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Since critics always evoke Vietnam, we should carefully examine its three phases: (1) 1963-1969, a phase of constant troop increases; (2) 1970-73, a phase of a steady downsizing of the American presence as Vietnamization took hold and counterinsurgency improved; (3) 1974-5, a phase of abandonment of the South Vietnamese government, followed by the conventional victory of the Communists. The second phase was the wisest course and should be the closest to our present strategy.
One can see why our military would expect 500,000 Americans to battle a North Vietnamese army of one million, with Soviet and Chinese advisors manning batteries in the North, along with another couple of hundred thousand Viet Cong guerrillas in the South.
Even generous estimates of the number of insurgents in Iraq conclude there are about 10,000 active killers - a fraction of just the irregulars in the south of Vietnam alone. Why then, when the numerical disparities are so much more favorable to our cause than during the Vietnam War, are we, rather than our vastly outnumbered enemies, lamenting the paucity of troops? That we have not secured the country may be due to the limitations put on our soldiers rather than their number; and to our preference for conventional rather than counter-insurgency fighting....Any gain from having more military forces "freed" from Iraq to face crises elsewhere would be vastly overshadowed by the far greater number of new crises that would soon arise - once Iranians, Syrians, Chinese, North Koreans, and the new Latin American Communists sought to emulate the successful Iraqi formula of defeating and humiliating the U. S. military.
...So yes, let us talk about sending more troops, or taking them out altogether, or cry about bad news coverage. But the truth is that, if they were given more tactical leeway to go on the offensive, we would already have enough soldiers in Iraq to win a victory that even a hostile media will have to acknowledge and enemies watching must respect - but only if we persevere here at home in this latest climate of renewed hysteria.
Hanson brilliantly brings a historical perspective to an analysis of today's MSM:
...Third, what does unbalanced reporting really mean? We all harp that the media - specifically, the wire services, network television, and the international stations like the BBC and CNN - all focused on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the carnage left by IEDs and suicide bombers, and the allegations against the Marines at Haditha, and neglected entirely the damage we did to the terrorists and Islamic fascists, or the singularity of seeing parliaments in places like Kabul and Baghdad.
But the important question left unspoken is Why? Was the unbalanced converge, in the case of leftwing elites in the American media, a simple effort to embarrass Republican policy, allowing more sympathetic Democrats to regain power? In the case of the envious European media, was it to take down the Americans a notch or two to remind us that we are not as powerful as we think?
...One can grasp that generic hypocrisy by reviewing all the journalists' charges leveled against Gulf War I - too much realpolitik; too much pay-as-you-go war thinking; too much Colin Powell and James Baker and not enough Paul Wolfowitz; too much worry about stability and not enough about millions of poor Kurds and Shiites; too much worry about empowering Iran. Then compare those charges to those leveled against Gulf War II - too much naïve idealism; too much expense in lives and treasure; not enough Colin Powell and James Baker and too much Paul Wolfowitz; too little worry about regional stability and too much given to ungovernable Iraqis; and too little thought about empowering Iran.
The one common denominator? Whatever the United States does is suspect; and journalists without responsibility for governance, either for setting policy or for its implementation, are always brighter than generals, politicians, and policy planners saddled with it.
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