IRAQ is Nearing its Second Tipping Point! It Is Vietnam All Over Again!

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VIEW: Iraq nears its second tipping point —Ahmad Faruqui

Another major reason for the American defeat in Vietnam was that the war was fought without a clearly defined objective. Interviews revealed that 70 percent of the senior American officers in the field did not know the war’s objective. One can presume that the senior American officers in Iraq are no wiser

About midway during the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, a spokesman for the Bush administration said that Iraq had reached a tipping point since large numbers of Saddam’s forces had begun to desert the battlefield. Two and a half years later, Iraq is nearing a second tipping point and this one deals with the American presence in Iraq. The war in Iraq, which had supposedly ended when President George Bush declared, “mission accomplished”, on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, now resembles the Vietnam War.

There are some who believe that the US had kicked the Vietnam syndrome after the Gulf War in 1991. But, as British historian Niall Ferguson notes in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire”, the American electorate has become more sensitive to war casualties since then. Between April and October 2003, an incremental 350 American war deaths brought about a 29 percent drop in the support of the Iraq war in America. In Vietnam, it took more than 30,000 war deaths and around three years to cause a similar drop in public opinion.

Support for the Iraq war among the American people has continued to fall. A primary factor behind the decline in public support for the war is the rising number of American casualties, which now include 2,100 killed and some 16,000 wounded. About two-thirds of Americans are opposed to President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, 60 percent feel it was a mistake to go to war in the first place, 52 percent would like the troops to be brought home in the next 12 months and, more tellingly, 50 percent think the US won’t win the war. Of the last mentioned group, not all assert that the US cannot militarily win the war but all agree that the US no longer has the will to win it.


http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005%5C11%5C27%5Cstory_27-11-2005_pg3_6