Here is a list of Robert McNamara's 11 items of mistakes we made going into the Vietnam misadventure.
Quote:In 1995, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert published In Retrospect, the first of his three books dissecting the errors, myths and miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War, which he now believes was a serious mistake. Nine years later, most of these lessons seem uncannily relevant to the Iraq war in its current nation-building, guerrilla-warfare phase.
[1]* We misjudged then -- and we have since -- the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries . . . and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
[2]* We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
[3]* We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
[4]* Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
[5]* We failed then -- and have since -- to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine. . . . We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
[6]* We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement . . . before we initiated the action.
[7]* After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course . . . we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
[8]* We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
[9]* We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action . . . should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
[10]* We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. . . . At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
[11]* Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
Osama bin Laden’s August, 1996 Fatwa, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places
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Those youths know that their rewards in fighting you, the USA, is double than their rewards in fighting some one else not from the people of the book. They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same hell with his righteous executioner.
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Osama bin Laden’s 23 February 1998 Fatwa, Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders
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On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies [/b]-- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."
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Al-Qaida Statement Warning Muslims Against Associating With The Crusaders And Idols Jun 09, 2004
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Once again, we repeat our call and send this clear message to our Muslim brothers, warning against fellowship with the Crusaders, the Americans, Westerners and all idols in the Arab Gulf. Muslims should not associate with them anywhere, be it in their homes, complexes or travel with them by any means of transportation.
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No Muslim should risk his life as he may inadvertently be killed if he associates with the Crusaders, whom we have no choice but to kill.
Everything related to them such as complexes, bases, means of transportation, especially Western and American Airlines, will be our main and direct targets in our forthcoming operations on our path of Jihad that we, with Allah's Power, will not turn away from.
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We further repeat our warning to the officials and those who guard the American complexes and who stand with America and its hired help, who takes up arms against the Mujahideen for defending for them and their interests such as the Saudi government and others who choose to support the idol’s regime over the Islamic one. We call them to repent, separate and to hate idols by fighting them with money, tongues and arms.
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The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Report, i.e., The 9-11 Commission Report alleged, 8/21/2004:
[CHAPTERS 1, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1] Before we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, al Qaeda et al fomented the following mass murders of Americans:
1. 10/1983 US Marine Corps Headquarters in Beirut--241 dead Americans;
2. 2/1993 WTC in NYC--6 dead Americans;
3. 11/1995 Saudi National Guard Facility in Riyadh--5 dead Americans;
4. 6/1996 Khobar Towers in Dhahran--19 dead Americans;
5. 8/1998 American Embassy in Nairobi--12 dead Americans;
6. 12/2000 Destroyer Cole in Aden--17 dead Americans;
7. 9/2001 WTC in NYC, Pentagon, Pennsylvania Field--approx. 1500 dead Americans (+1500 dead non-Americans);
8.
ican711nm wrote:That is self-serving, gratuitous hyperbole.We have no other choice but to win in Iraq.
Mine isn't hyperbole; but yours is! I gave my reasons for my statment that you quoted. You gave zero reasons for your statement here. I didn't know Nixon and Reagan and the Bushes were non-conservatives 
Of course we have other choices...but there are people in this country who are being stone headed about it...and refuse to acknowledge that we have other choices. In fact, this item is so wrong...I suspect it may have been put in here so that you can retract it for some reason.
ican711nm wrote:We must correct our mistakes and get on with it.
Or we should simply acknowledge that the costs (not just monetary) for "correcting our mistakes" is simply too high...and presents the danger of making further, even more serious, mistakes... ...and just do what we most likely will have to do at some point anyway... ...namely...cut and run.
We can hide in a martial law closet here in the states and die at the increased rate at least double the national accident death rate.
ican711n wrote:It is not a question whether we can win; it is only a question of how and when we can win.
Baloney! The very real possibility exists that we cannot win this one...that all the choices lead to loss of some kind. That, in fact, was why so many of us argued against going in the way we did in the first place.
We can hide in a martial law closet here in the states and die at the increased rate at least double the national accident death rate.
We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.
We are in a cabin deep down below decks on a Navy ship jam-packed with troops that's pitching and creaking its way across the Atlantic in a winter gale. There is a man in every bunk. There's a man wedged into every corner. There's a man in every chair. The air is dense with cigarette smoke and with the staleness of packed troops and sour wool.
"Don't think I'm sticking up for the Germans," puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, "but "
"To hell with the Germans," says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. "It's what our boys have been doing that worries me."
The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting.
"Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier's pay," interrupts a red-faced major.
The lieutenant comes out with his conclusion: "Two wrongs don't make a right." You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. "Two wrongs don't make a right" and "Don't think I'm sticking up for the Germans, but ."
The troops returning home are worried. "We've lost the peace," men tell you. "We can't make it stick."
A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word "liberation." Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.
You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don't blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now.
Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of out misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA. They blame us for the fumbling timidity of our negotiations with the Soviet Union. They tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned. "Have you no statesmen in America?" they ask.
The skeptical French press
Yet whenever we show a trace of positive leadership I found Europeans quite willing to follow our lead. The evening before Robert Jackson's opening of the case for the prosecution in the Nurnberg trial, I talked to some correspondents from the French newspapers. They were polite but skeptical. They were willing enough to take part in a highly publicized act of vengeance against the enemy, but when you talked about the usefulness of writing a prohibition of aggressive war into the law of nations they laughed in your face. The night after Jackson's nobly delivered and nobly worded speech I saw then all again. They were very much impressed. Their manner had even changed toward me personally as an American. Their sudden enthusiasm seemed to me typical of the almost neurotic craving for leadership of the European people struggling wearily for existence in the wintry ruins of their world.
The ruin this war has left in Europe can hardly be exaggerated. I can remember the years after the last war. Then, as soon as you got away from the military, all the little strands and pulleys that form the fabric of a society were still knitted together. Farmers took their crops to market. Money was a valid medium of exchange. Now the entire fabric of a million little routines has broken down. No on can think beyond food for today. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are used as a kind of lunatic travesty on a currency. If a man goes out to work he shops around to find the business that serves the best hot meal. The final pay-off is the situation reported from the Ruhr where the miners are fed at the pits so that they will not be able to take the food home to their families.
"Well, the Germans are to blame. Let them pay for it. It's their fault," you say. The trouble is that starving the Germans and throwing them out of their homes is only producing more areas of famine and collapse.
One section of the population of Europe looked to us for salvation and another looked to the Soviet Union. Wherever the people have endured either the American armies or the Russian armies both hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The British have won a slightly better reputation. The state of mind in Vienna is interesting because there the part of the population that was not actively Nazi was about equally divided. The wealthier classes looked to America, the workers to the Soviet Union.
The Russians came first. The Viennese tell you of the savagery of the Russian armies. They came like the ancient Mongol hordes out of the steppes, with the flimsiest supply. The people in the working-class districts had felt that when the Russians came that they at least would be spared. But not at all. In the working-class districts the tropes were allowed to rape and murder and loot at will. When victims complained, the Russians answered, "You are too well off to be workers. You are bourgeoisie."
When Americans looted they took cameras and valuables but when the Russians looted they took everything. And they raped and killed. From the eastern frontiers a tide of refugees is seeping across Europe bringing a nightmare tale of helpless populations trampled underfoot. When the British and American came the Viennese felt that at last they were in the hands of civilized people. But instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies.
U.S. administration a poor third
We know now the tragic results of the ineptitudes of the Peace of Versailles. The European system it set up was Utopia compared to the present tangle of snarling misery. The Russians at least are carrying out a logical plan for extending their system of control at whatever cost. The British show signs of recovering their good sense and their innate human decency. All we have brought to Europe so far is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. [Emphasis mine]
The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met. Thoughtful men can't help remembering that this is a period in history when every political crime and every frivolous mistake in statesmanship has been paid for by the death of innocent people. The Germans built the Stalags; the Nazis are behind barbed wire now, but who will be next? Whenever you sit eating a good meal in the midst of a starving city in a handsome house requisitioned from some German, you find yourself wondering how it would feel to have a conqueror drinking out of your glasses. When you hear the tales of the brutalizing of women from the eastern frontier you think with a shudder of of those you love and cherish at home.
That we are one world is unfortunately a brutal truth. Punishing the German people indiscriminately for the sins of their leader may be justice, but it is not helping to restore the rule of civilization. The terrible lesson of the events of this year of victory is that what is happening to the bulk of Europe today can happen to American tomorrow.
In America we are still rich, we are still free to move from place to place and to talk to our friends without fear of the secret police. The time has come, for our own future security, to give the best we have to the world instead of the worst. So far as Europe is concerned, American leadership up to now has been obsessed with a fear of our own virtues. Winston Churchill expressed this state of mind brilliantly in a speech to his own people which applies even more accurately to the people of the U.S. "You must be prepared," he warned them, "for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes, if you are not to fall back into the rut if inertia, the confusion of aim and the craven fear of being great."
Frank Apisa wrote:ican711nm wrote:That is self-serving, gratuitous hyperbole.We have no other choice but to win in Iraq.
By the way your statement back several pages that conservatives are constantly having to be rescued by non-conservatives is very very funny.
Frank Apisa wrote:More hyperbole! Yes, technically we actually do have another choice! We can hide in a martial law closet here in the states and die at the increased rate at least double the national accident death rate. Silly me. I rejected that choice as a non-choice.Of course we have other choices...but there are people in this country who are being stone headed about it...and refuse to acknowledge that we have other choices. In fact, this item is so wrong...I suspect it may have been put in here so that you can retract it for some reason.
What other choices do you read in your cards?
Frank Apisa wrote:These verbal obfuscations imply advocacy ofican711nm wrote:We must correct our mistakes and get on with it.
Or we should simply acknowledge that the costs (not just monetary) for "correcting our mistakes" is simply too high...and presents the danger of making further, even more serious, mistakes... ...and just do what we most likely will have to do at some point anyway... ...namely...cut and run.Quote:We can hide in a martial law closet here in the states and die at the increased rate at least double the national accident death rate.
Frank Apisa wrote:"Baloney" doesn't constitute a rebuttal, Frank, it's merely a food or an euphemism for an epithet.ican711n wrote:It is not a question whether we can win; it is only a question of how and when we can win.
Baloney! The very real possibility exists that we cannot win this one...that all the choices lead to loss of some kind. That, in fact, was why so many of us argued against going in the way we did in the first place.
That kind of content free response is why so many of you who argued and argued "we can't win this one" were and are continuing to fail to grasp the full consequences of what you advocated and continue to advocate. It's long past time for you to think about the full consequences of doing what you advocate. Adopting your recommendation limits our choice toQuote:That choice is not acceptable to me or to those I love. We would rather take our chances in Iraq as long as necessary to discover how to win there and then win there.We can hide in a martial law closet here in the states and die at the increased rate at least double the national accident death rate.
Oh, yes, technically there's a third choice. Don't do anything. But, of course, if we want different challenge we can always move to France! :wink:
