Worth reading-
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In Iraq, U.S. ignores lessons of Vietnam War [excerpts]

By JAMES L. LAROCCA

... Our government called it "pacification." We called it madness. It all has come back to me while watching the news from Iraq, where we should be applying more of the lessons so painfully learned in Vietnam. Instead, we seem to be repeating our mistakes. ...

President Bush, who spent almost all of his military service out of uniform and involved in political campaigns in the South, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who never served at all (he had, in his words,
"other priorities"), would do well to consider the lessons of Vietnam.

We did not win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people because we occupied their country while we burned down their homes and killed them and brutalized and abused them.

We will not win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people by wrecking their towns and cities, destroying their homes, terrorizing their families and humiliating their men.

Incredibly, we have again become an occupying army, out of touch with the realities of the lives and culture of the people we are there to save. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi people are striking back....


Full article HERE