We Have Learned Nothing in the last 40 years.!

Or, at least, many of us haven't.

Oh yes, there are those of us who saw the Bush war on Iraq for exactly what it was, from day one.

But we don't belong to any party, are rarely listened to and routinely referred to as the loony left and the un-enlightened Right. Odd, because most of us are not leftist or Right-wing.

We are simply knowledgeable about how our government works. We are also all to familiar with that of which our government is capable. A number of us know first hand.

That is precisely why we are independents.

The FP Memo: The Endgame in Iraq
By Shawn Brimley, Kurt Campbell
Page 1 of 4
July/August 2007

What happens when you take a 40-year-old CIA memo on losing a war and replace the word “Vietnam” with the word “Iraq”? The result is a set of conclusions that are just as true today.


MEMORANDUM: TO: CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden

FROM: Kurt Campbell and Shawn Brimley

RE: The Consequences of Losing in Iraq


American policymakers and intelligence analysts are currently struggling to consider the potential repercussions of failure in Iraq.

Forty years ago, an earlier generation of U.S. policymakers were thinking about the implications of defeat in another conflict—Vietnam.


During the summer of 1967, then CIA Director Richard Helms asked for a quiet review of the global political and strategic consequences of an American failure in Vietnam.

The result was a classified memorandum circulated on Sept. 11, 1967, “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” which detailed a lengthy list of potential dark outcomes and worrisome prospects.

Excerpts from this document—with only minor edits—offer eerie parallels to the very different set of circumstances the United States faces today in Iraq. In considering the Iraq war’s endgame, the U.S. government would be wise to review its own notes.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.