Iraq ≈ Vietnam. It's Deja Vu All over Again
 

Mission Accomplished !
Listening to the breathless descriptions and pronouncements of events in Irag, especially Mosul, of the past few days takes me back 39 years to the NVA victory in Vietnam. Almost all of the same hollow phrases, rationalizations, possible military action, BS & posturing from talking heads, Congress & the Prez, practically word-for-word are being spouted via the MSM. It's just uncanny how close the stuff they're saying is to what I remember. I checked with a few other "old farts" at work and they concurred. A corrupt regime on the verge of total collapse because none of the thousands of "solders & police" we spent untold billions to "train" & equip are willing to die for it, and who can blame them?
Today I heard that 55,000 government troops were defeated by about 10,000 "insurgents" in Mosul. The other big news flash was the assertion that these guys are the worst, even worse than Al-Quida and they are going to march down Main Street as soon as they have secured Baghdad SO WE HAD BETTER DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING! Also we are being reminded every 30 seconds that OUR PRECIOUS BLOOD WAS SPENT SECURING THE TERRITORY BEING LOST.
We are the stupidest country in the world because we keep making the same mistakes repeatedly and NEVER LEARN to let these s**tholes alone.
At work, I remember right after "Mission Accomplished" was declared by W that I expressed grave misgivings and said we could be in for another quagmire. I was denounced as a "surrender monkey" and "soft on terrorists". A few days afterwards I read that some group of "insurgents" had destroyed an M1 Abrams tank with an IED! This was amazing because during all of Gulf war #1, we had NOT LOST ONE SINGLE tank to Saddam's forces, and here was some rag-tag group dancing on a burned-out M1 on the front page on the NYT ! Shades of the Viet Cong!
Next up: we are going to be treated to another scene of helicopters landing on the roof of the US embassy evacuating embassy staff & contractors.
The finger pointing will begin in earnest with everyone blaming everyone else all the time ignoring the corporations that sponsored the war.
Oh yes, let's not forget we still have that "other" war in Afghan going on. They unloaded 5 coffins from a plane today.
My favorite Afghan quote: "Afghanistan is where empires go to die"

[url]http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html[/url]

[QUOTE=tServo;375678]Mission Accomplished !
[/QUOTE]

I did not read anything in your piece that gave me any understanding of or new insight in the Vietnam war nor the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each of those wars had or has its own merits, objectives and errors. It appears to me that you see so many similarities because you fail to see the differences.

[QUOTE=tha;375797]I did not read anything in your piece that gave me any understanding of or new insight in the Vietnam war nor the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each of those wars had or has its own merits, objectives and errors. It appears to me that you see so many similarities because you fail to see the differences.[/QUOTE]
Perhaps those differences between the Vietnam and Iraq wars could be quite revealing. Do you, or anyone else, feel like listing (some of) the key differences for the benefit of people like me who are not so hot on our history knowledge? Would be interesting to read!

One of the best lessons that I ever learned about how things of this nature work came from my maternal grandfather. He was a bit of a hoarder of sorts, nothing like what you see on TV, but his house and basement were full of things, e.g. 20-year-old mail and bills, thread-barren clothes, expired food, expired medicine, long-impotent rat poison, etc., that a rational person might be inclined to call "rubbish" and dispose of. But after my grandmother died in 1990, and he married a second time in 1996 and moved in with his new wife, his house became a time capsule of sorts. The only problem was that every so often, he and his new wife (who was, to put it bluntly, a gold-digger taking advantage of his WWII disability pension and a piss-poor replacement for my grandmother at the very least) would argue, and he would gather his few worldly goods from her house, and come to us with the idea of moving back into his old home and divorcing his wife.

Worried for his welfare and not fans in any sense of the new bride, we would go to his house and clean out the junk in the basement, throw out the expired food, and try to get him set up again in some semblance of a nice home (we only lived a mile down the road). Sadly, one of two things would inevitably and invariably happen: he would either become disgruntled during the clean-up process and demand that we put all of the junk that we had just removed *right back where it was* or he would allow us to fix him up in very nice digs, only to end up back with Wifey in a couple of weeks, where the cycle would begin again in six to twelve months.

Sadly, he would play similar games with his will, finances, and power-of-attorney between my mother and his wife, and ultimately this is what led to his (IMHO early) demise days before his 85th birthday in 2008. After he fell (under quite suspicious circumstances) and put his head through the drywall at Wifey's house, she hurried up and pushed through a "Do Not Resuscitate" order despite his longstanding objection to such, and despite the quite good prospects of recovery. But I digress.

The fact is that even up to the point of possibly shortening his life, despite having all the help that his family could give, my grandfather did not (or could not) change his way of life. After his death, despite two major cleanouts of the basement, we still had enough rubbish to fill a box truck! This led me to a basic theorem on life: "You can clean out Grandpap's basement, but he has to *want* to keep it that way".

Well, the same thing applies to these war-torn countries. We have spent 12-13 years cleaning out the basement in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have tried to fill their refrigerators with good food and bought them a nice big screen TV. We have tried to keep the abusers away. The fact is that they don't know how (or don't want) to keep up that lifestyle. They enjoy fighting battles, they enjoy factions that war endlessly, they are not interested in keeping the proverbial basement clean! Even up to the point of suffering and death.

The answer is, as sad as it may be, similar to what we finally had to say to my grandfather just a month before he died: we can't watch this any more. We need to pull out of these countries, stop wasting money, and stop trying to institute our way of life on people(s) that are clearly not interested. Let them decide if-and-when they would like to become a first-world country and only then, once they invest their own time, money, blood, sweat, and tears, offer our help. But to keep doing this every 10-30 years in a region that is just not interested in improvement is futile and irresponsible, not to mention essentially disrespectful (and hence aggravating) to the people that we make the premise of "helping". Let them be.

You can't clean out someone's basement if they don't want it cleaned out. Keep that in mind and apply it to life, and it is amazing how much heartache you'll avoid.

[QUOTE=NBtarheel_33;375836]You can't clean out someone's basement if they don't want it cleaned out. Keep that in mind and apply it to life, and it is amazing how much heartache you'll avoid.[/QUOTE]

+1! And I very much appreciate what a personal space that came from.

But, further... Who is to say we in the "West" have all the correct answers?

Clearly we don't, or else there wouldn't be hungry people, some without shelter, within our lands while a very few have more wealth than they really know what to do with....

If your narrative had included the part where, before you cleaned out the basement and fixed up the living space, you bombed the hell out of their front yard, cut the power lines, burnt down the hospital and school next door, and in general destroyed the reasonable living space they once had, I would be more inclined to think you had a grasp of the situation.

There was joke told around the time of G.W Bush making the case for WMDs in Iraq that went something like, "I know they've got weapons of mass destruction, cause my daddy kept all the receipts."

[QUOTE=chappy;375841]There was joke told around the time of G.W Bush making the case for WMDs in Iraq that went something like, "I know they've got weapons of mass destruction, cause my daddy kept all the receipts."[/QUOTE]

You're confusing Iraq with Iran, and Israel....

[QUOTE=chalsall;375844]You're confusing Iraq with Iran, and Israel....[/QUOTE]

No, we helped Iraq against Iran.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack#Controversies[/url]

(among others)

[QUOTE=chappy;375845]No, we helped Iraq against Iran.

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack#Controversies[/url]

(among others)[/QUOTE]

I know that.

And who did we help gain thermonuclear capability?

If you are implying Iran, they don't have it. :) We did help them along the way, maybe. And only in the most obscure ways. If you want to point fingers at who helped the most? Siemens is a German company. Atomenergoprom is Russian.

Certainly the US has hurt the Iranian nuclear program more than helped, at least since 1979.