Iraq and Vietnam
by Warren Coats

Following the kidnapping of a fellow Bearing Point consultant in Baghdad and all four of his security team, I am again being asked what we should do in Iraq (as if working there gives me the answers).

The easy but irrelevant part of the answer, agreed to by everyone but W and Tony Blair, is that we never should have attack Iraq in the first place. Or as David Halberstam put it in “The Best and the Brightest” about Vietnam: “If the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and the public had know of the extent of the intelligence community’s doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war.” (from the Economist magazine’s Obituary).

Unfortunately, I have no better answer to what to do now than Halberstam’s conclusion of his great book in 1972: “Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out…only being able to lash out…. And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.”

As I watch the losses mount ( Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon,…) and contemplate how we managed to get W’s good friend Putin to threaten to re-aim Russia’s missiles at Europe, it is only the beautiful Tuscan sun that keeps me from being pessimistic.

I hope the sun is shinning on your life.

Warren Coats is an international monetary consultant.