http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-kissinger31may31,1,1 96997.story?coll=la-news-a_section
From the Los Angeles Times
The lessons of Vietnam
Iraq desperately needs a political solution in the short term to make the war more manageable for the next president.
By Henry A. Kissinger
Two lessons emerge from this account. A strategic design cannot be achieved on a fixed, arbitrary deadline; it must reflect conditions on the ground. But it also must not test the endurance of the American public to a point where the outcome can no longer be sustained by our political process. In Iraq, rapid, unilateral withdrawal would be disastrous. At the same time, a political solution remains imperative.
A political settlement has to be distilled from the partly conflicting, partly overlapping views of the Iraqi parties, Iraq's neighbors and other affected states, based on a conviction that the caldron of Iraq would otherwise overflow and engulf everybody. The essential prerequisite is staying power in the near term. President Bush owes it to his successor to make as much progress toward this goal as possible; not to hand the problem over but to reduce it to more manageable proportions. What we need most is a rebuilding of bipartisanship in both this presidency and in the next.
[WS:] Interesting. James Mann (_Rise of the Vulcans_) argues that Kissinger's post-Vietnam policy was deliberately sabotaged by Rumsfeld, Cheney and the gang who preferred a more unilateral and confrontational foreign policy. In that context, the above piece, shrewdly criticizing unilateralism, reads like a revenge of an old foe, almost from the grave, no?
Wojtek