Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - There are still a thousand reasons why Iraq is NOT Vietnam, but after a year of bitter combat in that place the points of similarity and intersection are growing both in number and intensity, and that's not good news.
My thoughts lately have turned to the words of two wily old warrior-strategists, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap of Vietnam and the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz.
In an early and eerily prescient analysis of the future course of the Viet Minh guerrilla war against the French colonial occupiers, Giap wrote: "The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war."
Giap was right about the French, and the same principle and the same outcome would apply to the American armies that replaced the French armies.
Unless their backs are to the wall, democracies aren't very good at bloody wars of long duration. How much more true that is of 21st century America, whose citizens have come to expect swift, almost bloodless victories. The 100-hour war in the Persian Gulf. The week-long conquest of Panama. The three-week blitzkrieg that took down Saddam Hussein last spring.
But the lightning takedown of Saddam and his regime has morphed into a stubborn, bloody, costly occupation that's producing a stream of flag-draped coffins flowing home to hundreds of grieving American families.
It wasn't the media images or reporting that turned the American people against the war in Vietnam in 1968. It was that stream of coffins coming home to cities, towns and villages all across America. That, and the sense that there was no way out, no point where we could declare victory and go home, no way to end the slaughter that ultimately took the lives of 58,235 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese.
And so we come to Clausewitz, whose name gets mentioned much less in newspaper columns since the passing of Col. Harry Summers, but whose words occasionally are worth reflecting on.
"No one starts a war - or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." The first law of war, according to Clausewitz, written 150 years ago. The first law of war, and we have broken it in Iraq.
If you want another law of war, I would cite a key point of both the (former Secretary of Defense Caspar) Weinberger and (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now Secretary of State Colin) Powell Doctrines: Don't begin a war without first delineating your exit strategy. In other words, think about how you're going to get out BEFORE you get in. We've broken that law, too.
General Vo Nguyen Giap rides in the back of his chauffeur driven car after celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the communist party in Hanoi, Vietnam in February. Now, at 88, the diminutive general remains proud and feisty. "In a little over a decade I will be 100, but my communist spirit remains that of a youth," he said in an interview. JIM GENSHEIMER, San Jose Mercury News
All of this brings to mind the images of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his merry crew of neo-conservatives doing high-fives and victory laps just three weeks into a war that looks as if it could last for years and consume thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars.
Although neither Clausewitz nor Weinberger nor Powell had anything to say about this, I postulate one more law of war: Don't gloat prematurely. It may come back to haunt you.
This week America mourned the death and pondered the life of just one young American, Pat Tillman, who had the courage and character to turn his back on a multimillion-dollar pro football contract to enlist in the U.S. Army and become a Ranger. Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan.
Every week now, two or three dozen other terrific young Americans lay down their precious lives for a country that is content to let them do so, so long as the lives of all the rest of us aren't inconvenienced in any way.
We have the finest military force this nation has ever assembled and trained and equipped. It's without question the most powerful and most lethal army in the world. It's officered and staffed by a different breed of young Americans, many of whom seek to give something back to a nation now hardly deserving of their sacrifice. Our Army is full of young men and women like Pat Tillman, and unlike the war against al-Qaida in which he died, the Bush administration's crusade in Iraq is not worth the life of even one of them. Not one.
