Halberstam:War inflames Muslims

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by don walton

Bush administration miscalculations about Iraq triggered a war that may turn the United States into "a lightning rod for grievance" in the Islamic world, David Halberstam said Thursday night.

"The great danger is that all their misery will be focused on us," the noted author and historian told 2,000 Nebraskans at the Lied Center.

U.S. policy-makers failed to gauge the opposition in Iraq to occupation by Christian, Western, white invaders, he said.

"I was cautionary, wary and melancholy before the war," Halberstam said. "If anything, it's been worse" than he anticipated.

Halberstam, author of 18 books and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter during the Vietnam War, delivered the ninth annual Governor's Lecture in the Humanities.

Earlier, he spoke with the news media.

In his view, Halberstam said, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not the most serious U.S. intelligence failure.

That prize, he said, goes to "the concept we would be welcomed as liberators."

Iraqis may have disliked Saddam Hussein, he said, but they did not want a white, Christian country to impose its military will on them.

The U.S. attack in the volatile Middle East was tantamount to "punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world," Halberstam said.

In the process, he said, "we were moving away from the emphasis on the war on terror" by transferring attention, manpower and resources away from the battle against al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

The result, he said, may be "a recruiting poster for those who wish us badly."

Sadly, he suggested, "we may be doing al-Qaida's recruiting for them."

The administration's "tragic miscalculations (may) make the real job of fighting terrorism all the more difficult," he said.

Halberstam said Iraq parallels Vietnam in terms of a colonial past that U.S. policy-makers failed to consider in waging war.

While the U.S. military performed brilliantly in the invasion of Iraq, he said, "we underestimated and miscalculated what would happen" in the aftermath.

"An undertow of resentment works against our military superiority," he said.

"We are bogged down into something very dangerous there."

What has emerged, he said, is a form of urban guerrilla war in which insurgents "nick away at our kids."

What the United States now faces in Iraq and in "an Islamic world that already was aflame" is more difficult than Vietnam, Halberstam said, and more dangerous than the Cold War.

On other matters, Halberstam said he's been quite surprised by the television advertising assault on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry questioning his naval service in Vietnam and attacking his subsequent opposition to the war.

"It's the unsettled nature of Vietnam that doesn't go away."

Halberstam said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey was unfairly attacked three years ago by a New York Times magazine story and "a very aggressive, prosecutorial anchorman, Dan Rather," for alleged war crimes in a village during one night's mission in Vietnam.

The allegations were "very dubious," he said. The evidence, he said, was "very, very weak."

"Young people in a bad war have been put under the microscope when it should be the people who were architects of the war," Halberstam said.

Thursday's lecture was presented by the Nebraska Humanities Council and co-sponsored by the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues and the University of Nebraska.

Answering questions from the audience at the Lied Center, Halberstam said "it's not hard to foresee a darker America if it becomes scared" by foreign terrorists.

Liberty, he said, could be a casualty of that fear.

Halberstam said he believes U.S. allies who opposed the invasion of Iraq have not gone away, but will be there to work hand in hand with "a nation that listens and not just gives orders."

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@;journalstar.com.