Start bringing troops home, Laird says

Melvin Laird, the former Wisconsin Congressman who became Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, was also key in extracting the U.S. from that war. Laird has the standing and experience to suggest what our course should be in Iraq, which many now call George Bush's Vietnam.

Laird has written a piece for Foreign Affairs magazine about Vietnam and Iraq, which David Broder writes about in his Sunday column in the Washington Post.

In part, Laird echoes another Wisconsinite, Sen. Russ Feingold, who has called for a target date for bringing US troops home, and who has argued that the US presence in Iraq is actually fueling the insurgents.

From Broder's column:

. . . Laird argues that the United States should "not let too many more weeks pass" before beginning to withdraw troops from Iraq and turning over the security of the country to Iraqi forces.

When he took over the Pentagon, Laird said, he changed the mission statement "from one of applying maximum pressure against the enemy to one of giving maximum assistance to South Vietnam to fight its own battles."

That should have been U.S. policy in Iraq "even before the first shot was fired." It ought to begin now and continue indefinitely, with the pace to be restrained only by the judgment of American military commanders on the capabilities of Iraqis to fill the security role.

"We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people," Laird says. "Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency."

White House officials would maintain they are doing their best to establish a legitimate government in Iraq and to boost the fighting capacity of Iraqi forces. But on Laird's third point, they cannot pretend to be in accord.

The former defense secretary, himself a veteran of World War II, has harsh words to say about abuse of prisoners in American hands.

"To stop abuses and mistakes by the rank and file, whether in the prisons or on the streets, heads must roll at much higher levels than they have thus far," he says.

"To me, the alleged prison scandals reported to have occurred in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay have been a disturbing reminder of the mistreatment of our own POWs by North Vietnam. The conditions in our current prison camps are nowhere near as horrific as they were at the 'Hanoi Hilton,' but that is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. The minute we begin to deport prisoners to other nations where they can be legally tortured, when we hold people without charges or trial, when we move prisoners around to avoid the prying inspections of the Red Cross, when prisoners die inexplicably on our watch, we are on a slippery slope toward the inhumanity that we deplore."

Those are powerful words from a powerful source. One can only hope they are heeded.