The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

As far as anyone knew, the battle raging just north and west of Hué that night — May 2, 1972 — could have been the turning point of the entire war. If the city fell, the road to Danang, and perhaps Saigon, was open to the NVA. The consequences would also be personal. The machine guns we had set up on the roof of CORDS head- quarters were an empty gesture. None of us Americans believed we would be pulled out in time if the city fell. We knew that Vietnamese desperate to escape would mob any choppers sent to save us. We are alive today because American carrier jets caught the advancing North Vietnamese at daybreak and all but obliterated them. The interval we bought in Vietnam was never “decent.” While the final defeat would not come for three more years, pictures on the evening news showed not happy peasants but terror and carnage as the country collapsed. And Now Iraq The pictures from Iraq 35 years later are no different. The Bush administration is “surging” troops into Baghdad to try to quell the vio- lence, but the essential U.S. mis- sion, according to the president’s Jan. 10 speech, remains the training of Iraqi forces. The president will double the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (Iraq’s version of CORDS) to try to rebuild essential services for the Iraqi people. Meanwhile, Washington has imposed benchmarks designed to force the Iraqis toward a political resolution of their civil strife — conditions which, if unmet, will trig- F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 As in Vietnam, the “surge” policy is meant to provide political cover for a defeat, and to lay the groundwork for blaming the loss on the Iraqis.