Word: vietnamize
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...with America's ally the Shah of Iran under siege, President Jimmy Carter asked a former diplomat named George Ball to study the situation and recommend a course of action. Ball's chief qualification was that he, more than any other high-level U.S. official, had been right about Vietnam--from early on, he had warned it would be a quagmire. Ball accepted Carter's offer but refused to visit Iran. In the 1960s he had watched one colleague after another set off on fact-finding missions to Vietnam, and each returned convinced that America could...
Barack Obama should keep Ball in mind as he mulls John McCain's suggestion of a joint visit to Iraq. Ball understood something important: that when you take a guided tour, your tour guide decides what you see. In Iraq today, as in Vietnam back then, the tour guides are America's officers and diplomats on the ground. And in Iraq, as in Vietnam, they have an incentive to show good news--which isn't always the same as the truth...
This is not to say the security improvements in Iraq are illusory. It's just that the war's realities are too elusive to grasp on a brief trip led by people with a vested interest in what you see. In Vietnam, the wisest U.S. officials sought out journalists like David Halberstam and Bernard Fall who had spent years traveling the country, and former diplomats and military officers who had the freedom to say what they really believed. And even that kind of granular, uninhibited knowledge isn't much help without a larger view of the world. McCain thinks winning...
...killed by an assassin 40 years ago this month, in June 1968. I remember it well; I was a student finishing my first year of graduate work at Harvard and it had already been a tumultuous semester. In January, the Viet Cong had struck hard against U.S. forces in Vietnam with their bloody Tet Offensive. Earlier that month my Selective Service status had been changed to 1-A, a fateful switch that took me away from Harvard and into military service the following year, after all my appeals ran out. Angered by this fate, in February and March I skipped...
...across the country. Angry protesters filled the streets at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago two months later, provoking helmeted police into a brutal assault. At Harvard the following spring, in 1969, students took over University Hall to protest the institution’s alleged complicity in the Vietnam War, once again provoking a police incursion, followed by a student “strike” that shut down the university...