"What are we doing here?" Iraq echoes Viet Nam.

Airborne Staff Sergeant David Safstrom is on his third tour as a member of the Airborne in Iraq. It is his first time to question whether there is any value in what he is doing there.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness. (New York Times.)

The quagmire of Iraq is not the same as the one in which we once fought in Viet Nam, but there are echoes. Lots of echoes. Big echoes.

A buddy of mine once commanded a supply company in Long Binh, staffed by a mixture of Americans and South Vietnamese. He said the Vietnamese were generally the better workers, more motivated and more efficient. The senior Vietnamese employee was also a friend of his. My buddy felt that we were making real progress there - until one evening he went to town and stumbled on a Communist rally which his highest ranking Vietnamese worker was leading. Not only could my buddy not trust our allies, he couldn't even trust his friends.

Lyndon Johnson didn't invade South Viet Nam. It was Eisenhower who committed the U.S. to military support of the South Vietnamese government when the French pulled out in 1954. It was a political decision, since leaving Viet Nam would have been described by the conservative right-wingers a "Losing Viet Nam, just as they were still blaming Truman and the Democrats for "losing China" in 1948. Then when it came time in 1956 for the scheduled vote in South Viet Nam on whether South Viet Nam would be reunified with North Viet Nam, Ike could not permit it to take place. It was clear that the South Vietnamese would vote to unify with North Viet Nam, and 1956 was a Presidential election year.

This was high "Joe McCarthy" time. Like now, the radical American right was in the ascendant. At some point during this period of the 1950's the John birch Society even called Ike a Communist. America's radical right had veto power over ending unnecessary wars. (Note the "echo.")

So Viet Nam became a tar-baby. Once America had grabbed hold it became politically impossible to let it go. Ike couldn't ignore the Conservative right-wingers and pull out, so he handed Viet Nam off to his Democratic successor, John Kennedy. Still, it wasn't a major commitment of American troops in 1961. It was more like the current American involvement in Colombia. But it remained unwinnable. Kennedy even sponsored a coup which removed the corrupt South Vietnamese leader and replaced him with a military dictator in hopes that corruption would be reduced and Viet Nam would become more unified fighting the Viet Cong. That didn't work either. (The corruption of the government is another echo.)

Lyndon Johnson was also unable to face up to the American radical right wing. His White House tapes have him recorded as admitting that we could not win there, but he could not politically face the threat of right-wing accusations that he had "lost" Viet Nam to the Communists. So he listened to Gen. Westmoreland and attempted a "surge" in 1965. (Another echo.)

Only he had a draft in place, so his "surge" could get a lot larger than Bush/Cheney's has been. It reached half a million military men. The substitute that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld have used is to have 100,000 contractors substitute for combat soldiers. Still, that places this current "surge" at about 160,000 military and 100,000 contractors (including Blackwater) for a total of 260,000 Americans. The population of South Viet Nam in 1960 was 17,333,000 and of North Viet Nam was 21,154,000. Half a million was not enough to win Viet Nam, and 260,000 are not enough to win in Iraq. (Echo?)

Neither LBJ nor George W. Bush found it politically possible to mobilize America for a real war. For LBJ it was "Guns and Butter." For Bush it has been "Support the troops. Display a ribbon." But at least LBJ passed a 10% surtax to try to pay the costs. Didn't work, as the inflation fought by Nixon, Ford and Carter demonstrated, but at least he had the good sense to try. Bush hasn't even tried, instead leaving the Federal Reserve to manipulate the money supply and depress the economy to prevent inflation. (Echo? We'll see.)

Bush 41 could have invaded Iraq as the tracks of the Persian Gulf War swept across the sands towards Baghdad, but as he explained in his book, the potential cost was not worth what little could be gained. Dick Cheney and the NeoCons obviously disagreed, so the moment they got a pliable and ignorant George W. Bush into office they took the opportunity to continue the Persian Gulf War by invading Iraq. A major part of this appears to have been an effort to erase the stigma of having "Lost" the war in Viet Nam. They were trying to prove that America was no longer bound up in what the conservatives call "The Viet Nam Syndrome." Rather than being an echo of the Viet Nam War, this seems to be the same set of right-wingers attempting to correct what they saw as a mistake when we left Southeast Asia without a clear victory. This has not been an echo of viet Nam so much as refusing to learn from their mistakes and making the same mistake twice.

Whatever the excuse for invading Iraq in the first place, it has clearly not been worth the cost for at a minimum the last three years. But like in Viet Nam, the American right-wingers have defined leaving without victory (which they never define) as losing, so they have to stay. (Yep. Another echo. A real big one this time.)

That kept Americans fighting an unwinnable war in Viet Nam for two decades before we saw that the French had been correct in leaving in 1954. Cheney has already promised the King of Saudi Arabia that America will be in Iraq 18 months from now, and it is clear that Bush intends to pass this abortion of a war off to his Democratic successor when the new President is sworn in January 2009. Then, of course, the "Who lost Iraq" cry will ring from the rafters as the right-wingers blame the person who pulls the troops out of Iraq for losing the damned war we never should have started in the first place. (More echoes. It is domestic politics that keep us there, not the war itself.)

How long - and for how many American lives - do we let these right-wing power fantasies keep us stuck in an unwinnable and unnecessary war in Iraq?

We're going to miss David Halberstam.

I wasn't sure what I could write here that was worthy of who David Halberstam was, but now that I have gathered my thoughts, perhaps this will help people who didn't read his dispatches out of Viet Nam. He understood what we were really doing there.

The only reason were were in Viet Nam at all is that the French pulled out, partitioned the nation, and set a national referendum to take place on reunification for 1956. This was the very height of the Red Scare from Anti-Communist American Conservatives and John Birchers, so Ike could not permit the referendum to occur. The South would approve reunification, and Ike would have to face the screams of "Who Lost Viet Nam" from the same people who were still yelling "Who Lost China." The American conservatives were convinced that Communism was a unitary ideology, and that all Communists were focused on destroying America as the center of Capitalism. This was a major element of the Domino Theory that was used to justify American involvement in Viet Nam after the French wised up and got out.

In hindsight it is now clear that the fiction of a unitary Communist front concealed the many and very powerful splits among Communist nations, not the least being that Ho Chi Minh was not going to let Chinese Communists dominate Viet Nam any more than he was gong to let the French, Japanese or Americans. In fact, the Chinese were the first, great enemy. The Vietnamese had been fighting them for over a thousand years.

Based on the Domino Theory and the fiction of a unitary Communist Front as an explanation for how we Americans were involved, President Eisenhower prevented the Referendum from occurring and sent in large numbers of military advisers to try to develop an effective South Vietnamese Army to support and legitimize the government of the Republic of Viet Nam. Then in 1961 Ike handed this can of worms off to Kennedy. David Halberstam was sent by the New York Times around that time to write about those worms and make sense of what was happening.

Halberstam later said that he expected to find that we were the good guys, that we were in a good fight, and that as the Generals kept telling us, we were winning. It would just take time. What he found when he compared what the guys on the ground said to what the Generals were saying was quite different.

Halberstam later wrote that the Vietnamese were willing to send every single Vietnamese in the country to their death to defeat the occupying America, just as they had been to defeat the Japanese and the French before us. The only way for America to win in Viet Nam was for us to kill everyone there. We weren't willing to do that, particularly since they were no real threat to us.

The only other way for America to win in Viet Nam was to so demoralize those who were fighting us that they would give up and at the same time create a nation in South Viet Nam with a legitimate government that had broad acceptance. That was never going to happen, particularly since the government of RVN was controlled largely by Catholics. The South Vietnamese were not going to somehow accept a government imposed on them by foreigners, no matter who the foreigners were.

Tet was proof that we couldn't win the war. In January 1968 we won Tet militarily, hands down. We destroyed the Viet Cong command structure. So the North Vietnamese stepped in and replaced it, then the Vietnamese kept on fighting. It was the worst defeat we could impose on the insurgents, and they simply absorbed it and kept fighting.

Halberstam got that. He saw how the U.S. military command was fooling itself with its little wins into thinking that the war could be won, but it couldn't. [Read "We were soldiers once, ... and young." or watch the movie and pay close attention to the epilogue. The battle for Ia Drang was November 1965.]

Halberstam figured out the lay of the land early on. The American Right-wingers don't have it yet. The 'wingers are still blaming others for the defeat in Viet Nam, when the truth was and remains that Vietnamese nationalism defeated American militarism.

The 'Wingers are even today blind people complaining because someone with functioning eyes told them to avoid the chasm. The 'wingers then went into the chasm anyway in spite of warnings. Now they want to blame the seeing people for stabbing them in the back. They don't like Halberstam because he warned them.

I don't blame the 'wingers too much. I'm a Viet Nam era vet, pre-baby boomer, and until the late 70's I blamed the press (especially TV) for our "loss" in Viet Nam. So I tried to figure out how we could have won. David was right. We couldn't have. Not without killing most Vietnamese. And we would have won --- nothing. The only way to win in Viet Nam was for us to get out. But that does not match the 'wingers definition of winning. To them "leaving" is "losing."

The basic importance of the fight is less important than the fight itself. That makes quitting the fight the same as losing. As long as the fight goes on, we have not lost, and all the American dead and wounded are heroes.

We are faced with much the same decisions and attitudes today in Iraq. Our methods of mass killing of opposing armies are ineffective against insurgents operating in small groups without uniforms and we don’t have enough trustworthy troops to literally blanket the country. We can’t break their will to fight through overpowering, demoralizing destruction. We can't create an acceptable government and impose it on them, and any efforts we make to prop up the Iraqi government are seen as imposing a foreign government on the Iraqi nation.

We also can’t outlast the insurgents because they frankly don’t have anything we want that bad. The insurgents understand that, and they prove how serious they are every time they send a suicide bomber to kill our troops or other Iraqis. If they were likely to run out of suicide bombers, maybe we could outlast them. I see no indication that they will run out of suicide bombers. In fact our very methods of warfare alienate the population and create ever more committed insurgents and suicide bombers. That is a prescription by which we can win every battle and still lose the war.

If it really mattered, like defeating the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland mattered to the British or defeating the Basque terrorists matter to the Spanish government, we could outlast them. But the Spaniards and British are not foreigners imposing a foreign regime on a nationalist country as we are in Iraq. There is nothing to be won by us in Iraq for which my grandchildren should still be fighting there twenty years from now, just as there was nothing to be won in Viet Nam.

If we get out now, perhaps in a generation we can get a relationship with the new Iraq (or Iraq nations) that is as good as we now have with Viet Nam. Maybe. Depends on the Iraqi people more than on us.

The alternative is that we will still be killing and our troops dying there in a generation.

Note: none of this has anything to do with the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. To them, Iraq is a side issue, but it is a place they can send or support a few combatants while bleeding the American military of both the ability and the will to fight. At the same time and at a very low price to our real enemies, the Americans are being forced to lose credibility world wide while al Qaeda gains credibility. Our government has become a group of self-centered incompetent corrupt fools out for their own gain, and totally unresponsive to what the American population wants. Conservatives have lost all credibility with most of the American population. The war in Iraq has brought all this about at a very small cost to the terrorists who have been trying to stoke up the sectarian warfare in Iraq.

David Halberstam was one who recognized this pattern of conservatives in the Viet Nam War. The conservatives refused then to recognize what Halberstam wrote. So now we are living thorough it again, brought in large part to us by retreads from the Nixon administration who refused to recognize the real cost/benefit calculus of the Viet Nam War. Same pattern. Different enemy. Different part of the world. But it's the fight that matters to the 'wingers. They'll keep sending soldiers to kill and die just so they can keep on bragging "We're number one!!" and they'll continue to define getting out of Iraq as defeat.

The conservatives won't forgive Halberstam for being correct.