[Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Vietnam's Forgotten Lessons - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Vietnam's Forgotten Lessons
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By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 11, 2006; A21

Back when Hugh Shelton was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he 
sent all 17 of his four-star generals "Dereliction of Duty" by H.R. 
McMaster and asked them to a Pentagon breakfast to discuss the book with 
the author. The book charges that the U.S. military was derelict in its 
duty by meekly allowing duplicitous and inept civilians from the 
president on down to lead the nation into a war (Vietnam) that it then 
fought unsuccessfully. Shelton vowed that this would not happen again.

We all know the cliche about generals fighting the last war, but in Iraq 
it is not the tactics that were duplicated -- certainly not compared to 
the Persian Gulf War -- but the tendency of the military to do what it 
was told and keep its mouth shut. Shelton, who retired in 2001, cannot 
be blamed for this and maybe no one but Donald Rumsfeld can, but the 
fact remains that the United States fought a war many of its military 
leaders thought was unnecessary, unwise, predicated on false assumptions 
and incompetently managed. Still, no one really spoke up.

Now, some have -- although from retirement. In recent days, three former 
senior officers have called for Rumsfeld to be sacked. The most recent 
is Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who does not stop at faulting Rumsfeld 
but blames himself as well. "I now regret that I did not more openly 
challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions 
were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda," he writes in a Time 
magazine article this month. He joins Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who 
commanded the training of Iraqi security forces and who has also called 
on President Bush to fire Rumsfeld. "President Bush should accept the 
offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once," 
Eaton wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece.

The third retired general is Anthony Zinni, a four-star Marine with vast 
experience in the Middle East. (He was Bush's Israeli-Palestinian 
negotiator for a while.) He goes further than (merely) recommending 
Rumsfeld's political defenestration. He also strongly suggests that 
something is broken in the American military, that its priories are 
misplaced. Too many senior officers put their careers first and candor 
or honesty second. One who did not, the then-Army chief of staff, Eric 
K. Shinseki, was rebuked by Rumsfeld and his career essentially ended. 
After that, the brass knew that the path to promotion was to get with 
the program. They saluted Rumsfeld and implemented a plan many of them 
thought was just plain irresponsible.

Zinni would be the first to concede that it is not easy for military men 
to express their own opinions. Officers have been trained to obey and 
respect civilian leadership -- and, as history instructs, it's a good 
thing, too. Moreover, they are inculcated with the virtue of loyalty -- 
to their superiors and to their service. Even in retirement, most of 
them are loath to speak up and Zinni, for one, says he has felt the 
opprobrium of former colleagues. "There are certainly generals out there 
who don't like me speaking out," Zinni told me.

No American institution can escape blame for the disaster of Iraq -- not 
Congress, not the CIA and certainly not the media. But the military has 
both a constitutional duty and a solemn obligation to its troops to be 
candid with the American people. Yet in testimony before Congress and in 
statements from the field and elsewhere, all we get are ridiculously 
optimistic assessments, no calls for more troops and no suggestion that 
Rumsfeld and Bush were mismanaging the war. The occasional peep of 
dissent is quickly reversed. From the very sound of it, you would be 
entitled to think that everything has gone swimmingly in Iraq. Instead, 
the military has participated in a debacle.

In several ways -- some obvious, some not -- the war in Iraq has been 
likened to Vietnam. Certainly, it has opened the same credibility gap, 
has been funded by deficit spending and has turned into a quagmire. 
Maybe, though, this sense of deja vu is felt most keenly at the 
Pentagon. Within that building, it must be Vietnam all over again -- 
another asinine strategy, another duplicitous civilian leadership, more 
conformity and careerism, and, of course, more unnecessary loss of life.

Donald Rumsfeld famously came to the Pentagon to reform it. Instead, as 
we are coming to realize, he broke it, and H.R. McMaster, now a colonel 
with Iraq service, has at least one more book in him. Unfortunately, he 
can use the same title.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041001027.html
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