Editorial: Iraq: Shades of Vietnam

Friday, June 17, 2005 | 5:10 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

June 18-19, 2005

Before dawn Friday in western Iraq, in the Anbar province bordering Syria, a force of 1,000 U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers began an offensive against enemy strongholds. The enemies included insurgent Iraqis along with foreign fighters who have been swarming over the border. The news should have brought satisfaction, as taking the fight to our enemies, and destroying them, is how wars are won.

Unfortunately, however, such offensives in Iraq are providing mostly illusionary victories. Reporting last week about a similar offensive in Tal Afar, in northwestern Iraq and also along the Syrian border, The New York Times interviewed the executive officer of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. That offensive, which took place in September, cleared the area of insurgents. But the Army had to come back last month and wage the fight all over again. That's because there were not enough troops to secure the area after the September battle.

"We have a finite number of troops," Maj. Chris Kennedy told the Times. "If you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them (enemy forces) to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. ... We haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we've cleared the insurgents out."

As the result of insufficient troops to secure the area, Tal Afar, despite the Army's immediate victory, returned to being a "way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from Syria, and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school," the newspaper reported.

What happened in Tal Afar demonstrates the critical need for more U.S. troops in Iraq -- tens of thousands of them. Without a massive troop buildup to provide security and wage offensives that bring lasting victories, Iraq will continue as a pendulum -- troops moving back and forth, back and forth, with only the minutes and hours going forward, bringing days and weeks and years of more bloodshed.

Frighteningly, however, this military reality is canceled out by the political reality. Public support for the war in Iraq is dropping precipitously, recent polling shows. And members of Congress are no longer standing together on the steps of the Capitol singing "God Bless America."

An "Out of Iraq" caucus was formed Thursday by 41 House Democrats. Also on Thursday, two Republican congressmen and two Democratic congressmen sponsored a resolution calling upon President Bush to begin pulling troops out of Iraq by Oct. 1, 2006. Additionally, more than 100 members of Congress have signed a letter demanding that Bush fully respond to the Downing Street Memo. This document -- a July 23, 2002, briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's top ministers -- was disclosed in May by the Sunday Times newspaper in London.

It reveals that Bush and Blair met in April 2002 -- a year before the invasion and months before Bush has acknowledged making his decision to go to war -- to discuss Britain's role in the war and ways of justifying to the world a regime change. Excerpts from the memo include: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. ... It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action ... but the case was thin ..."

The war in Iraq is beginning to mimic the Vietnam War, which attracted public support in its early years but was the cause of widespread and violent protests in its later years. The protest movement grew as casualties mounted, as disclosures cast doubt on our reasons for being in Vietnam and as it became clear the government had little knowledge of how to fight a guerilla war or how to end it. This tragic chapter in our history seems to be repeating itself in Iraq.

More than 1,700 U.S. troops have been killed there, including three from the Las Vegas Valley in just the past two weeks. President Bush can't withdraw troops from Iraq because of the caldron he's created, and he won't bring them up to strength for political reasons, yet he assures America he knows what he is doing. In our view, the White House had better put forth a plan to succeed in Iraq before the country once again enters into a long and bitter period of protest.