Measuring Progress in Iraq - Metrics have their drawbacks, but we need to keep politicians honest...

Metrics have their drawbacks, but we need to keep politicians honest in this debate.

In conventional warfare, it is fairly obvious if a war is being won. Movement of the front lines, industrial production of war material and logistical sustainability of forces in the field provide fairly clear standards by which to assess trends. But counterinsurgency and stabilization operations like the ones in Iraq are much more complex. How do we measure progress in such a situation? The administration has just done so on an interim basis. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will be asked to do so again in September, just before the expected showdown between Congress and President Bush over the 2008 war budget.

This is a hard challenge because metrics are easily misused. In Vietnam, for example, we were convinced that there would be a "crossover point" in attrition of the Viet Cong. If we could manage to kill enough of them, say 50,000 a year, their recruiting efforts would not be able to keep pace, and the combined American and South Vietnamese forces would ultimately prevail. That led to a focus on massive firepower that killed huge numbers of innocents and failed to achieve its military objective.

Our conviction that the Viet Cong needed hundreds or thousands of tons of supplies daily led to additional bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and ultimately Cambodia as well--again to no avail, as it turned out that the Viet Cong in South Vietnam needed very little outside help. Our focus on supporting a government with strong anti-communist credentials led to dependency on a corrupt regime with limited legitimacy among its own people. Our hopes of sparking GDP growth in Vietnam were dashed because the country's economic successes were enjoyed by only a small fraction of the...

That led to a focus on massive firepower that killed huge numbers of innocents and failed to achieve its military objective.

Not true. The massive bombing of North Vietnam is what brought them to the table and is the only thing that made them willing to make concessions. Our POWs in the Hanoi Hilton cheered when they heard the bombs dropping.

Again, this is just not true. Destroying their large supply depots inside Cambodia was quite effective. The problem was we should have been doing it regularly. The North Vietnamese for all intents and purposes annexed that part of Cambodia (parrot's beak, fish hook) but the liberals in the US prevented US and South Vietnam from attacking there. After the Tet Offensive destroyed much of the Viet Cong, the effort against the South was sustained nearly entirely by "outside help" from the North. Furthermore, we now know from post-war history such as NVA General Giap's memoirs that this distinction liberals always drew between the "native" Viet Cong and the northern NVA, as if they were separate, was false and the Viet Cong were in fact being controlled and supported from the North.

Our focus on supporting a government with strong anti-communist credentials led to dependency on a corrupt regime with limited legitimacy among its own people.

Actually Diem had much more "legitimacy" than JFK and the liberals believed when they conspired to have him "removed." We now know that much of the "oppression" of the Buddhists, which was made so much of by the liberal US press at the time, was contrived propaganda stunts by the communists.

Our hopes of sparking GDP growth in Vietnam were dashed because the country's economic successes were enjoyed by only a small fraction of the population.

It was no different in South Korea. Or Japan for that matter in the immediate post-war period. Why do liberals expect an economy to thrive on a broad basis in a war zone?

Finally, our focus on enlarging and equipping South Vietnamese security forces could not compensate for their qualitative deficiencies.

In fact, what was demonstrated after major US ground forces had been withdrawn was that the South Vietnamese, if supported with supplies and US air cover, could repel and reverse a major invasion from the North. What happened in 1975 was that the liberals in the US Congress reduced the supplies to the South to far below what was necessary for combat operations and refused to allow US forces to provide air cover. The result was thus foreordained by the liberals in Congress, who must bear their share of the responsibility for the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who fled their homes in the bloodbath which followed in SE Asia.

If these authors are so wrong about what happened in Vietnam, why should anyone take seriously what they now say about Iraq?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.