Washington Post

Is Iraq Another Vietnam?
By Nathaniel Fick Sunday, November 19, 2006; BW04

   The most impressive thing about Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs, $24) is that Robert K. Brigham doesn't treat the title's question rhetorically. In this readable book, he emphasizes the military distinctions between the two conflicts: The United States does not have half a million troops in Iraq, many of them drafted; Iraq's insurgents lack the support of a sympathetic superpower and are unlikely to find a single galvanizing leader such as Ho Chi Minh; and while Vietnam began as an insurgency and escalated into a conventional war, Iraq started with a conventional invasion and deteriorated into a messy insurgency.
   Still, notes Brigham, a professor of international relations at Vassar who previously coauthored a book with Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, some important larger similarities have emerged: The stated rationales for going to war have been discredited in both cases; both missions morphed into attempts to build stable societies from chaos; and declining U.S. public support may presage an "Iraq Syndrome" that limits future U.S. interventions just as surely as the Vietnam Syndrome did. Today, he writes, "The United States seems to have come full circle. Once again it finds itself engaged in a war characterized by no clear boundaries, no clear exit strategy, no definition of victory, little allied support, no UN authority, growing public unrest, rising costs, and perhaps an inadequate number of troops for the job." U.S. policymakers decided to wage war in Vietnam and Iraq, Brigham concludes, "with the expectation that a distinctively American story would emerge." It would be a distinctively American tragedy if those stories turned out to be the same.

Washington Post

War Correspondence The voices of American soldiers and those they left behind.
Reviewed by Nathaniel Fick Sunday, November 19, 2006; BW04
OPERATION HOMECOMING
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families
Edited by Andrew Carroll
Random House. 386 pp. $26.95

    If history is any guide, at least a few of tomorrow's great American literary voices are on patrol today near Ramadi or Jalalabad. Ambrose Bierce, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer all drew from their combat experience, and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan will likely shape the talent of a new generation of writers.
   In April 2004, as Marines were attacking Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah, the National Endowment for the Arts, in cooperation with the Department of Defense, brought nearly three dozen novelists, historians, poets, dramatists and journalists -- including such writers as Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason and Jeff Shaara -- to 25 military bases at home and around the world. The writers hosted workshops, inviting troops and their families to record memories of their wartime experiences since 2001. More than 1,200 submissions poured in, and the best of them are collected in this resonant and beautiful anthology.
   Army Sgt. Brian Turner wrote poems in Iraq but kept them to himself because he didn't want his men to think he was writing about "flowers and stuff." One of his pieces is called "Ashbah," Arabic for "ghosts."
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from the rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.
   The circumstances that bring this poem into our hands bear repeating: The federal government, with a war underway, invited active-duty combatants and their families to write about their most intense and private hopes, fears and losses. Then a hundred of these stories and poems, without bias or varnish or ulterior motive, were selected by an independent board, with the war still raging. Andrew Carroll, editor of several collections of letters, edited this anthology on a pro bono basis, and its proceeds will fund arts and cultural programs for U.S. military communities.
   Combat veterans are a famously taciturn group. Writing, however, can be just indirect enough to convey ideas too painful for the spoken word. Operation Homecoming brims with these personal anecdotes, showing us the human beings behind the headlines and beneath the body armor. A hardened Marine captain, in a letter to the mother of one of his troops, writes, "His death brought tears to my eyes, tears that fell in front of my Marines. I am unashamed of that fact."
   The troops aren't the only ones who sacrifice. In this book, we hear from their families, those who wait at home and are too often forgotten. Myrna E. Bein is the mother of Charles, a 26-year-old Army infantryman who "barely survived an ambush" in Kirkuk; as he recuperates, she brings her wounded son's clothes home from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and washes them. She searches the dryer for a missing sock, then searches the washer, and the floor, and the dryer again. Finally, she realizes that there's only one sock. Her son has only one foot, one lower leg, one knee. "I stood there in my bedroom and clutched that one clean sock to my breast and an involuntary moan came from my throat; but it originated in my heart."
   This collection rings with truth, the sort of truth that mere observers of war find hard to capture. Generals and journalists and politicians -- even the best of them -- simply have a different point of view. Operation Homecoming relives five tumultuous years through the eyes of the men and women who've done the fighting. When asked why he chose to participate in the project, a Special Forces soldier replied, "This is the first time anyone's asked us to write about what we think of all that's going on."
   Let's hope it's not the last.

New York Times

December 10, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Give Amnesty, but Not to All
By NATHANIEL FICK

    THE Iraq Study Group report points to a lack of national reconciliation as the “fundamental cause of violence in Iraq.” It concludes that the Iraqi government must find “ways and means to reconcile with former bitter enemies” and that “Iraqi amnesty proposals must not be undercut in Washington.”
Amnesty is a hard sell in Iraq, where the Shiite-dominated government is loath to forgive its Sunni opposition, and also in the United States, where many view it as condoning attacks on American troops. I fought against some of those who would be pardoned. They killed my comrades. But stubborn opposition to reconciliation will only harm more Americans, Iraqis and the cause we’re fighting for. There’s no sense in fighting to the finish against anyone who might otherwise be coerced into quitting. That said, three conditions must be enforced:
• Amnesty must be offered only after United States forces have shifted their priority from conventional operations to an advisory role. It cannot occur with 141,000 potential targets in Iraq.
• Amnesty must forgive only past attacks, and cannot appear to sanction or legitimize future ones.
• Amnesty applies only to Iraqis. Foreign fighters, with no legal standing in Iraq, cannot be eligible.

Military.com

Cambridge, Mass.

   America’s delusional debate on Iraq is paralyzing our country. The war’s supporters argue that victory is still possible, that we can achieve it with one, last-ditch effort, and that doing so doesn’t require sacrifice from most of our citizens. The war’s opponents claim that we can safely withdraw from Iraq without disastrous long-term consequences for the United States. But we have the proverbial wolf by the ears, and we can neither hang on nor let go. The sooner we recognize this sad, mad irony, the sooner we can find a third way forward, minimizing wasted lives and further damage to America’s standing in the world.
   Military force can no longer win the war in Iraq. The conflict has passed through at least three distinct phases since the 2003 invasion, and American military strength on the ground had a chance at success in only the first two. Recalling this history is useful in charting our next moves.
   The three-week march to Baghdad was largely a conventional blitzkrieg, and American units battled precisely the enemy described by the Bush Administration: hard-core Baathists, foreign jihadists, and criminals. We won those fights, but were unprepared for the aftermath. Instead of bringing peace and prosperity, our arrival in Baghdad ushered in chaos and anarchy. The Iraqis desperately needed more troops to help patrol the streets, provide medical care, and begin the gargantuan task of rebuilding the country’s long-neglected civic infrastructure. Without those troops, violence bubbled up across Iraq, and citizens, with mounting skepticism, were unable to send their children to school, buy gasoline, or even walk the streets after dark.
    By August 2003, the war slid into its second phase as these average Iraqis – not ideologues or dead-enders – began to take up arms against us. Some were motivated by disillusionment with the Americans’ inability to restore order and basic services. Others, with families to feed, accepted payment to bury bombs in the roadside.
   So began two years of insurgency in Iraq. If history and the Army’s own Counterinsurgency manual are any guide, then quelling an insurgency among a population of 26 million people requires over half a million troops committed to counterinsurgency tactics. These tactics, anathema to the training and culture of most conventional militaries, emphasize performing concrete acts of assistance to the population, rather than killing the enemy. Successful attrition requires that the insurgents be finite in number. In Iraq, the enemy was never finite. Each anarchic day turned moderates and pragmatists against the American occupation. More soldiers and Marines were desperately needed to reverse this trend. The United States averaged only 150,000 troops on the ground in 2004 and 2005, and was reluctant to adopt the proven tactics of counterinsurgency. A vicious downward spiral ensued, as American forces were insufficient either to squash the insurgents directly, or to sap their popular support by showing a better way forward to the people of Iraq.
   The war’s third phase exploded early in 2006, with the bombing of the fabled Golden Mosque in Samarra, ushering in a year of savage sectarian combat. This is where we are today. Hundreds of
   Iraqis die each week as factions, tribes, and sects choose their own agendas over national unity, and there is little that twenty-year-old, English-speaking Americans can do to stop them. Yet our government’s response now is to “surge” in Iraq, sending more than 20,000 additional troops to augment the 140,000 already there. As the previous phases of the war show, this is military folly for at least two reasons.
    First, it isn’t really a surge at all; it’s an incremental escalation of about fifteen percent over the current number of troops in Iraq – in Jon Stewart’s observation, a gratuity, not a surge. This may be the maximum possible for an over-engaged military to provide and a disengaged electorate to accept, but it’s far short of the minimum necessary to make any significant difference. Many in the military call this the “JEL” option – “Just Enough to Lose.” A real option for doubling-down in Iraq would involve hundreds of thousands of troops over a period of years, not tens of thousands over a period of months.
   Second, our window of opportunity to use military force to effect political change in Iraq has shut. More troops in 2003 could have stopped the looting, sealed the borders, and demonstrated our commitment to making Iraq’s future better than its past. More troops in 2005 could have provided the security necessary to begin ferreting insurgents out from among the passive civilian population – a prerequisite for all other progress. More troops in 2007 will do little to quell sectarian violence, and could possibly inflame it further.
   This does not mean that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq. America’s military forces, however insufficient for victory, are the lone dampening rods preventing a complete meltdown.
   Unconstrained by our military presence, Iraq’s Shi’a majority would move decisively to consolidate control. Iraq’s Sunni minority would intensify its resistance, including efforts to enlist the support of their religious brethren in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere around the Muslim world. Iraq’s Kurdish minority would attempt to opt out of a Shi’a-Sunni conflict by increasing its autonomy, exacerbating neighboring Turkey and Iran’s concerns about their own Kurdish minorities. Faced with Sunni intransigence and Kurdish separatism, Iraq’s Shi’a would increasingly turn to Iran for help. Withdrawing American forces from Iraq, under any rubric or justification, would serve as a catalyst for instability across the Middle East.
   If we cannot win and we cannot quit, then what are we to do? There are few new ideas, and no easy answers. Three steps, though, can maximize our chances of salvaging a tolerable outcome in Iraq, which might be defined as preventing genocidal killing, checking Iran’s destabilizing bid for regional hegemony, and thwarting al Qaeda’s attempt to organize with impunity inside the country.
    First, our government must re-engage the American people in this fight. We undertook a total war to transform the political culture of Iraq from a socialist Sunni Arab dictatorship to Western-style liberal democracy, but we only mobilized limited resources to do it. The entire burden of this war has been borne by the fraction of one percent of our population that wears a uniform, and by their families. We cannot just shuffle forces around, hire a smart general, and hope that everything will turn out fine. It won’t. President Bush has squandered so much public trust that citizens will not re-engage voluntarily; our elected officials must lead the way. Unfortunately, the time for idealistic calls to service is past: too few will answer. Americans must be hit where it hurts: their pocketbooks. We should abandon the folly of tax cuts during wartime, and instead implement a series of taxes to pay for the war, care for our returning veterans, and encourage lower gasoline consumption and higher investment in renewable energy. If so many of our citizens are unwilling to pay a modest price in Iraq, then we cannot ask so few to pay the ultimate price.
   Second, American combat forces must begin to withdraw from Iraq’s cities, where our conventional troops are increasingly unable to intervene effectively in sectarian strife. We can move a portion of our troops, perhaps a quarter of the current force, to remote airbases in Iraq’s vast deserts, where they can bolster regional stability without stoking resentment and providing targets on the streets of Iraq’s cities. The resulting violence in Baghdad and parts of Anbar province will be as terrible as it is inevitable. But this is no longer a classic counterinsurgency campaign, and the best we can do now is to ensure that the violence does not spill over into the rest of the region.
   Our most promising insurance policy in this regard are the teams of American advisors working with Iraqi military and police units. In a high-risk, high-reward strategy, these troops don’t hole up in comfortable mega-bases; they live in remote outposts with their charges, learning their language, sharing their danger, and living the rhetoric that the United States can only stand down in Iraq when Iraqis begin to stand up. There are currently about 3,000 of these advisors. Their ranks should be expanded at least five-fold, as recommended by the Iraq Study Group. Besides making military sense, this recommendation, like others made by the group, has the indispensable advantage of support from both political parties and the American people as a whole – an absolute requirement for the success of any policy of such importance.
   It would be a critical blunder to commit our little remaining deployable land-power to the so-called “surge” in Baghdad, leaving America without a strategic reserve at a time of growing danger elsewhere in the world. This new strategy will fail because the United States lacks the capability to clear and hold the city, and the Iraqi government lacks the will to help. When it fails, our over-committed military and under-committed citizenry will be even worse off as Iraq begins its final descent into chaos.

Nathaniel Fick, a former a Marine Corps infantry officer, is the author of One Bullet Away.