Reply #34: Yeah. There are worse. Henry Kissinger and all his people. [View All]

Kissinger's Bad Advice on Iraq

By Ivan Eland
October 3, 2006
Consortiumnews.com

Editor's Note: As the situation in Iraq steadily worsens, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has emerged as a White House adviser, urging George W. Bush to resist calls for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. The question now is whether Kissinger is charting the same disastrous course for a prolonged war as he did in Vietnam.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland examines whether Kissinger is the right man to have the President's ear at this dangerous moment:

The bellwether of the cautious establishment press, Bob Woodward, has finally unloaded both barrels on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, in his new book, State of Denial.

The media hoopla surrounding the book has focused mainly on the administration’s deceptions surrounding the sorry state of affairs in Iraq and Andrew Card’s attempts, with the apparent blessing of Laura Bush, to get Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired. Neither of these facts is surprising.

The real surprise in Woodward’s book has received less attention:  The Bush administration’s main advisor during the war has been Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger, according to Woodward’s book, apparently has convinced the Bush White House that any troop withdrawals from Iraq will start a wave of public pressure to pull out all U.S. forces from Iraq. He is probably right in this analysis.

But Kissinger missed the main lesson of Vietnam and is now missing it in Iraq. As the U.S. generals in Iraq know, killing more Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militiamen than the United States loses of its own troops will not win a war that is fundamentally political.

As Lieutenant General William Odom (Ret.), former Director of the National Security Agency and opponent of the war, has noted, the Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate and the United States will eventually be forced to withdraw from Iraq. So withdrawing sooner, rather than later, according to Odom, will save U.S. lives and money and salvage what international prestige the United States has left.

If Nixon and Kissinger had followed similar advice in Vietnam, the United States, its military, and its international standing would not have been tarnished by four additional years of war. And even worse than Vietnam, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq is fueling and worsening the Islamic terrorist threat to the United States, according to an estimate from Bush’s own intelligence agencies.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/100206a.html