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	IRAQ 1 . . . see "WAR & PEACE" for related links see "PLACES" for related links Know that Baghdad was great in the past but is now falling in ruins {due to civil wars}. It is full of troubles, and its glory is gone. I neither approve it nor admire it, and if I praise it, it is mere convention. Fustat of Egypt is today what Baghdad was in the past, and I do not know of any greater city in all Islam. --AI-Muqaddasi (mid- to late 10th century) _Ahsan al-taqalim fi ma'rifat al-aqalim_ (The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions) - Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever. --Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) English politician and historian. "Milton" in _Edinburgh Review_ [August 1825] - When Iraq becomes strong enough in our opinion to stand alone, we shall be in a position to state that our task has been fulfilled, and that Iraq is an independent sovereign state. But this cannot be said while we are forced year after year to spend very large sums of money on helping the Iraqi government to defend itself and maintain order. --Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [1940-1945, 1951-1955]. [1922 remark cited by Christopher Catherwood, in _Churchill's Folly_, Carroll & Graf [2004]] - Now, let's imagine the future. What if he [Saddam Hussein] fails to comply and we fail to act or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And someday, some way, I guarantee you, he will use the arsenal. --Bill (William Jefferson) Clinton (1946- ) American Democratic statesman and president [1993-2001]. _Meet the Press_ [17 February 1998] - Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. --Madeline Albright (1937- ) Czech-born American who was the first woman to become United States Secretary of State [1997-2001]. [18 February 1998] - He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983. --Sandy Berger (1945- ) Clinton National Security Adviser to the Clinton Administration. [18 February 1998] - We urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs. --Letter to President Clinton, signed by Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, et al. [9 October 1998] - Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.... Along with Prime Minister (Tony) Blair of Great Britain, I made it equally clear that if Saddam failed to cooperate fully we would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy or warning... Instead of inspectors disarming Saddam, Saddam has disarmed the inspectors... I gave Saddam a chance -- not a license. If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed...If Saddam can cripple the weapons inspections system and get away with it, he would conclude the international community, led by the United States, has simply lost its will... He would surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction... The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people... Saddam Hussein and the other enemies of peace may have thought that the serious debate currently before the House of Representatives would distract Americans or weaken our resolve to face him down... But once more, the United States has proven that although we are never eager to use force, when we must act in America's vital interests, we will do so. --Bill (William Jefferson) Clinton (1946- ) American Democratic statesman and president [1993-2001]. Announcing airstrikes against Iraq [16 December 1998]. - Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process. --Representative Nancy Pelosi (1940- ) First woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Speech [16 December 1998]. - Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies. --Madeline Albright (1937- ) Czech-born American who was the first woman to become United States Secretary of State [1997-2001]. [10 November 1999] - The world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, has been offered sanctuary in Iraq if his worldwide terrorist network succeeds in carrying out a campaign of high-profile attacks on the West. --_The Herald_ (Glasgow, Scotland) [28 December 1999] - We do know that Iraq has weaponized thousands of gallons of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. We know that Iraq maintains stockpiles of some of the world's deadliest chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas. We know that Iraq is developing deadlier ways to deliver these horrible weapons, including unmanned drones and long-range ballistic missiles. And we know that Saddam Hussein is committed to one day possessing nuclear weapons. If that should happen, instead of simply bullying the Gulf region, he could dominate it. Instead of threatening only his neighbors, he would become a grave threat to U.S. security and to global security. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored. --Tom Daschle (1947- ) American politician. Speech [October 2000]. - There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies. --Bob Graham (1936- ) American politician. Letter to President Bush [5 December 2001]. - It is simplistic, or simple-minded, as the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something, sniffed last week. _C'est vrai_. It is indeed "simplisme" to pick fights with evil regimes just because those regimes want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer and far more profitable path of shrugging one's shoulders in a fetchingly Gallic fashion and sending one's Jews off to the camps, as one's new masters in government request. On the other hand, as the foreign minister might have noticed, the French may today enjoy springtime in Paris without the annoying sounds of jackboots all over the place, and the reason for that was the simple-minded determination of the British, the Russians and the Americans to fight the Nazis and to die by the millions, in order to make the world safe for, among other creatures, future French foreign ministers. "Simplisme" works. Against evil, it is the only thing that does. --Michael Kelly (1957-2003) Editor-at-large of the "Atlantic Monthly" and a columnist for the "Washington Post". He died covering the invasion of Iraq. _Washington Post_ [12 February 2002] - All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founders or will it be irrelevant? --George W. Bush (1946- ) The 43rd President of the United States and a former Governor of Texas. Speech to the U.N. General Assembly [12 September 2002], quoted in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939 Cohan & Major note: Bush was making the point that Iraq had failed to respond adequately to every UN resolution passed in the I990s. The United Nations now had the chance to enforce its will on Saddam Hussein; if it did not do so, he declared that the United States and its associates would take unilateral military action against Iraq. & note: The Security Council... 1. Decides that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions ... 9. Demands ... that Iraq cooperate immediately, unconditionally, and actively with UNMOVIC and the IAEA [the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency] ... 13. Recalls ... that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violation of its obligations. --United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 [8 November 2002] - We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandates of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them. --Carl Levin (1934- ) American politician. [19 September 2002] - Our national security requires Congress to send a clear message to Iraq and the world: America is united in its determination to eliminate forever the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. . . . Congress needs to act now to make clear to our U.N. allies and to Iraq that the United States will not stand for the usual half-measures or delaying tactics. . . . Here's what I believe the resolution should say. First and foremost, it should clearly endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Second, the resolution should call for an effort to rally the international community under a U.N. Security Council mandate. . . . [but] we must not tie our own hands by requiring Security Council action. Congress should authorize the United States to act with whatever allies will join us if the Security Council is prevented from supporting action to enforce the more than 16 resolutions against Iraq. . . . Thousands of terrorist operatives around the world would pay anything to get their hands on Saddam Hussein's arsenal and would stop at nothing to use it against us. America must act, and Congress must make clear to Hussein that he faces a united nation. --John Edwards (1953- ) American politician. _Washington Post_ op-ed piece [19 September 2002], excerpt as quoted in "Scrapbook", _The Weekly Standard_ [18 October 2004]. - Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. We know he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. --Al Gore (1948- ) American politician. [23 September 2002]. - We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction. --Ted Kennedy (1932- ) American politician. [27 September 2002] - The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons... --Robert Byrd (1917- ) American politician. [3 October 2002] - There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. ... We should also remember that we have always underestimated the progress Saddam Hussein has made in development of weapons of mass destruction. [ . . . ] But I also believe that after September 11th, the question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, the documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get. To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot. --Jay Rockefeller (1937- ) American politician. Speech [10 October 2002], quoted on Fox News Sunday [12 October 2003] - We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction. --Bob Graham (1936- ) American politician. [8 December 2002] - Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real ... --John F. Kerry (1943- ) American politician. [23 January 2003] - "Cowboy" Bush challenged by bovines. Christopher Hitchens (1949- ) British journalist, author, and literary critic. [27 January 2003] To be reading the European press or visiting a European capital these days is to witness a strenuous competition. The competition, which is easy to enter but not at all easy to win, is to see how many times a person can get the word "cowboy" into an article or a speech. In normal times, an editor would probably limit the usage automatically, if only to avoid the vulgarity of repetition, but this quotidian rule is being relaxed these days. The term can appear any number of times as long as it is affixed to the proper name "Bush." [ . . . ] To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn't to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures-putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it. In the present case of Iraq, a cowboy would have overruled the numerous wimps and faint hearts who he somehow appointed to his administration and would have evinced loud scorn for the assemblage of sissies and toadies who compose the majority of the United Nations. Instead, Bush has rejoined UNESCO, paid most of the U.S. dues to the United Nations, and returned repeatedly to the podium of the organization in order to recall it to its responsibility for existing resolutions. While every amateur expert knows that weather conditions for an intervention in the gulf will start to turn adverse by the end of next month, he has extended deadline after deadline. He has not commented on the eagerness of the media to print every injunction of caution and misgiving from State Department sources. The Saudis don't want the United States to use the base it built for the protection of "the Kingdom"? Very well, build another one in a state that welcomes the idea. Do the Turks and Jordanians want to have their palms greased before discovering what principles may be at stake? Greased they will be. In a way, this can be described as "a drive to war." But only in a way. It would be as well described as a decided insistence that confrontation with Saddam Hussein is inevitable-a proposition that is relatively hard to dispute from any standpoint. It's true that Bush was somewhat brusque with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but then Schröder is a man so sensitive that he recently sought an injunction against a London newspaper for printing speculation about his hair color and his notoriously volatile domestic life. What we are really seeing, in this and other tantrums, is not a Texan cowboy on the loose but the even less elevating spectacle of European elites having a cow. - The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. --George W. Bush (1946- ) The 43rd President of the United States and a former Governor of Texas. State of the Union Address [28 January 2003]. - Commentary in the _Wall Street Journal_ [30 January 2003] United We Stand By Jose Maria Aznar, Jose-Manuel Durao Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, Peter Medgyessy, Leszek Miller And Anders Fogh Rasmussen The real bond between the U.S. and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law. These values crossed the Atlantic with those who sailed from Europe to help create the United States of America. Today they are under greater threat than ever. The attacks of Sept. 11 showed just how far terrorists -- the enemies of our common values -- are prepared to go to destroy them. Those outrages were an attack on all of us. In standing firm in defense of these principles, the governments and people of the U.S. and Europe have amply demonstrated the strength of their convictions. Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom. We in Europe have a relationship with the U.S. which has stood the test of time. Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the U.S. we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The transatlantic relationship must not become a casualty of the current Iraqi regime's persistent attempts to threaten world security. [. . . ] The Iraqi regime and its weapons of mass destruction represent a clear threat to world security. This danger has been explicitly recognized by the U.N. All of us are bound by Security Council Resolution 1441, which was adopted unanimously. We Europeans have since reiterated our backing for Resolution 1441, our wish to pursue the U.N. route, and our support for the Security Council at the Prague NATO Summit and the Copenhagen European Council. [. . . ] The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is a threat of incalculable consequences. It is one at which all of us should feel concerned. Resolution 1441 is Saddam Hussein's last chance to disarm using peaceful means. The opportunity to avoid greater confrontation rests with him. Sadly this week the U.N. weapons inspectors have confirmed that his long-established pattern of deception, denial and non-compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions is continuing. Europe has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. Indeed, they are the first victims of Iraq's current brutal regime. Our goal is to safeguard world peace and security by ensuring that this regime gives up its weapons of mass destruction. Our governments have a common responsibility to face this threat. Failure to do so would be nothing less than negligent to our own citizens and to the wider world. The U.N. Charter charges the Security Council with the task of preserving international peace and security. To do so, the Security Council must maintain its credibility by ensuring full compliance with its resolutions. We cannot allow a dictator to systematically violate those resolutions. If they are not complied with, the Security Council will lose its credibility and world peace will suffer as a result. We are confident that the Security Council will face up to its responsibilities. Messrs. Aznar, Durao Barroso, Berlusconi, Blair, Medgyessy, Miller and Fogh Rasmussen are, respectively, the prime ministers of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.K., Hungary, Poland and Denmark. Mr. Havel is the Czech president. - Great Britain's Foreign & Commonwealth Office has released a report revealing that in 2000 Saddam Hussein approved amputation of the tongue as a penalty for abusive remarks about him or his family, and that he has broadcast TV pictures of this punishment as a warning to would-be dissenters; that Saddam's son Uday maintained a private torture chamber called "the Red Room" in a building disguised as an electrical-power plant along the Tigris River; that Saddam's army retains "professional rapists"; and that inmates in the "casket prison" in Baghdad are kept "in rows of rectangular steel boxes, as found in mortuaries;" which are opened for only half an hour a day until the inmates either confess to crimes or die. --in _Atlantic Monthly_ [January/February 2003] - A U.S. invasion to disarm Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and rebuild a decent Iraqi state would be the mother of all presidential gambles. Anyone who thinks President Bush is doing this for political reasons is nuts. You could do this only if you really believed in it, because Mr. Bush is betting his whole presidency on this war of choice. --Thomas Friedman (1953- ) American journalist. "The Long Bomb", _The New York Times_ [2 March 2003] - ...In all my 38 years, I have never before felt such a sense of personal shock. I am shocked that so many of my friends would rather a brutal dictator remained in power - for that would be the direct consequence if their views won out - than support military action by the United States. I am ashamed that they would rather believe the words of President Saddam Hussein than those of their own Prime Minister [Tony Blair]. I am nauseated that they would rather give succour to evil than think through the implications of their gut feelings. It is a shocking experience to realise that your friends are either mindless, deluded or malevolent. --Stephen Pollard Political columnist. "My address book is the first casualty of war" [18 February 2003] & note: In 1933 Oxford undergraduates, traumatized by a recent war, passed a resolution refusing "in any circumstances to fight for King and Country." Today there is once again dictatorship on the rise, but our pacifists, enervated by affluence rather than scarred by battle, choose street carnival over reasoned debate, and so march in our capitals proclaiming a new Axis of Evil - the democracies of America and Israel, the shared targets of fundamentalist suicide-murderers. --Victor Davis Hanson (1953- ) American military historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. *The Present Farce: Should we laugh or cry as we watch history come full circle?" [28 February 2003] - Katie Couric interview of German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger [NBC Today Show, 26 February 2003. ISCHINGER: I think all of our governments believe that Iraq has produced weapons of mass destruction and that we have to assume that they continue to have weapons of mass destruction. - A graph using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute "How the United States Armed Iraq - Weapons imported by Iraq, 1973-2002" USSR - 57% France - 13% China - 12% Czech. - 7% Poland - 4% Brazil - 2% Egypt, Romania, Denmark, Libya, USA - 1% each --data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in _Weekly Standard_ [14 April 2003] - Let there be no doubt, Iraq retained an active biological-weapons program. Unscom had adequate evidence of such. In 1998, presented with the evidence, the leading biological-weapons experts from the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Ukraine, Romania and Canada all agreed with the Unscom findings and observations. Incredibly, U.S. and British politicians with little or no knowledge of biological weapons and biological warfare are choosing to believe otherwise. --Richard Spertzel Head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom [1994-1999]. [29 June 2003] - I could just about have "got inside" the view--though it wasn't my view--that the war to remove Saddam Hussein's regime should not be supported. Neither Washington nor Baghdad--maybe. But _opposition_ to the war--the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George W. Bush, and so forth--meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children's jails and the mass graves recently uncovered. This was the result that hundreds of thousands of people marched to secure. Well, speaking for myself, comrades, there I draw the line. Not one step. --Norman Geras (1943- ) "A Moral Failure: Why did so many on the left march to save Saddam Hussein?" [4 August 2003] Adapted from a 21 June lecture to the Workers' Liberty summer school, London. - Suppose for an instant that no weapons of mass destruction ever turn up in Iraq. Of course, they might well still appear, but let's imagine that Saddam Hussein did not have an advanced program for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as the missiles to carry them. What would that imply? President Bush's Democratic opponents say it renders the decision to go to war a "fraud" or "hyped." But they miss the point, for there was indeed massive and undisputed evidence to indicate that the Iraqi regime was building WMD. Defectors and other Iraqi sources nearly all agreed on his WMD program. The actions of Saddam's government - fending off United Nations weapons inspectors tooth and nail, hiding evidence, forgoing opportunities to have the economic sanctions lifted - all confirmed its existence. Nor is that all: Rich Lowry of National Review has shown that the entire Clinton administration leadership - as well as the United Nations and the French and German governments - believed in the existence of Iraqi WMD. If no WMD exist, the real mystery is not how the Bush administration made the same mistake everyone else did; the mystery is why Saddam created the false impression that he had them. Why did he put himself into the bizarre position of simultaneously pretending to build WMD and pretending to hide his nonexistent weapons? --Daniel Pipes "WMD Lies", _New York Post_ [7 October 2003] - Here is what was known by 1998 based on Iraq's own admissions: * That in the years immediately prior to the first Gulf War, Iraq produced at least 3.9 tons of VX, a deadly nerve gas, and acquired 805 tons of precursor ingredients for the production of more VX. * That Iraq had produced or imported some 4,000 tons of ingredients to produce other types of poison gas. * That Iraq had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax. * That Iraq had produced 500 bombs fitted with parachutes for the purpose of delivering poison gas or germ payloads. * That Iraq had produced 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas. * That Iraq had produced or imported 107,500 casings for chemical weapons. * That Iraq had produced at least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents. * That Iraq had produced 25 missile warheads containing germ agents (anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum). Again, this list of weapons of mass destruction is not what the Iraqi government was _suspected_ of producing. (That would be a longer list, including an Iraqi nuclear program that the German intelligence service had concluded in 2001 might produce a bomb within three years.) It was what the Iraqis _admitted_ producing. And it is this list of weapons--not any CIA analysis under either the Clinton or Bush administrations--that has been at the heart of the Iraq crisis. --Robert Kagan & William Kristol "Why We Went to War" _The Weekly Standard_ [20 October 2003] - Exacerbating the pain of many Iraqis is a keen awareness of the world's record of apathy toward their plight. "Where were the U.N. and our "fellow Arabs" when we were suffering?" Hasan asked. Where were the peace activists and leftists? How can they all accept the crimes of a dictator for so many years, then rise up in protest when a war begins to remove that dictator?" --Steven Vincent "Faith, Shame, and Insurgency", _Reason_ [March 2004]. Quoting Naseer Hasan, poet and former member of Iraq's national chess team. - Any seasoned reporter covering the Tet offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and presumably retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200 colleges and universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and invidious historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about what led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely. Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed to overwhelm some 70 cities and towns, and 30 other strategic objectives simultaneously. By breaking a previously agreed truce for Tet festivities, master strategist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi calculated that South Vietnamese troops would be caught with defenses down. After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese troops reacted fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some 6,000 casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of their objectives -- except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S. Marines -- but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many wounded. Giap had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble that was also designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals and trigger a popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the world. It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around. As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup documented in "Big Story" -- a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was covered by American reporters -- the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and defectors, the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been set in concrete. [...] With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp. [...] That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an option for Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who called Iraq the president's Vietnam. It is, of course, no such animal. But it could become so if Congressional resolve dissolves. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made clear the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential to our strategy." Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers "gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses." America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin, "because of its democracy. Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win." Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East. --Arnaud de Borchgrave, [Covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under the French and 1972]. "Analysis: A mini-Tet offensive in Iraq?" [6 April 2004] - What then is the truth of this so-often-caricatured war? On the bright side, there has not been another 9/11 mass-murder. And this is due entirely to our increased vigilance, the latitude given our security people by the hated Patriot Act, and the idea that the war (not a DA's inquiry) should be fought abroad not at home. The Taliban was routed and Afghanistan has the brightest hopes in thirty years. Pakistan, so unlike 1998, is not engaged in breakneck nuclear proliferation abroad. Libya claims a new departure from its recent past. Syria fears a nascent dissident movement. Saddam is gone. Iran is hysterical about new scrutiny. American troops are out of Saudi Arabia. True, we are facing various groups jockeying for power in a new Iraq; and the country is still unsettled. Yet millions of Kurds are satisfied and pro-American. Millions more Shiites want political power - and think that they can get it constitutionally through us rather than out of the barrel of a gun following an unhinged thug. After all, any fool who names his troops "Mahdists" is sorely misinformed about the fate of the final resting place of the Great Mahdi, the couplets of Hilaire Beloc, and what happened to thousands of Mahdist zealots at Omdurman. So, we can either press ahead in the face of occasionally bad news from Iraq (though it will never be of the magnitude that once came from Sugar Loaf Hill or the icy plains near the Yalu that did not faze a prior generation's resolve) - or we can withdraw. Then watch the entire three-year process of real improvement start to accelerate in reverse. If after 1975 we thought that over a million dead in Cambodia, another million on rickety boats fleeing Vietnam, another half-million sent to camps or executed, hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in America, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Iranian take-over of the U.S. embassy, oil-embargos, Communist entry into Central America, a quarter-century of continual terrorist attacks, and national invective were bad, just watch the new world emerge when Saddam's Mafioso or Mr. Sadr's Mahdists force our departure. This war was always a gamble, but not for the reasons many Americans think. We easily had, as proved, the military power to defeat Saddam; we embraced the idealism and humanity to eschew realpolitik and offer something different in the place of mass murder. And we are winning on all fronts at a cost that by any historical measure has confirmed both our skill and resolve. But the lingering question - one that has never been answered - was always our attention and will. The administration assumed that in occasional times of the inevitable bad news, we were now more like the generation that endured the surprise of Okinawa and Pusan rather than Tet and Mogadishu. All were bloody fights; all were similarly controversial and unexpected; all were alike proof of the fighting excellence of the American soldiers - but not all were seen as such by Americans. The former were detours on the road to victory and eventual democracy; the latter led to self-recrimination, defeat, and chaos in our wake. The choice between myth and reality is ours once more. --Victor Davis Hanson (1953- ) American military historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Myth or Reality? Will Iraq work? That’s up to us. [23 April 2004] end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos |

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