Straight from the horse's mouth

Max Boot (I know, great name) jumps the fence in this NYT article:

The Lessons of a Quagmire
This month's setbacks in Iraq � the downing of American helicopters,
the suicide bombing of an Italian headquarters � have made President
Bush's mantra of "progress" ring increasingly hollow. It's true that 80
percent of Iraq remains peaceful and stable, but we seem to be losing
in the other 20 percent, mostly among Sunni Muslims who benefited from
Saddam Hussein's rule. The escalating violence lends credence to
critics who see parallels with Vietnam.
The biggest error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight
a guerrilla foe the same way they had fought the Wehrmacht. The
military staged big-unit sweeps with fancy code names like Cedar Falls
and Junction City, and dropped more bombs than during World War II.
Neither had much effect on the enemy, who would hide in the jungles and
then emerge to ambush American soldiers. Seeing that his strategy
wasn't working, Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander,
responded by asking for more and more troops, until we had 500,000
soldiers in Vietnam. And still it was not enough.
What proved most effective in Vietnam were not large conventional
operations but targeted counterinsurgency programs. Four � known as
CAP, Cords, Kit Carson Scouts and Phoenix � were particularly
effective.
CAP stood for Combined Action Platoon. Under it, a Marine rifle squad
would live and fight alongside a South Vietnamese militia platoon to
secure a village from the Vietcong. The combination of the Marines'
military skills and the militias' local knowledge proved highly
effective. No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the
Vietcong. Cords, or Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was
the civilian side of the counterinsurgency, run by two C.I.A. legends:
Robert Komer and William Colby. It oversaw aid programs designed to win
hearts and minds of South Vietnamese villagers, and its effectiveness
lay in closely coordinating its efforts with the military.
The Kit Carson Scouts were former Communists who were enlisted to help
United States forces. They primarily served as scouts and interpreters,
but they also fought. Most proved fiercely loyal. They had to be: they
knew that capture by their former Vietcong comrades meant death.
Phoenix was a joint C.I.A.-South Vietnam effort to identify and
eradicate Vietcong cadres in villages. Critics later charged the
program with carrying out assassinations, and even William Colby
acknowledged there were "excesses." Nevertheless, far more cadres were
captured (33,000) or induced to defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were
killed (26,000).
To secure the Sunni Triangle, the army would do better to focus on
classic counterinsurgency strategies. We need closer cooperation
between Iraqi and coalition forces, as in CAP. We need better
coordination between the military and L. Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority, as in Cords. We need better intelligence to
identify and neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in Phoenix. We might even
want to recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their
erstwhile comrades, as in the Kit Carson Scouts.

What's significant about this piece are not the points he makes about
anti-guerilla tactics. It's the fact that he raises them at all - even
moreso the fact that he's calling Iraq a quagmire.
The mere suggestion that maybe things aren't going exactly according to
plan would have been inconceivable three months ago. Max Boot, you see,
is one of the high profile neocons whose voice shrieked loudest in the charge to war:

The power of neocons is much exaggerated � unfortunately.
I think the emergence of neocon thinking is very significant. In
essence, I think neocons combine the best of the two dominant strains
of US foreign policy thinking: Wilsonian idealism and Kissingerian
realpolitik. They have Wilson's devotion to promoting democracy while
at the same time recognizing � as Wilson did not � that this often
requires force and that the US cannot rely on international treaties
alone.

If he can come around, maybe there's hope for the rest of them too.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 16, 2003 at 12:00 PM | Permalink