored] this up?

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It's all the anti-war activists fault -- just ask Old Dogg. Otherwise, things would be smooth sailing.

[MidGe]

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When the USA stays dedicated (American revolution, WWI, WWII, Korea) there are positive results.

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In this case it looks like the people of Iraq are more dedicated than the USA. I guess that is the stupid and embarrassing US culture, rooted in Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill and plenty other proponent of the power of positive thinking.

Be that as it may, reading the ansers to the OP, I am amazed at the number of people that still think it is for the US to decide what to do with Iraq. IMO, the US has shown unbelievable incompetence in firstly promulgating a strategy, and secondly in letting it fail by loosing the war in Iraq. What needs to happen now to try correct those huge mistaken made unilaterally by the US and a handful of allies, is the let the UN take over, Send the US home and, most importantly, set tle level of war reparation due to Iraq by the US. If this is set as a sufficient high amount, there may be a chance or reconstructing the country and it would hopefully teach a thing or two about humility to what thinks is a superpower but doesn't look like it in practice.

[Taso]

I would disagree about the people of Iraq being more dedicated. The majority don't support the insurgency, they just want peace. There are some in Iraq that are more dedicated, I agree with that.

[Chips Ahoy]

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When the USA stays dedicated (American revolution, WWI, WWII, Korea) there are positive results. When the people don't care or don't go the distance (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq I, Somolia) there are negative results.

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Your classification is incorrect: the US pulled out early in WW1 and Korea.

You left out War of 1812, Spanish American War, Philippine Insurrection, the Bay of Pigs, and Beirut (among others).

The U.S. starts too many wars to see them all through to the finish.