Nixon's Secretary of Defense Speaks out on Iraq and Vietnam

[Odin]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
We've already repeated most of the mistakes of Vietnam, it's a little late for him to chime in now.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by PLATO

MELVIN R. LAIRD was Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973

As SecDef under Nixon this would make him responsible for such things as the mining of Haiphong Harbour and the Christmas Bombing Campaign. This makes him one of the architects of the war regardless of his back peddling into saying that he was all about withdrawal. In 1970, the US drafted 191 out of 365 possible birthdate registrations...over half of those elgible to be drafted were called. A true deescalation of the war would have placed more emphasis on "Vietnamization" of the war from 1969 onward. It was, however, the policy of the time to "bomb Hanoi to the peace table"...not provide the South Vietnamese the ability to fight the war themselves.

It was only when Congress threatened to cut funding for the war when the idea of Vietnamization took hold.

We came belatedly to Vietnamization; nonetheless, there are certain principles we followed in Vietnam that would be helpful in Iraq. The most important is that the administration must adhere to a standard of competence for the Iraqi security forces, and when that standard is met, U.S. troops should be withdrawn in corresponding numbers. That is the way it worked in Vietnam, from the first withdrawal of 50,000 troops in 1969 to the last prisoner of war off the plane in January of 1973. Likewise, in Iraq, the United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few thousand U.S. troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people. The readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100 percent, nor must the new democracy be perfect before we begin our withdrawal. The immediate need is to show our confidence that Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own terms. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.

Even with the tide of public opinion running against the war, withdrawal was not an easy sell inside the Nixon administration. Our first round of withdrawals was announced after a conference between Nixon and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu on Midway Island in June 1969. I had already softened the blow for Thieu by visiting him in Saigon in March, at which point I told him the spigot was being turned off. He wanted more U.S. soldiers, as did almost everyone in the U.S. chain of command, from the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down. For each round of troop withdrawals from Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs suggested a miserly number based on what they thought they still needed to win the war. I bumped those numbers up, always in counsel with General Creighton Abrams, then the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Even Nixon, who had promised to end the war, accepted each troop-withdrawal request from me grudgingly. It took four years to bring home half a million troops. At times, it seemed my only ally was General Abrams. He understood what the others did not: that the American people's patience for the war had worn thin.

[Arrian]

By the way, did you notice this:

Those who wallow in such Vietnam angst would have us be not only reticent to help the rest of the world, but ashamed of our ability to do so and doubtful of the value of spreading democracy and of the superiority of freedom itself. They join their voices with those who claim that the current war is "all about oil," as though the loss of that oil were not enough of a global security threat to merit any U.S. military intervention and especially not "another Vietnam."

The loss of that oil? Excuse me? Saddam wasn't gonna stop selling oil. He needed to keep selling it so he could keep getting kickbacks so he could build himself some more palaces. Anyway, it seems to me he pulled this comment right out of his ass.

The real answer to the "no war for oil" folks is this: oil makes the region strategically important, sure, but the real reasons for intervention included: 1) testing out the Neocon idea of using US military force proactively to bring down dictators and install democracy; 2) getting rid of a bad man many old guard types and neocons felt we should have finished off in 1991; 3) concerns about WMDs, however overblown & "spun" the intel was, some people were concerned about this angle - others thought Saddam was "contained" ; 4) gee, wouldn't it be nice to have a democracy grateful for our efforts smack in the middle of the middle east, and for us to move our troops from Saudi Arabia to Iraq?

Some or all of the above, depending on what you believe, was hogwash. But it drove policy nonetheless, just as oil did. NO WAR FOR OIL is such simplistic tripe.

-Arrian

[GePap]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk


That's because it isn't about Iraq and Vietnam so much as how we handled Iraq and Vietnam, and what it implies about future conflicts.

I'm disappointed, I thought you might have something interesting to say.

"Handle future comflicts"? I see no prescriptions for how to handle future conflicts except his bit about the justifications for war, but that is a moot point, since the admin. already ruined that part.

MOst of the article is just a "stay the course" arguement- make sure you keep enough resources, keep men in until they can be replaced...there is nothing new in the article.

The reason I find it uselss is simple- he never addresses the point of whether a government could have sustained itself internally. All he says is with enough money they could survive some external attack. Well, DUH. BUt the forces working against us in Iraq are mainly internal, not external. He might say that a South Vietnamese government could have stood with enough resoruces- but would that government have been democratic, or simply a right wing authoritarian regime?