a tunnel at the end of the tunnel

In Iraq, we are the new Hessians - Pete McCloskey

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 / SF CHRONICLE


Watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his generals defend their policies before a Senate committee recalls another brilliant and persuasive predecessor and his subordinates defending their policies in Vietnam. For six years, they spoke of "a light at the end of the tunnel," that we should stay the course, that "We can't just cut and run." After 58,000 American dead and 153,000 wounded, we finally learned that our confidence in those leaders was sadly misplaced.

Then, as now, we were trying to build a new democratic nation for which we had trained an army half again the size of that of their adversaries.

Then, as now, it was difficult for military leaders to speak out against a policy American soldiers and Marines were doing their best to carry out. Former Marine Commandant David Shoup, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his valor in World War II, had the courage to say that the war was a terrible mistake, but was castigated for criticizing military decisions and leadership while Marines were fighting and dying.

Then, as now, Congress had been led into authorizing a war because of deception by a president. Then, it was a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. Now, it was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and a nonexistent conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In both cases, an American president and secretary of defense sincerely believed that a war was in our best interests, and that initiating that war justified deceiving the American people.

Sadly, then and now, Marines and soldiers were dying and being maimed for life because leaders at the Pentagon and in the White House, many of whom had never experienced combat themselves, were confidently claiming that they were building a new democratic nation, that they could see victory on the horizon, and, deliberately or implicitly, that it was unpatriotic to suggest otherwise.

Today, it is argued that it would be premature to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis before we have trained an Iraqi army and police force capable of sustaining a "democratic" Iraqi government. But what Iraqi leader, put in power and maintained by the American military, can expect support from Iraqis in the future? No occupying power can become beloved while it destroys cities and neighborhoods to root out local insurgents. In Vietnam, we sought to win the minds and hearts of the people only to learn that this could not be done while destroying their villages and countryside. Does this not seem reasonably parallel to the situation we face in Iraq?

Now, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, our leaders believe in and have staked their reputations on the principle that we can successfully occupy a country whose history, culture and religions are alien to ours. Have they forgotten our own sense of outrage when the British brought in the hated Hessians to put down our own insurgency back in 1776, the anniversary of which we will shortly celebrate? I suspect that the brave young men and women now fighting in Iraq would be the first to rebel against any foreign force occupying Texas, Kansas or California. No matter how many successful sweeps of insurgent strongholds and weapons caches or young Iraqis imprisoned, I doubt that American firepower can ever permanently overcome the rage for revenge on the part of young men who see us as the hated Hessians of our time.

So it seems proper for our best minds and statesmen to debate publicly the wisdom of continuing military occupation of Iraq until those whom we put and sustain in power feel that the Iraqi army and police are "ready." Who can be sure that such an army and police force will be loyal to whomever may happen to be elected, or that a brutal civil war is not a necessity of our blunders? It is wholly proper to suggest that our neocon civilian leadership has simply been dead wrong in its assumptions and conviction that American military power should be projected abroad in the manner we have pursued in Iraq. In no way should this be considered an unpatriotic debate.

Robert McNamara was fully as intelligent and persuasive as Rumsfeld. Then, as now, most members of Congress had little military experience, and were extremely anxious that their sons not suffer. Is it any different today? I can identify no neocon leader who has served in a shooting war, or who indeed made any effort to so serve in the wars of his own youth.

Let us then not shy from a free, open and reasoned debate as to whether Americans should tell our leaders that it is time to commence an orderly withdrawal from our position as a military occupier of Iraq. As in Vietnam, we might consider the possibility that trying to insert American values and processes at the barrel of a gun may simply not be possible. The most terrible weaponry in history may not be able to overcome the historic desire of a people to be free of foreign domination. Iraq should be for the Iraqis, whatever they may try to resolve from the chaos we have created there.

Pete McCloskey, a farmer in Yolo County, was a Marine Reserve lieutenant colonel in 1967, the year he was elected to Congress from San Mateo County as the first Republican opposing the Vietnam War. During the Korean War, he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.