Forward Observer: Distant Replay

On Oct. 19, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "how we assure victory in Iraq. With the Iraqi government, our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and build: To clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and to build durable national Iraqi institutions."

Not one senator raised a single question about this newest administration strategy for winning in Iraq, despite the fact that the same plan was tried early on in the Vietnam War -- and it failed. Other names for the "clear, hold and build" plan have been the "ink blot" strategy and "enclave" warfare.

In the mid-1960s, Marine leaders announced they were going to employ the ink blot strategy to pacify their operational area of South Vietnam, the northernmost part of the country called I Corps. Their idea was to put their boots on the ground in one small but important area, make it safe for farmers and everybody else to carry on their daily working and living and then expand the pacified area like a spreading ink blot.

To understand the biggest flaw in this strategy, imagine trying to make the most dangerous area of Washington crime free. It would require putting a cop on patrol on almost every street, night and day. The D.C. police department would run out of cops if it tried to expand the secure zone. This is what happened to the Marines' ink blot strategy in I Corps. They didn't have enough troops to expand the ink blot.

Rice told the unquestioning senators the U.S.-trained Iraqi army and police force would spread the ink blots. This sounds good, especially since such a takeover would enable U.S. troops to come home. But I saw for myself, during combat reporting tours for The Washington Post in Vietnam in 1968 and 1972, the difference between such Washington rhetoric and the reality on the ground. The same gap looms in Iraq.

Many South Vietnamese troops the United States trained and equipped were more loyal to their village leaders than the central, ever-changing Saigon government. They tipped off the enemy to almost every military operation before it commenced and pinpointed key targets, such as fuel and ammunition dumps.

The same splintered loyalties run through the U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, virtually guaranteeing the same frustrations and disasters during "clear, hold and build" -- even if U.S. military units continue working with Iraqi units.

I recall, for example, how angry and frustrated Lt. Col. John Keeley sounded when I camped out with him and his infantry battalion at their outpost on the rice-producing delta of South Vietnam during the war. To make it look like their war, ground rules required Keeley to get permission from South Vietnamese politicians before he could fire his artillery batteries, even when the lives of his own men were at stake.

One night he radioed the village and province chiefs for that permission so artillery, not his own riflemen hiding in the elephant grass, could stop a sabotage attack. Permission denied. Why? Keeley never found out but suspected the local pols were not loyal to Saigon's government and certainly not Washington's.

I saw in Vietnam another downside of building schools and other such do-good projects as soon as an area was cleared of insurgents and held -- for the moment. The insurgents made a point of sneaking in at night and blowing up those success stories. The smoking ruins often filled television screens back in the states, making citizens and their hired hands in Congress wonder if Vietnamization was worth its cost.

Like President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today, President Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird decided in 1969 that there was no way to put enough U.S. troops on the disputed ground to make it safe to build on. And they had 536,000 American troops on the ground in Vietnam at their disposal compared to the 138,000 in Iraq now. The South Vietnamese military expanded from 820,000 to 1.1 million soldiers between 1969 and 1973 under Vietnamization, while U.S. forces went down to a mere handful.

To this day, Laird believes Vietnamization would have succeeded -- that North Vietnam would not have taken over South Vietnam in 1975 -- if Congress had not lost heart and cut off the money the South Vietnamese military needed to stay in the fight. Breaking a long silence, Laird spells this out in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, along with advising Bush and Rumsfeld to level with the U.S. people about what is at stake in Iraq and how they intend to get the troops out of there.

Given the similar perils of Vietnamization and Iraqization, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would do all of us a favor if it called Laird to testify in an open session.

When you look at it hard, Iraqization is the only exit sign flashing for Bush and company. They stiffed armed allies before they invaded Iraq and cannot expect them to send in significant numbers of troops to help pacify Iraq now. Neither Congress nor the governors, who are tired of their National Guard units being sent to Iraq, would support a much bigger U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Unless the administration does a better job of explaining its "clear, hold and build" strategy as part of Iraqization and steels the public against its inevitable and photogenic reverses, Iraqization will fail like Vietnamization before it, perhaps triggering a civil war.