THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED...

The chickenhawks didn't learn the lessons from Vietnam because they had "other priorities" at the time. What freaking idiots put these guys in charge? DON'T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR JOHN KERRY.

Given the recent disappointing performance of Iraqi police and security forces, the influx of more US troops marks at least a symbolic setback to the larger strategy of "Iraqification", or giving indigenous Iraqi forces more responsibility for maintaining order and keeping the largely Sunni insurrection in check.

"I fear that it signals a 're-Americanization' ... of our strategy in Iraq," retired army Colonel Ralph Hallenback, who worked with the US occupation in 2003, told Thursday's Washington Post.

The announcement also offered an "I-told-you-so" moment to any number of critics, who have argued from the outset that the Pentagon's civilian leadership, in hoping to prove that wars could be won with fewer forces, more firepower and greater speed, was dead wrong.
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For the vets, one of the most important lessons of the whole Indochina debacle was to scrupulously avoid situations in which US forces found themselves in an escalating guerrilla war, where the only way to contain a growing insurgency was to deploy more troops to the theater.
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The announcement on troop numbers raises yet another bogeyman from the Vietnam era - the administration's "credibility" in conducting the war, particularly when the top civilian leadership not only had insisted from the start that the number of "boots on the ground" was adequate, but had also ridiculed senior retired and active-duty military officials who publicly warned before the invasion that many more would be needed.
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Such reports are feeding efforts by some lawmakers to add as many as 50,000 soldiers to the armed forces, an expense that Pentagon and so-called "deficit hawks" in Congress would prefer desperately to avoid. Deficits, indeed, is another bad word dating from the Vietnam era.