David Ignatius: Iraq strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success?
It's a telling fact that the hot book among Iraq strategists this season is "A Better War," an upbeat account of American counterinsurgency policy in the last years of the Vietnam conflict. I noticed that Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid was reading it when I traveled with him in September. The influential State Department counselor Philip Zelikow read the book earlier this year.
Perhaps it's a measure of just how bad things are going in Iraq that the strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success. But it's interesting that the Iraq team, like their predecessors in Vietnam, is getting serious about counterinsurgency doctrine after making costly initial mistakes.
"A Better War" was published in 1999 by Lewis Sorley, a former military and intelligence officer. It drew on an extensive collection of documents and tape recordings from the legendary Army warrior, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. The book's contrarian argument is that after Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland -- and scuttled his "search and destroy" tactics in favor of a pacification strategy of "clear and hold" -- the Vietnam War began to go right.
By Mr. Sorley's account, it was politics back in America that turned victory into defeat. That seems to me a considerable stretch but Mr. Sorley offers some fascinating evidence that Abrams' strategy was working better than is generally understood. He quotes William Colby, who ran the pacification effort: "By 1972, the pacification program had essentially eliminated the guerrilla problem in most of the country."
What caught my eye in Mr. Sorley's book was the phrase "clear and hold." For the words appeared in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Oct. 19 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions," she said.
In Vietnam, Abrams' version of "clear and hold" replaced Westmoreland's ruinous idea that with ever larger U.S. troop levels and a bigger "body count," the U.S. could bleed its adversary into submission. Abrams' approach included a sharp drawdown in U.S. troops, an emphasis on training and advising local security forces, a focus on securing the capital, stress on intelligence operations over main-force battles and interdicting enemy supply lines from neighboring countries. The same factors are evident in planning for the Iraqi version of "clear, hold and build."...
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Perhaps it's a measure of just how bad things are going in Iraq that the strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success. But it's interesting that the Iraq team, like their predecessors in Vietnam, is getting serious about counterinsurgency doctrine after making costly initial mistakes.
"A Better War" was published in 1999 by Lewis Sorley, a former military and intelligence officer. It drew on an extensive collection of documents and tape recordings from the legendary Army warrior, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. The book's contrarian argument is that after Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland -- and scuttled his "search and destroy" tactics in favor of a pacification strategy of "clear and hold" -- the Vietnam War began to go right.
By Mr. Sorley's account, it was politics back in America that turned victory into defeat. That seems to me a considerable stretch but Mr. Sorley offers some fascinating evidence that Abrams' strategy was working better than is generally understood. He quotes William Colby, who ran the pacification effort: "By 1972, the pacification program had essentially eliminated the guerrilla problem in most of the country."
What caught my eye in Mr. Sorley's book was the phrase "clear and hold." For the words appeared in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Oct. 19 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions," she said.
In Vietnam, Abrams' version of "clear and hold" replaced Westmoreland's ruinous idea that with ever larger U.S. troop levels and a bigger "body count," the U.S. could bleed its adversary into submission. Abrams' approach included a sharp drawdown in U.S. troops, an emphasis on training and advising local security forces, a focus on securing the capital, stress on intelligence operations over main-force battles and interdicting enemy supply lines from neighboring countries. The same factors are evident in planning for the Iraqi version of "clear, hold and build."...