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structurally we've repeated history in Iraq; this time as farce.

Assorted cabinet departments (State) & ancillary agencies (CIA) have spent much of the last half-century figuring out how to dispose of tyrants with which we've become disenchanted: the Shah of Iran, Gen. Pinochet in Chile, & Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When U.S. troops cruised into downtown Baghdad in March 2003, they were indeed welcomed as liberators. Except for Hussein's elite Republican Guard & assorted Ba'athist gangs, there was little interest on the part of Iraqis in fighting the Americans. Hussein had ceremoniously executed senior army staff that disagreed with him; Iraqi soldiers owed him nothing. While American military commanders annexed some of Saddam's old palaces as headquarters, Iraqi army & Baghdad police stood by, awaiting orders &, very likely, rewards for not resisting.

Although many knowledgeable senior civilians & military officers cautioned against sweeping vengeance, the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) program of de-Ba'athification swept the army & the police away, & Iraq & mainly Baghdad went overnight from tyranny to chaos. To fire soldiers & allow them to keep their weapons is the zenith of naivety, incompetence, & stupidity in the early days of a foreign occupation.

After a month of unimpeded anarchy, an insurgency emerged. As further evidence of U.S. naivety & incompetence, officials were paralyzed with astonishment: "Wait, aren't we liberators?" It wasn't until the battles over Fallujah, more than year later, that our guys stateside conceded that there was an insurgency.

This is the lesson from Vietnam & Iraq: if it leads to chaos, do it?

II

The U.S. war in Vietnam became unpopular in the States after we began sending ground forces into S. Vietnam, circa 1965. Before that, the U.S. Presidents & their defense secretaries recommended aid; then military advisers; & after that those bombing missions. There was another popular expression at the time: Bomb them back into the Stone Age. What our champions of the air strikes failed to foresee was that there would be a period of time between the raids & the beginning of that Stone Age. There were thousands of those periods, & the enemy filled them all.

The purpose of military strategy is to inhibit the enemy's desire to fight or at all events compel him to fight very little. The correct strategy in the early years in Vietnam would have been to send in troops

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