To the editor:

Many have asked what we learned from Vietnam that could be useful in Iraq. Here are two relevant quotes that I believe apply.

The first is from John F. Kennedy, in conversation with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on Vietnam: “They want a force of American troops,” he told me early in November. “They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. … Then we will be told we will have to send in more troops, it’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to have another. … The war in Vietnam could be won only as long as it’s their war. If it was ever converted into our war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.”

Second, a few months earlier J.F.K. had been warned by Charles De Gaulle: “…to intervene in this region (Indochina) will be to catch yourself in the cogs of a machine … the more you become involved there, the more your enemies will appear as champions of national independence … I predict that your country will sink bit by bit into a bottomless military and political swamp however much you may pay in men and money.” (Both quotes are from “War in the Shadows,” by Robert Asprey, 1994 ed.)

Our desire to have our enemies in Iraq stand and fight is a hopeless fallacy. Guerrillas never stand and fight except on their own terms.

America cannot afford another Vietnam.

EG Hickam,

Lawrence