Kissinger - from Consortiumnews .com

The real surprise in Woodward's book is that
the Bush administration's main advisor during the war 

has been Henry Kissinger.  Kissinger apparently
has convinced the Bush White House that any troop 

withdrawals from Iraq will start a wave of public
pressure to pull out all U.S. forces from Iraq. 

He is probably right in this analysis.

But Kissinger missed the main lesson of Vietnam
and is now missing it in Iraq. As the U.S. generals in 

Iraq know, killing more Sunni insurgents and
Shi'ite militiamen than the United States loses of its own 

troops will not win a war that is fundamentally
political.

As Lieutenant General William Odom has noted,
the Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate and the 

United States will eventually be forced to withdraw
from Iraq. So withdrawing sooner, rather than later, 

according to Odom, will save U.S. lives and money
and salvage what international prestige the US has left.

If Nixon and Kissinger had followed similar advice
in Vietnam, the United States, its military, and its 

international standing would not have been tarnished
by four additional years of war. And even worse 

than Vietnam, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq
is fueling and worsening the Islamic terrorist threat 

to the United States, according to an estimate
from Bush�s own intelligence agencies.