Iraq War: The Stars and Stripes on soldiers' morale

I just want to mention again the series in the armed services paper Stars and Stripes about troop morale in Iraq. It would be naive to say it was done without an awareness of the current disputes over the Iraq War. But the reader can get at least some glimpses of the morale situation without it being first filtered and "spun" through political and PR slogans.

It's especially interesting to read the full text of this interview with Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top officer commanding American forces in Iraq, and then to compare what the news article summarizing the interview selected out of the interview.

This is one passage that stands out to me in the full interview (my emphasis):

[Stars and Stripes]: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you're the first officer to lead V Corps who is not a Vietnam veteran. Still, I imagine you have been a student of that war on more on more than a few occasions. What lessons from Vietnam should we remember in Iraq?

[Sanchez]: I think the key is that the only way we're going to fail here in this country is by walking away from Iraq. The defeat in Vietnam was because we walked away from it. We can't afford to retreat back. I firmly believe that this is one of the battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism and it will continue - there's a long road ahead.

This is a version of the Vietnam stab-in-the-back theory that has become widely accepted among military officers. The idea is that the Army could eventually have beaten the Viet Cong/National Liberation Front in Vietnam if "the media" and "the politicians" back home hadn't lost their determination.

To call this a half-truth or a quarter-truth would be to misconstrue it. It's an ideological reading of the Vietnam experience that allowed the Army to stick with its orientation toward conventional "mid-level" conflict, and try to avoid guerrilla wars.

Avoiding guerrilla wars is great as long as it's consistent with America's national security. But now the Army is in the middle of one.

Tags: iraq war, ricardo sanchez, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war