Far graver than Vietnam
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
The Guardian -- Thursday September 16, 2004

Sidney Blumenthal

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

[...]

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, how is [it] better? [I was] with a Marine group when they first went into Iraq back in May and April in which time after a month they lost no soldiers at all through the combat. I went back a year ago and we lost 8 guys within a two-week span. A couple of questions. We still continue to sort of refer to May 2003 as the end of major combat and I’m not clear on that and the second thing is why do you think it is that we haven’t been able to make Iraq more secure. Every soldier I talk to and that’s my own personal experience, every soldier I talk to or marine say that it’s much more frightening now, it’s tougher now, we’re taking more combat now and the latest reports seem that we have less security now than we did say a year ago.

RUMSFELD: Thank you. We did lose lives during major combat operation. Major combat operation is just that — it involved the air and the land and the sea and it was opposing organized armies and elements of the Iraqi armed forces. That ended and major combat ended and what we have been in since that period has been an insurgency. And the reason it’s tough and the reason we’re losing lives is because an insurgency is an ugly business.

[ ... ]

I’m very encouraged about it. I think that the United States and the coalition countries, of course, unlike other countries we have no desire to stay there or to be there at all other than to help that country get on it’s feet. We’re in the processing of doing that and they’re making good progress politically. They’re making progress economically. The schools are open. The hospitals are open. They have a stock market functioning. They sent some teams to the Olympics. They have a symphony and at the same time, amidst all those good things that are happening, people are being killed. Iraqis are being killed, as they were yesterday and the day before. At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country.

Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004