Iraq report more like a road map

It's too late for victory optics, but it's surely the only way to go at this stage in the Iraqi intervention.

With the counter-terror effort in Iraq bogged down and mismanaged, the elders of the American government have come up with a solution to end at least the western context of the problem.

Headed by former state secretary James Baker and former House leader Lee Hamilton, the Iraq Study Group has laid it out pretty clear in its report.

Things aren't going well in the counter-terror effort in Iraq.

There can be no staying the course, the report says. The 79 recommendations point out American - and, no doubt, British et al. - combat formations should be out of the country by the first quarter of 2008. American forces will be there for trainers and advice, as well as support coordination.

More importantly, the Iraqis have to take up the slack, in a hurry - or be abandoned.

President George W. Bush says he will give all due consideration to the recommendations. In fact, he will be giving a hell of a lot more than that to the report. I think it's pretty well a foregone conclusion the recommendations are just what will transpire over the next year or so - pending, of course, undesirable developments on the part of the Iraqi and guest terrorists.

From the beginning, support for the war was not a unanimous thing among the American hierarchy - even the Republicans, as is shown by the study group.

Let's not forget then-state secretary Colin Powell - a Vietnam veteran and the chiefs of staff chairman during the first Gulf War of so many years ago - warned Bush not to go into Iraq in 2003. Life turned out to be at least as complicated as Powell tried to make the president understand.

Though not currently elected or even in office, the study group and its report are a reflection of the true leadership of the country and the public it represents - at least as far as the war is concerned - and of the real options, or lack of them, available.

It's all a current version of Vietnamization, for sure. The Americans had this program in force during the early 1970s, when they were preparing their exit from South Vietnam. Equipment and advice was readily available to the challenged young republic. The American combat formations - particularly after the Cambodian sanctuary incursions of 1970 - were getting fewer and fewer on the ground.

Some South Vietnamese military people and forces caught on with Vietnamization. Most did not. Besieged by North Vietnamese aggressors, the defenders were duly abandoned. The South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, fell to the invaders at the end of April, 1975, ending an era for our generation.

It was surreal watching it all on television in late April, 1975 - just before my graduation at Acadia - but it was very real for millions of people in South Vietnam. Soon, the economic and political consequences would spread rapidly around the American world.

Non-North Americans gloat at their peril. Regardless of claims of who came first in the Vietnam War, the truth still is the American military effort caused the most damage to the enemy in and around South Vietnam during the conflict. No question.

No doubt, Iraqis on either side can attest to that as well.

In Vietnam, the original cause of the American intervention - the Viet Cong communist guerrilla insurgency - had pretty well had the biscuit by 1970. Ham-fisted as they were, counter-insurgency efforts had guerrilla capabilities. So did the Tet Offensive of January, 1968, during which the Viet Cong's North Vietnamese sponsors and allies encouraged the guerrilla forces to go for broke - with disastrous results.

The North Vietnamese pretty well took over the communist effort in the south after 1969.

South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 not from the Viet Cong, but the North Vietnamese conventional invasion - and of, course, the victim country's own corrupt ways.

In fact, a number of Viet Cong - actually the political National Liberation Front - eventually became boat people in the late 1970s, life under the communist northerners having become too unbearable.

All that aside, if the Iraqis want to deal with their counter-terror effort in a sincere way, the Americans and British will provide the necessary tools. If not, well, let's look at what happened to the South Vietnamese. No one really feels sorry for them. They, not the Americans, blew it.

The Iraqis won't suffer anything as cut and dried as a conventional invasion, but there will be a continued, rapid decline into mayhem. Hopefully, they will snap into action. Their long hold out against the Iranians in the 1980s show they have the stuff. They have South Vietnam's example. It's now in the new Iraqi government's court.

What does it all mean for Canada?

Well, the exercising of American options as outlined in the report will no doubt reflect in the North American economy in a broad way. With the British and Americans out of the Iraqi issue, they will be able to put more effort into real nation-building in Afghanistan. That will directly impact on our own efforts.