A good friend and mentor of mine and of the Small Wars Journal community of interest sent along a link to his latest article -- Caution: Iraq is Not Vietnam by Ambassador David Passage.
This article appears in the November 2007 edition of Foreign Service Journal.
From the Introduction:
The CORDS Program could not have been successful in today's Iraq or Afghanistan.
Over the past year, President George W. Bush and other senior administration officials have on numerous occasions invoked the U.S. assistance program in South Vietnam as an experience that offers lessons for Iraq. Specifically, the Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program has frequently been held up as a model for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams currently operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The CORDS teams administered both security and development programs at the provincial and district levels in South Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like today's PRTs, they comprised military and civilian personnel, the former always significantly outnumbering the latter. The civilians came primarily from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, augmented by a limited number of direct hires from other agencies (e.g., Commerce, Treasury and Agriculture). There were also a limited number of personnel whom USAID brought on board expressly for CORDS, with no promise of career employment beyond Vietnam.
Yet despite basic similarities and parallels between the CORDS teams and today's PRTs, there are also important and sharp distinctions. Lest today's policymakers be misled into assuming that the earlier experience can be replicated today, I believe it is vital to identify several critical differences that affect the Foreign Service's ability to help Iraq and Afghanistan deal with their internal difficulties and emerge as functioning economies with democratic societies...
Much more and well worth the read.
Links contained within quoted text inserted by SWJ.
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Link
"Iraq is Not Vietnam" - The Belmont Club