IRAQ

Charlstonnet: 'My Cambodian Moment': Discovering the truth in Iraq BY SEN. ERNEST F. HOLLINGS

The majority leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield, quietly opposed the war in Vietnam for years. He had a practice of writing memos in opposition to the war to Presidents Johnson and Nixon while publicly supporting the war on the floor of the Senate. But finally, when Cambodia was invaded under President Nixon, he snapped.
Going on television, he said Vietnam was a mistake from the get-go. The next day he received a letter from an admirer who had just lost her son. She said: "I just buried my son to come home and watch you say that the Vietnam War was a mistake from the beginning. Why didn't you speak out sooner?"

We should have listened to former President "Papa" Bush, who wrote in "A World Transformed," "We should not march into Baghdad ... turning the whole Arab world against us ... assigning young soldiers ... to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war."