Submitted by Nikos Retsos, academic, Mar 19, 2007 00:07

The resiliency of the Iraqi fighting spirit was the biggest miscalculation the U.S. made in Iraq.  Military experst and Geoge Bush thought:  If a little dictator, Saddam Hussein,  can slap the Iraqis and they beg for mercy,  we can start with our "Shock and  Awe"  and they will roll over and accept  the U.S. with fear and tremor.

And it looked like it at the outset, so Bush went on an aicraft carrier, hang the sign "Mission Accomplished",  and declared victory .   But then the reality started to emerge, and  we now blame the Iraqis for failing to reconcile their differences,  so we can declare victory and come home -head high.

It sounds like the Iraqization of the war in the face of defeat.  And it is a page taken from the Vietnam. When faced with defeat in Vietnam, Nixon  declared the  Vietnamization Plan.  Just as we talk  about Iraq, intensive training and increase of the South Vietnamese army would have enabled the replacement of the U.S. units until all our troops were out, and a pro-American regime was left behind.  Vietnamese president, Diem Van Thieu (General), and VP Van Cao Ky (Air Marshal) sounded confident and asked for time to built up their forces.

Fast forward to Iraq.  The term Iraqization has been avoided to avoid the resurection of the Vietnamization ghost.  But that is the exactly   where we are now.  Maliki asks for more time to built up his forces, and we  can claim it is all an Iraqi matter.  The Sunni insurgents, like the Viet Cong, proved more resilient  than we expected.  Lyndon Johnson said on Vietcong:  "We are going to defeat the in the battlefield."  And George Bush talked about  the Sunnis:  "Defeating the enemy; no cut and run, and stay in Iraq until  we finish the job -the one he declared "Accomplished" 4 years ago.   But the crowds demonstrating against the war in Iraq across the country  see another Vietnam fiasco unfolding in the horizon.  And Nelson Mandela was right when he said that a war in Iraq will "create a chaos."   I wished  then, and we wish now, that Bush was listening.   

a fool who kicked a behive.   

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